Part 5: Accountable

My contract with Microsoft ended after 18 months. I’d gone to work for one person who’d handed me over to another, whose boss had turned against his boss with me caught in the middle. The volatility made me nervous, so I joined a consulting firm and let Microsoft know I wouldn’t extend my contract.

My boss’s boss Gianna needed help writing a couple keynote speeches and contracted me for the work through my new firm. But they priced my speech-writing services at $20,000 which felt high. I had no idea what things cost. I just knew my work had to be worth that, and I’d never done it before.

I made the mistake of thinking my writing was good enough I could do anything with it. I thought a good speech just required good writing, but you need ideas too. I didn’t know anything about messaging and positioning, or marketing. I thought it was only wordplay.

As a result I bumbled my way through the speech writing with Gianna, we invoiced her, and I’m not sure she even used what I wrote. I followed up afterwards but she never responded. I didn’t have any more projects lined up and spent most of the summer at my new job reading other people’s work and taking long walks around the parking lot.

Moving from being an independent contractor to the firm gave me the protection of guaranteed pay whether I was billing hours or not, and a layer of protection between me and the client. After the drama I’d been through at Microsoft, I was glad for that.

As a manager, I was responsible for the work delivered by my direct reports, junior consultants fresh out of college. But after the speech-writing I had to wait five months for my first project: a messaging framework for the chip manufacturer Nvidia, why their GPUs were the best.

I didn’t know anything about GPUs but tried to make myself care. Another guy in the office, a hippy-looking kid named Donovan, was super into it. He was new like me, nerdy looking, and talked too loud in the break room. Donovan didn’t look comfortable in his office clothes and I immediately identified with him, like a younger version of myself. No one would put Donovan on a project because he was so new, so I put him on mine.

Donovan dug into the technical aspects and sounded like he knew what he was talking about. That would make him a valuable asset when we interviewed subject matter experts; it helped to know the technology so you could explain why it was so cool.

But you also needed to know how to write, and Donovan didn’t. Here was my chance to take someone under my wing I thought, someone young enough to be my son. So I tried to make Donovan a writer, with long sessions at the white board and no lesson plans or experience teaching. None of it mattered in the end. Donovan’s work wasn’t up to snuff—and try as I might, I couldn’t explain why.

We limped along for weeks running interviews and revision cycles, presenting work to clients, me trying to guide the work without doing the work, Donovan getting frustrated, me losing patience, and at last Donovan deciding he didn’t like me, intimating he might quit. I rewrote most of the messaging the weekend before it was due, bitter and hateful, and it still wasn’t right. And worse, I’d become a villain to this young consultant, who probably went home to his wife every night complaining about me, his arrogant boss Bill.

As an independent contractor I did the work and was accountable to it. As a manager I couldn’t do the work, but was still accountable for the quality. I found myself putting work in front of clients that wasn’t as good as I knew it should be, and that sucked.

Fortunately my firm wasn’t concerned if the project succeeded or failed because they didn’t care much for the client or her unrealistic demands. When they scoped the project Nvidia wanted five messaging frameworks for the price of one, suggesting we should be privileged to work with a brand like theirs, a “marquee client.” I think my firm saw it as a throw-away project, and a good one for a newbie like me.

I did three more messaging projects in three months and got better as a writer and manager, got more seasoned people too. We did work for an Israeli-based software company who made products for law enforcement, technology that could hack into phones or scan video footage for illicit content, like sex trafficking stuff encoded in video, weird shit I’d never heard of before. Stuff that was hard to market.

It was coming up on a year since things fell apart at Microsoft and Audrick fired me, Christmastime. I met with my old client Jackie for a coffee, whom I hadn’t seen since I left in the spring. She’d gotten promoted, and was now working in a different group than Audrick and Gianna, with a new boss.

She didn’t try to recruit me but when she mentioned she had a spot on her team, a contract gig, I leapt for it. I even accepted the offer before she told me the bill rate, and then I learned it was nearly twice the amount I was making with the firm.

The pay shouldn’t have mattered so much to me but it did. More than any time in my life I felt valued, powerful, and wise—without knowing what they’d expect me from me in return, or how it might change me.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir