Because I’m Not

A friend from a couple of bad jobs back texted me last night – she was coming into town, one night only, and wanted to meet up for dinner. Of course I said yes, and offered to pick her up at the airport, because as much as I hate picking people up at airports (I would seriously rather pay the exorbitant parking rates than try and thread my way through the maze and traffic) I love spending time with her. There hasn’t been much time for that since she moved to Denver last year.

We met a couple of other friends from the old place at the bar. Inside of half an hour I was quiet, and after another half hour I was wishing I was somewhere else.

Don’t Care If I Lose …

• I quote the Bible a lot for an atheist. Call it upbringing, call it a common moral shorthand, call it the shared heritage we Westerners are steeped in, but there it is. No sense in throwing away the frame because you’re not wild about the painting. Anyway, today’s verse for which I have learned a new meaning recently: Luke 12:48.
• Second day on the job, and my team is already the most efficient by a very wide margin – my team takes 15% of their time to do what other teams spend about half their day on. I call that awesomeness.
• I had an informal meeting with Chris tonight on my way out the door. He and my boss were talking through the major issues that they want to deal with in 2012, including some for my shiny new unit. So knowing me and what I can do, he showed me what they’re looking at. Surprise! They’re all things I’m already on top of and things I’ve dealt with successfully before. Because why? Because I rock like the Clash at the Casbah, that’s why. (Sorry, Sharif. Too bad, so sad.)
• I am having a BLAST. And why? Because I work best when my managers tell me what they want and then step back and let me do my thing. Not their thing, not the thing the lady before me did, not the thing that’s Always Been Done, but my thing. Because that’s where magic comes from. It comes from me making things up and trying them out. It comes from me unleashing all that creativity and energy into building an awesome team and honing all the key processes to lightsaber sharpness. If you want another you, hire them. But if you want the guy I sold you on in the interview, the guy who turns the “dregs” of the call center into a top-performing team of professionals, the guy who works miracles and changes the game, let me be me – or you’re pretty much just wasting your money.
• Did I mention that I’m having a blast? Because seriously, I am SO loving this. Tomorrow I’m bringing out the tricorn and cutlass.

For Melissa B

Life is short. We are an eyeblink, a light that slips through clouds

From high wide skies to cold hard earth.  A second hand scythes it,

And all that’s left sparks on waves over the silent deep.

But love is long: the sky that holds, the sun that gives,

The clouds that shape, texture, and color. Even the moonless night

Wears countless suns shining through countless skies:

Clouds over swelling seas, seas under rising clouds,

And eyes that open again to the sun on the waves.

I Get By With …

In the house where I grew up, there was Theory and there was Practice.

Theory said, “You can talk to us about anything. We want to help you.” Theory said you were loved, you were respected, you were cherished. You were safe. You might not always get what you want, but you would always be treated fairly.

Practice was “if you’re asking for help you must have done something wrong, so let’s make sure you feel ashamed of that”. Practice was I was loved for who I was to them, not for who I was in fact: I was loved more in concept than execution, an object labeled “eldest son” and loved only in so far as I could be crammed into that dark Procrustean box. Practice was there was no place safe, no place home, no belonging, and precious little fairness.

I didn’t understand what people meant by “home” or “family” until I was in my late twenties.  And it wasn’t that my relatives changed. To this day I know very well that if they met me on the street, a stranger not tied by blood, they would reject me out of hand. They endure who I am because they have to.

I learned not to ask for help. I suppose the theory was to learn self-reliance – depending on others is shameful and weak, after all – but I just learned how to be small and ashamed of what I didn’t know or couldn’t do. I learned to bull through on sheer stubborn will and my abilities to inflict hurt with words and to intimidate with my intelligence. I learned to be manipulative. I’m not half the puppetmaster I seemed to think I was, but I made it work.

So when I find myself in difficult situations, situations where none of my usual “tools” work, I freeze. I find it next to impossible to ask for help. I find it nearly as hard to accept it. I think of my struggles as failures, and I take them hard. I expect to be “weighed, measured, and found wanting”, and my stubborn pride resents that, and my BPD-infected heart is terrified by that. So I don’t. I try to find a way that doesn’t involve others, no matter what.

But people surprise me, by being exactly what most people are: kind, generous, warm-hearted, loving. They reach out. They defy my dark predictions and remind me that there is reason to have faith in people, to trust others, to accept love – and to pay all that forward.

And I am endlessly, profoundly grateful to every one of them.

Bridges Built

One of the reasons I wound up at my last job was that a friend recommended me. She was someone I’d worked with back in my salad days at the bank, and I’d always had a lot of respect and affection for her. So I was excited at the chance to work with her again.

A few weeks ago the third member of our little trio resurfaced and wound up working with us. It was really exciting that we were “getting the band back together”. Combine that with the arrival of a new VP who understood  how call centers were supposed to work and wasn’t afraid to make changes, and I was excited. I was looking forward to a more modern, more professional organization. Someplace with a little more structure and discipline, someplace open to new ideas.

It didn’t quite pan out, at least not fast enough to keep me from making a choice between my sanity and my job. My two friends were very worried. They’d already been concerned because they knew how stressed I was – when you have a weekly meeting with your boss’ boss to convince her to keep you, it’s stressful. So they’d been talking to their connections in the company to try and get me help. Apparently if I’d hung on a little longer things might have been a lot different. Apparently I was not the only one noticing my manager’s very significant deficiencies. Part of me feels a little bad about that, like I should have stuck it out. It’s a little worrisome that I’ve quit my last two jobs – I don’t generally think of myself as a quitter.

They reached out to our old boss, who runs a call center not far from where I live. He called me last night. As it turns out he’s looking at starting up a unit very much like the one we used to run for him, and was thinking of me to run it for him. He won’t know anything for a few weeks, and I don’t imagine there’s any guarantee even if he gets it set up, but it’s a very interesting possibility. On the one hand, I’m not wild about the babysitting aspects of being a supervisor. On the other, that stuff’s a lot easier when you’re working for someone supportive who has your back and lets you get stuff done the way you want to do it, not the way he would do it. It’s an intriguing option.

They’ve also been telling me how shocked everyone was at my departure, and how much my colleagues miss me. How our recruiter put together some numbers that show how my team was actually the third-strongest team over the last year, not the weakest – especially considering my team is a lot newer than most. How they were going to fly someone out for a couple of weeks to help me. How the VP is keenly aware of my manager’s shortcomings. How my team was stunned and disappointed because I’d just got them all psyched up. (Funny, they didn’t seem in any way psyched or committed when I was there. I’m still a little annoyed that a team that professed to like me wouldn’t commit to doing the hard work needed to be successful. But I digress.)

There’s also a job I applied for that’s essentially all my favorite parts of my favorite job – more of a project manager role, working for a company that runs call centers for businesses that don’t want to set up their own call centers. It’s a lot like the work I used to do at the bank, and I was pretty good at it. And it doesn’t involve managing people.

Lastly but far from leastly, I’m working on getting my writing career going. I’m setting up another blog (unconnected to this one) to provide writing samples so I can sell my services to companies needing ad copy or web copy or maybe some proofreading/editing. And I’m putting together an idea for a kind of literary web site run on a “pay what you want” model, which I may try to get off the ground with Kickstarter.

So I have options. And many of those options come from friends. Friends are a wonderful thing.