Starting my new job has been a trip. Mostly because I don't know if this is how a job is supposed to be. Like… did I spend my 20's in a tech-start-up-cult/bootcamp that used millennial workers as disposable drone bees by selling us the "vision" that by spending 60 hours a week working for a corporation motivated solely by profit and shareholder interests that we were building a better world?
Most days I respond to this question with "You know what? Probably."
In my new role, I work a normal 8-8.5-hour workday and am treated like an adult. No one needs to know when I go to the bathroom (something I had to record in a previous position). My new boss at times has said, "Don't work late on this. Let me know if you need help."
To understand how crazy this is to me… Let me tell you a story about a brain scan.
The brain scan story is a legend amongst the core four of us that were on the same team in 2014. It really was almost at the level of a psychological experiment – i.e. what will people do when pushed to their absolute limits?
It started when we launched a new product at our company. For some reason, no one cared that it didn't work. This meant that the brunt of customer service burdens fell on the operations side of the table; we had the joy of telling our customers that nothing with their account will actually function. Meanwhile, the C-suite and technology sides of the business celebrated a "big" win.
The project manager in charge (poor woman) was in tears the day of the launch. SHE KNEW that nothing worked and there would be months, if not years, of backend work to make the product actually function.
My team was in charge of onboarding customers to the new "platform" which was essentially like being a flight attendant on a plane put together with silly straws and duct tape.
We generously referred to them as the "dark days" as we would get into work at 6am and leave around 6pm (never seeing sunlight). We took time for a 15-minute lunch, standing at our desk checking email, before doing more applications.
About 3 months into this "journey" one of our teammates grew ill. It was terrible, and we all felt awful for him, but when we had a meeting, our COO informed us that we would not get a replacement.
"Empathy is more important. We're going to pay for 3 months leave, so we can't backfill the position."
"So," our boss asked, "can we start the hiring process now? It usually takes 2-3 months."
"No."
So we all get back to our desks, our team of 5 working 12 hours a day, now a team of 4 working … 15? We weren't sure.
This was right around the Christmas season, so we were all really excited to probably get 0 days off … once again in the name of reviewing applications of, what was most likely, some sort of scam artists out of Bulgaria.
Our work slipped slightly because… we were already working 60 hours a week and had lost a teammate for 3 months with no possibility of a backfill. So, this led our boss (not his fault, under the pressure of the same COO who stripped our team, who now didn't know why our numbers were down) – to shot clock us.
What is shot clocking an adult professional? Well, it consisted of a woman on the team sitting next to us with A LITERAL STOPWATCH, timing how long it took us to do an application. This was all under the guise of "we're looking for efficiency opportunities" – all the while veerrryy sloowwwlllyyyy fixing the systems that weren't working in the first place.
So, this shot clocking was worthless because… well, some applications take 3 minutes, some take 3 hours – it just depends on the review needed. So, nothing happened.
After 3 months when our other teammate was let go after his paid leave, we finally got to look for another employee.
As if the powers-that-be realized having another teammate may make our team functional and healthy, they chose that time to launch a new-new product. This product didn't even claim to be finished; it just was… a pile of spreadsheets.
One of the women on my team inherited this mess. She was forwarded 50 emails and 10 spreadsheets and told to set up an account in Asia. She was looped in the week before the files were due, and the process had been rolling for months. This, of course, became her problem and the deadline her responsibility.
No one had told us this was coming.
Maybe they realized the bad news would literally destroy a team that was already crippled and ruinous to begin with, but – well, either way, it wasn't good for morale.
So then came the brain scan.
We were in the process of hiring someone new (which took us away from work sometimes 3-5 hours a week) and working in 2 busted markets with 2 crap products.
One of our teammates was so stressed she started having massive migraines. After seeing a primary care physician, she was directed to have an MRI to see if there was something seriously wrong with her brain – like cancer wrong.
So she had been out work for half a day for her primary doctor visit, then told us that she'd miss half another day to get an MRI.
This is the part where psychologists would have reviewed what happened. And it kind of went something like this:
"Oh, no! Are you, like, okay??"
"Yeah, the doctor wants to make sure that nothing is serious, though. I've never had migraines like this before."
"Awwww! Well, like… so…. [beat] Will you be online in the hospital? Or like do you need us to cover you?"
WE ACTUALLY ASKED. OUR FRIEND MAYBE HAD A BRAIN TUMOR BUT WE ASKED HER IF SHE'D BE ANSWERING EMAILS FROM AN MRI MACHINE.
It truly was a low point. While she was in the hospital the rest of us on the team had to examine our own humanity and give ourselves some mindfulness time (not too much, though, those applications don't do themselves!!).
Eventually, we did hire a bunch more people. Things improved and we got to take time off and go to cancer screenings guilt-free.
There were a bunch of other great anecdotes from this time period – I wish there was time for all of them: the days we got bonuses so we didn't quit, the days we got manicures so we didn't quit, the days we were yelled at for doing "too much work." They truly were… times.
All that is to say, though, that when I got to my new job and my new boss said: "Don't work late on this. Let me know if you need help." I had to do a double-take and wonder if my present life was real, or if my past professional life was just that surreal.
I'm still new in the role, so I may need to run one more test. I'll have to see how she responds to me getting an MRI.