Part 2: Retaliation

I got the contract work at Microsoft through a friend of Dawn’s we ran into named Lindsay. It was going on two years since I’d been out of work. My run at Starbucks lasted almost 20 years but came to a weird end; I left feeling bewildered and just wanted to drink. They’d decriminalized weed in Washington so I got some Maui Wowee and a good bottle of champagne and plotted my next move: we’d rent the house out, move in with my mom in Germany, home school the kids, travel through Europe. I’d write about the whole thing, maybe a book, quit work for good.

I turned 45 in Belfast on a shitty Monday night in a strange rental house with a coal stove. I knew I had to do something with my life but didn’t know what. More importantly, I had to work to earn a living. Dawn was working remotely for Microsoft as a contractor, doing late night calls. I was sitting around writing tasting notes on Scotch.

The problem with work was I got traumatized by it. I’d never felt so threatened or anxious about my job until those last six months at Starbucks. I didn’t know what to do, but drinking seemed to help. Our kids were just 9 and 7. Our dog was a puppy and didn’t behave well on a leash; I jerked her around the block and swore a lot.

I carried this baggage with me to my next job, at Microsoft. Dawn’s friend Lindsay wanted to hire Dawn but she was busy with other gigs. They needed a writer and project manager and Dawn said actually my husband might be good. I asked Lindsay, is it “writer and project manager” in that order? She said we need someone who can write these reports but also make sure it gets done.

I’d failed as a project manager and grown to detest the role. Starbucks had basically fired me because I wasn’t deemed up to snuff anymore. At the time I assumed it was me, but in hindsight I can see it was more 50-50. On my annual review I was a “meets expectations” and then a month later they were starting the paperwork to let me go. I lost sleep over it. I couldn’t pinpoint what had happened or how to fix it. But when I started the gig at Microsoft I swore I’d never let that happen again.

It had been more than a year since I started the Microsoft contract when I came back from a month off and everything went sideways. But prior to that, everything had been great: I’d gone from 20 hours a week to 40, worked a side contract with another client, run an event with Microsoft’s CEO in Washington, D.C., earned twice the amount I had at Starbucks.

Because you don’t get vacation in most contract roles I negotiated the whole month of December off so we could fly back to Germany for Christmas. We celebrated my last day of work at a local bar where they give you a large, German-style mug of beer for free on your birthday. There’s a picture of me posing with the beer and my kids, wearing a funny hat. My colleagues at Microsoft texted and messaged me, wishing me a happy birthday and a good time in Germany. I was riding high and felt like I’d landed in a good spot.

Jackie and I met at a Starbucks when I got back. She looked rattled, her hair still wet. She said a lot has happened since you left. The prior summer Audrick had arranged for a meeting between the Microsoft CEO and each of the company CEOs his team supported. It was a remarkable feat: we’d gone from an internal PR campaign (me ghostwriting reports for Audrick to boast about their sales performance) to getting time with the CEO at the annual partner conference in D.C. That meeting had gone so well, the CEOs got invited back to Redmond for a big meeting in January. All the work we did had been validated at the highest levels. Now there was talk that Microsoft might be willing to invest in the partners if they could make a deal, like agree to X amount of revenue generated if Microsoft invested Y. The scale of the money being discussed was astronomical. This small group of CEOs represented $30B annual sales contribution to Microsoft (yes, 30 billion). Now a weird dynamic was unfolding where the partner companies were jockeying to negotiate their slice of the Microsoft pie, and the salespeople on Audrick’s team were starting to compete with each other and form factions.

In fact, Audrick’s boss Gianna had salespeople on her team with partners who wanted in on the investment deal but Audrick was trying to cut them out. And Audrick hated Gianna and made that known to everyone, Gianna included. The math didn’t square for me: I’d never seen someone disrespect their boss so flagrantly as Audrick did Gianna, but he did so every chance he got—seemed to relish it, even.

Gianna was a GM and shone with a kind of high-tech female executive radiance. She looked like someone in a magazine. Any time I saw her on campus people were surrounding her, vying for her attention. She was tall, thin, blonde, perfect hair. Texan. And brilliant. (At least she sounded brilliant.) Like everyone at Microsoft, Gianna talked a mile a minute. Toss in the acronyms and tech-talk and I had no idea what she was saying.

When she spoke in team meetings Audrick would sit on the other side of the conference room with his legs spread wide and his head hung low rolling his eyes or shaking his head. Or making faces, diddling his phone, having side conversations. I felt embarrassed to be his vendor in front of Gianna, his GM, whom he so openly disrespected. Many times he didn’t even show up. And Gianna looked relieved when he didn’t.

In the time I was gone Audrick had become verbally abusive with Jackie over her relationship with Gianna. Jackie had started doing work directly with her, which Audrick interpreted as a threat, or a betrayal, and now he intimated that Jackie’s job was at risk if she crossed him. In the corporate world they call this retaliation.

The decision for me, Jackie said, was do I want to work with her and Gianna, or with Audrick? We had another big partner event the following week and the mood was tense. We had big dinners to plan and another meeting with the Microsoft CEO. Technically Audrick was still my uber-client since he funded my work. But now my day-to-day client Jackie was on the outs with him, had even opened a formal case with HR. Was looking for a lawyer too.

I thought maybe I could play both sides, to not let on with Audrick that I knew about this thing with Jackie. That didn’t go as planned.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir