Part 1: Henchman

After almost 20 years working at Starbucks I moved into the tech industry with a six-month contract at Microsoft. I didn’t understand anything about the technology or what anyone said, I just nodded and scribbled. The alphabet soup of acronyms was comical, even acronyms with dual meanings based on context. A CSP could be a cloud solution provider or a customer success platform; a CSA, “cloud solution architect” or customer service advisory, it went on and on. I’d just moved back from Germany where I didn’t speak the language and now I felt equally bereft in Redmond.

My first day on the job was both terrifying and thrilling. The client was a friend of my wife’s, and on day one announced she was leaving and that I’d soon get a new client, a woman named Jackie. They both worked for Audrick, the senior director. Everything I did would be in the service of him so it was important we all made Audrick happy. Everyone said he was great.

Audrick met me for a coffee on my first day, a lanky Belgian well over six foot, wrapped in a long coat with scarves, a flop of curly hair still wet from the shower. Audrick shone with an old-school salesman glow that formed a halo in his midst. I immediately liked and trusted him. He nodded and smiled to others in the cafe, he knew the baristas by name, he sipped his doppio like a true European as he pursed his lips and sucked. We were fast friends. He, tapping me on the shoulder: me, laughing at his jokes. It was going to be great.

Audrick leaned back and composed himself to shift gears and describe my role. Influential executives didn’t see the value in the LSPs and so this project was more like an internal PR campaign than anything else. I’d write reports on his behalf and work with Audrick’s team on the details. They would get sent every couple of months. I’d work with Robbie on the numbers and Robbie was great. It was all pretty straightforward. Although the last person in my role hadn’t worked out because they’d let Audrick’s team run all over them. We need someone who can manage the team, Audrick said. “And manage me” he added, with a wink.

Fortunately when I met my new client Jackie we hit it off, as our talk felt more like an interview than a “meet and greet,” or whatever it said on the meeting request. Just because they’d contracted me didn’t mean Jackie had to keep me on, as Microsoft clients prefer to work with their own vendors, and Jackie hadn’t chosen me: my wife’s friend Lindsay had, and now with Lindsay out of the picture my fate was in Jackie’s hands.

Jackie had an east coast vibe and a degree in journalism, which didn’t square with her career in tech. She fancied herself a writer. I said I had artistic aspirations but kept that talk cloaked in a corporate wrapper. (Which is to say, I don’t know what I said.) But I wanted it to be known I was a serious writer, meaning I did it for fun, whether I got paid for it or not. You can’t really say something is “existential” in an interview, but I did my best. I think I said I “identify as a writer.”

The first time Jackie tested me was over some banal newsletter we had to edit once a month. She hated the newsletter and aimed to kill it, and was spot on about that. Some other vendor coordinated its production but acted more as a pass-through, meaning he just gathered content and passed it along to other vendors who put it into a tool and clicked send.

Jackie wanted the other vendor to play more of an editorial role so he could earn his handsome bill rate but he was an older guy who’d been doing the same work for years and never questioned the quality of the content or its business value. She wanted me now to do that—to manage him in a sense, or to replace him. So she started rewriting the newsletter on her laptop, got frustrated with it, spun the screen around and said now you do it.

I saw what she had done and redid it, spun it back around and said here. And she said yeah, okay. And that was it, I passed.

I think compared to other vendors I produced more work in 20 hours than most. I was green and hungry and had something to prove. I showed up at the office every day, where most vendors worked remote. Being on site helped reaffirm your value. We all got to know each other and become friends. On the day after Trump got elected Jackie could tell I was down and said it’s okay, with any luck he’ll be out in four years. She called him a douche bag and we both laughed. One of her kids had a gastro-intestinal disease and the other, a shunt in her brain. Life was hard. Work was hard. We pulled together and got shit done.

Jackie fired the other vendor and pulled the plug on the newsletter. She started using me in a similar capacity with other vendors, even colleagues, a kind of henchman. She leaned on me to do things she didn’t want to do and in turn I leaned on others. When it came time to publish the reports for Audrick I set deadlines for his salespeople, who were world-class experts at avoiding work, slippery as eels. I went to great lengths to pin them down. I literally followed them around campus, texting at off-hours, making threats. I didn’t care. I let it be known I didn’t care. I said as much in my texts. My success as a contractor was, in fact, existential: a proxy for my success as a writer. Whatever shortcomings I felt as an artist I made up for on the business front. I was equal parts high-performing, uncompromising, and off-putting, a bonafide dick.

This won me praise from Audrick. He said my team really likes you, you’ve earned their respect. Things were looking up. And then I went away for Christmas break and when I got back, things weren’t.

Pages: 1 2

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, humor, Microsoft