Part 3: Separating

When Audrick fired me he did it through his business manager Dale. I knew Dale was up to no good when I got the meeting invite with the fishy subject line. Dale and I had never met before or had reason to; I wasn’t on his radar. You can be invisible that way as a vendor. I could tell Dale was nervous because he had cotton mouth and was sweating. He reminded me of a turtle, no neck. But that was the work business managers did: other people’s dirty work. He was a henchman just like me.

The word henchman comes from the Old English hengest, “male horse + man,” men who tended to their master’s horses. Men who put down horses, who got rid of them.

Dale was nervous firing me because a) he didn’t have a good reason, and b) he was worried about how I’d react. But I enjoyed watching Dale squirm in his own bullshit in that small telephone booth of a room. Audrick had replaced me with another vendor which was fine, because I still had enough hours from his boss Gianna, and since I’d broken off with the Gianna-Jackie faction my job was secure—just not with Audrick.

None of it smacked of the crap encounters I’d had at the end of my time with Starbucks, when they pulled out the paperwork and started to “separate” me. In fact I felt emboldened by it: to get back at Audrick was to act unfazed by it. But it was a jolting reminder of how tenuous the contract relationship could be.

The real reason I got let go was Audrick didn’t trust me. Since I’d started doing small projects for Gianna he now viewed me as a threat, and he was right. I couldn’t tolerate his abusive behavior and had begun to side with his boss. He’d openly defied Gianna, had even led a coup against her, having summoned his team for an unscheduled meeting with their CVP. They stormed his office demanding she be fired. I watched it from outside the office, Audrick and his team crowded inside looking tense. I hoped he was getting canned, but instead he was trying to oust his boss by going over her head. You had to hand it to him, it was pretty ballsy.

I can picture the quiet conversations Audrick had with his team one by one, to check whose side they were on. It was a mob-boss way of demanding fealty. After Donald Trump had come and gone, revealed as the true monster he was, I read interviews of people close to him who said they were surprised by how likable he was in person. But then you’d get the call one day he wanted you to do some dirty work for him and if you didn’t, you were screwed. It felt that way now with me and Audrick. But he’d played his only card with me and now I was aligned to his arch rival, Gianna.

Why he harbored such hatred for her was a mystery. She didn’t understand the business, he said. He said that behind her back and he said it to her face, and the one time I saw her push back against him she said, “maybe you could help me try, it’s your job.” To which Audrick just laughed. Maybe he saw himself better suited for the role, or he resented the fact they put a woman in that position, or he was too proud to work for someone he didn’t respect. I think that was the real reason, pride. Who you work for is a reflection of your personal power and Audrick thought Gianna was weak.

Brazen fool I was, I put myself right between Audrick, his team of salespeople, and Gianna. The partner CEOs and Microsoft’s top leaders had agreed to large investment plans, the details of which required substantial analysis and cross-functional coordination to execute. They had no one skilled or foolish enough to lead a project like that so I volunteered. And Gianna happily deputized me. Within an hour I was running a meeting with 40 people, half of whom hated each other.

Audrick had replaced me with a vendor friend of his, a lesbian with young triplets back home, who despite being keenly aware of Audrick’s distrust for me was always kind, perhaps out of pity for my obvious greenness, or the fact I couldn’t be trusted to not break her spreadsheets, having no skills with Excel.

But to lead a project of that scale with such large stakes was thrilling. After being canned by Starbucks as a failed project manager it felt like my Rocky II comeback moment. If Audrick’s Achilles heel was his pride, mine was ego.

One of the things about being a project manager is you need to get people’s attention so you can persuade them to do stuff. Getting people’s attention in a fast-paced tech environment is hard, especially when you’re invisible. But I liked getting people’s attention and I was good at it. Often I didn’t know what to do with it once I got it, but I could pretend.

Gianna was the real lead, I just helped her develop her ideas. She was really talented and bright, but I’ve seen a pattern in female tech executives where good is never good enough. And it’s not the work outputs per se but something deeper. Like they don’t feel as if they themselves will ever be enough, so you wind up working and reworking shit until the end of time.

Gianna said if we gave you more hours maybe you could buy a Porsche. She was joking. But it was time for me to move on from my old Volvo station wagon, so I bought myself a Mercedes.

On the day I drove it away from the lot I watched that red Volvo get smaller in my mirror and realized that by letting go of that old car I was saying goodbye to a part of myself I’d likely never see again. Which felt both empowering and remotely sad.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir