Yesterday afternoon, I got a voicemail message from one of my favorite headhunters. She said she'd seen a job that might be appropriate for me on Indeed.com, and to give her a call about it.
Of course, as an active, avid and still-unsuccessful job seeker, I'm not only on Indeed (and about 20 other sites) every day... I'm hooked into daily e-mails which update me to every possible job that appears on the interweb that I might be qualified for. Subsequently, as soon as she asked the question, I had a pretty good idea of what she was talking about.
It was a job I'd first seen posted back in December - and had decided not to pursue - but that apparently was re-posted on Tuesday. A job with a local business to which, as I discovered when first looking into it before the holidays, I had some ties.
When you look at my resume, you see two long and fruitful tenures with two different organizations, and in between... a third, far briefer professional experience. After getting laid off at the end of 2001 (during the last massive recession), I spent the better part of nine months working for myself — picking up freelance work here and there, and doing a lot of home improvement stuff in the interim. TheWife's job remained steady throughout, fortunately, and the rather generous severance package I'd received allowed us to stay afloat without undue discomfort.
But as the summer of 2002 began drawing to a close, I was getting anxious. The professional landscape for people like me was barren - just a complete, desolate wasteland - to the point that I remember going entire months without seeing a single application-worthy listing on Monster or Hotjobs. So when this job popped up, I applied immediately... and was thrilled, a week or two later, when they called me in for an interview. Which seemed to go reasonably well; they were a somewhat different animal than my previous employer, but I felt confident (and apparently persuaded them, as well) that my skills would translate admirably.
For their part, they seemed a business in transition. A year and a half earlier, they'd been a thriving, growing concern... but any number of unspecified factors had caused them to cut personnel significantly, and abandon their office space for a weird sublet scenario where they occupied one small corner of another company's floor in one of Boston's larger office buildings. But they claimed: we are rebuilding. We will be great again. And so I, in no position to argue, believed them. An agreement was struck, and I was on to the next step in my career.
Things began to go wrong almost immediately. On the day I joined, there were probably a dozen people in the organization — four of whom were in my group. Two weeks in... one of them resigned. Four weeks after that, an EVP and leader of my group (and woman who hired me) resigned. Leaving me and one other guy, who I'll call Mr. Sparrow, as the entire department.
This was going well.
Meanwhile, I was becoming familiar with the dynamics of the organization. The President and Founder (and namesake of the company) was personable enough... when he was around. Apparently, he preferred puttering around his house in one of Boston's wealthiest suburbs to actually being on-site, so we rarely saw him in the office for more than two or three hours a day. And when he was there... well, he wasn't really there. One of my new colleagues told me that some of the employees called him "Mr. Magoo," and soon enough I saw why — whenever we saw him, he appeared to be drifting around aimlessly: drifting through the offices and cubes, utterly saturated with a kind of blind, blissful ignorance to any and every concern of his business world. One in a blue moon, he'd hold a meeting in which he'd throw out ideas - which we were expected to applaud for their brilliance and insight - and then he'd disappear again, back to his office refuge, back to his big black imported car, back to the safety of home.
Which led to the question: who was actually running the show? The answer was one of his two EVPs (and, soon enough, his only EVP), who we'll refer to here as The Wicked Witch of the West.
She was, beyond question, the single most violently insane individual I've ever encountered in any professional situation. I have no doubt she was legitimately unbalanced: completely irrational, unstoppably confrontational, given to screaming - yes, screaming - at colleagues and subordinates, and then in the blink of an eye or at the ring of a phone turning off the crazy with instant, impossible ease (think: flipping off a light switch) and launching into the most sickly-sweet, nausea-inducing fake...
This wasn't just a case of the inmates running the asylum. This was the queen of the whackos, taking control and driving the entire concern straight into the ground, while the one person - the only person - who could have changed things for the better allowed himself to be completely oblivious to the entire situation.
Which is why the business wasn't just downsizing as a function of reducing personnel and expenses; people were actively fleeing the company at top speed. The woman who hired me? Apparently she grew tired of fighting The Wicked Witch and Mr. Magoo, and decided for the sake of her own sanity to go off and try something on her own. As did my other 2-week colleague. As had, apparently, several other talented people over the course of the previous year.
But. I was new to the organization, and my confidence was shaky after nine months of wandering through the wilderness of unemployent. This was not a boat I was going to rock. Especially given: TheWife was pregnant. Knocked up. With our first kid. And would be going on maternity leave in the spring. Regardless of how quickly I discovered that there was something drastically wrong with this professional scenario... this was a job I needed. So: I buckled down. Took the screaming. Did what I could. Adapted when my collaborators dropped like flies around me. Took the screaming. Actually tried to take steps for the good of the "team" by helping them to find a replacement for the departed — my friend Swoosh. (Who has yet to forgive me, btw.) Took the screaming. And the screaming. And the irrationality. And the lies, about who told who to do what and when. And the pointed fingers, and the false accusations. And the screaming. And the micromanagement, from both The Wicked Witch and one particularly evil minion who was generally referred to as Mini-Me (given his apparent desire to emulate the Wicked Witch of the West in every way, shape and form). And the undermining. And the omnipresent disrespect. And the screaming.
I kept my head down. I weathered the beatings. I didn't complain, when my job evolved from what I was told it would be (doing something potentially interesting) into something completely different (a role vaguely related but so horrifyingly dull that I'd rather sell organs then ever contemplate doing that for a living again). I brought in my talented friend, and together with Mr. Sparrow we tried to do good work, only to be beaten down - time and again - by The Wicked Witch and Mini-Me.
I think it was February when I finally figured out it was killing me. The winter of '02-'03 was a particularly brutal one in Boston - I actually got mild frostbite on my cheeks just standing and waiting for the train one morning - and between the relentless cold and massive snowfall, it certainly seemed to reflect the joy of my overall experience. I remember one morning, coming inside after shoveling my driveway (this occurred before I discovered the rewards of snowblowing) following the winter's most recent slap in the face, drenched in wet snow and sweat...
I was literally shaking with rage. Because for the two-plus hours I'd been outside, clearing the wet, heavy snow away from our driveway, our back and front walks, our front and back stairs, stabbing downwards with the shovel and lifting up and throwing away great, sodden slabs of frozen winter torment... every time I stabbed downwards, and every time I threw my body into propelling the snow up and away from pavement, I was reliving every time I'd been screamed at, and belittled, and undermined, and lied to and lied about, and harassed and troubled and tortured by these colossal fucking morons. My teeth were locked in a rictus grimace. My fingers and arms twitched uncontrollably. I could hardly even blink, I was so overwhelmed by anger.
And TheWife - god bless her - said, "You can't do this any more."
I tried. I tried to keep it up. For another month, I tried. But things just got worse. Every day, in brand new and horrifying ways, things got worse. It was an utterly toxic environment, and every day felt like a kind of dying.
Finally, TheWife and I talked it over. And we decided. And so, in mid-March, 2003, I came into work, grabbed Mr. Sparrow, and said, "Let's go for a walk." I told him that I'd decided to leave. He was completely unsurprised. He was just as miserable as I was, but was accustomed to the beatings, and unwilling to take a stand (for himself, or for his people). He asked if I had anything else lined up. I told him: "No. I just need to get out of here." He nodded, then returned wordlessly to his office so I could give my news to the President, Mr. Magoo.
(Swoosh, needless to say, was thrilled. "You brought me into this hellhole, and now you're leaving me here alone?")
(I am such a good friend.)
So. I had my little talk with Mr. Magoo. Decided it was pointless to say, "I'm quitting because my hatred of The Wicked Witch of the West and Mini-Me has reached the point where, if I don't leave, I'm going to kill one or both of them." (Only a partial exaggeration, by the way. I wouldn't have killed anyone, but odds of me losing it and finally - joyously - beating the crap out of someone were rising to dangerously high levels.) Instead, I manufactured an excuse about the way the job had changed from A (what I'd been hired to do) to B (what I was actually doing), and that it was time for me to move on. He seemed confused - what a pleasant surprise! - but had no choice but to accept my two weeks' notice. And a little while later, I walked out of his office, my heart absolutely bursting with glee. I had to restrain myself to keep from singing.
I made it through my two weeks, and - in what can only be described as a miraculously fortuitous confluence of events - made it through virtualy the entire 10-day period without speaking to The Wicked Witch or Mini-Me.
On the last day of March, I walked out of the building for the last time and stepped into a future defined by daunting uncertainty. The economy was still in the tank, and I had no serious job prospects to speak of. Because I'd resigned, I couldn't collect unemployment. In just over a week, my wife was going to give birth to our first child. And I felt. Fucking. Great.
Flash forward to this past December. When I first saw the job posting, and the company name rang a vague bell. And then I figured it out: this is the company that the EVP started, and for whom Mr. Sparrow is now a VP in his own right.
And what I'd decided was: my experience of '02-'03 was not necessarily the fault of either one of them, but nevertheless I wasn't eager to recreate that experience or any reasonable facsimiles thereof. And my ambivalence meant I didn't apply.
But. When my headhunter called... I figured that was a tipping point. I gave her a brief rundown on how I'd worked with two of the main people at this company before, and I wasn't sure if or how they'd react to my name. But if she wanted to try to get the ball rolling... sure: why not.
Twenty minutes later, she called me back. The first thing she said: "He hung up on me."
I burst into laughter. Couldn't help myself. Then she explained: she'd gotten through to him, then launched into her big headhunter pitch about everything she does, everyone she knows, etc. He was cold at first, then got borderline hostile as the call went on. By the time she mentioned that she'd seen the posting and that she knew me and would there be any interest... he growled at her, "That position's been filled" and, less than a minute later, hung up on her.
"Wow," I said. I was still laughing. "I guess he hates me."
"I'm pretty sure he hates me. I don't know how he feels about you." she replied.
And thus, the good times continue to roll.
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