Part 6: Opaque

Three years after meeting my old client Jackie and I was starting a new gig with her again, meeting at our usual Starbucks. We’d become friends, to the extent we could be as contractor and client. She’d been through a lot with her last boss Audrick, the debonair European who’d turned on her. Now she was in a new role and seemed full of hope, transformed by it.

We sometimes joked about the time in D.C. she got so drunk, but Jackie didn’t care. She had a lot going on at home with three young kids and personal troubles she often talked about. She seemed to care about mine too, and it felt good to share more of ourselves since we spent so much time together. But work can do bad things to people and this new contract was the lead-up to my final one with her later that year.

We cut the small talk and Jackie started talking about my new role. She was now account lead for HPE, a business that had broken off from Hewlett Packard for reasons I would never understand or care to. To Microsoft they were an OEM, an “original equipment manufacturer” like Dell, or Lenovo. They made hardware. But Microsoft was trying to get them to do more business in the cloud, because that’s where the money was. Amazon had created this cloud business and now Microsoft was trying to own it. The competition was fierce. Microsoft used its ecosystem of business partners like HPE, Dell, and thousands more, to sell Microsoft products through, to build custom solutions with, to sell products to partners and customers, it went on and on.

Microsoft used clever marketing terms to try to make their business sound less complicated than it was but all their efforts to simplify had the opposite effect and just made everything sound more confusing. And worse, every couple of years they changed all the names and created new frameworks. It was like Orwell’s 1984 where the State randomly switches the names of all the continents every few years so no one can tell up from down.

The first hurdle as a contractor was to make sense of all this so you didn’t look like an idiot. Contractors often carried a second class status for not understanding enough about the business to be useful. I got used to the eye rolls and having to repeat myself when people openly ignored me in meetings.

The new contract paid well but there was a catch, Jackie explained: the contract was up for renewal in July, so if we didn’t convince the SLT to re-up their investments with HPE, we’d be out of a job.

Jackie sold me on the role because it was called “go-to-market manager,” and I thought that meant I’d get to do marketing. But it wound up being a reprise of my last gig, with higher stakes. They say people rise to their level of incompetence and it didn’t take long for me to reach mine. Jackie had more than half a dozen contractors and wanted me to manage them. I was flattered but not cut out for it.

The lead contractor Venkat was a former Microsoft engineer and several years my senior. Messy hair, ill-fitting clothes, sleep deprived. He laughed outright when I told him I’d be overseeing his work.

Jackie didn’t trust Venkat but couldn’t pinpoint why. She wanted me to keep an eye on him. And she worried she’d lose her temper when he mansplained. To manage him at a task level felt belittling to us both, but Jackie didn’t understand what he really did, so she expected me to. I think the fact he didn’t openly respect her rankled Jackie. I played both sides.

For six months we orchestrated meetings with Microsoft and HPE stakeholders to build our argument for why the two companies should reinvest. It went all the way to the top, to the CEOs, a game of corporate chess. Venkat drove the strategy and used his relationships to rope people into meeting with us. For a while it looked like it might work.

It wasn’t part of Venkat’s strategy for Jackie to tour Europe but she did it anyway. And she asked if I would come, to help learn the business. That sounded marvelous but opaque, as I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing other than following her around. Which is how it basically went. We’d start in London at the HPE head office, pop down to Munich, back up to Amsterdam, then return home. All in less than a week.

I loved the idea of being there, but not working there. It was just turning to spring, mid-March, so I treated myself to a new set of outfits at a fancy Seattle department store, a pair of good walking shoes. Trying to look young and hip for some business meetings in Europe I told the clerk, business casual.

We were leaving London for our plane to Munich when I got a message from my wife saying one of our kids was in the hospital and we needed to talk. There was a problem with her new medication and now she was in a psychiatric ward. I ran the calculation, should I fly home?, but didn’t. It was Monday night and I’d be home on Friday. She was safe in the hospital and we couldn’t talk to her anyway, except for a brief window each afternoon. I hated the idea of complicating my work plans but felt conflicted. Jackie didn’t suggest I should leave, she kept quiet. I told my wife we’d talk again soon so I could think about it, we’re about to board. I could hear her disappointment.

The next three days, from Munich to Amsterdam, I followed Jackie from meeting to meeting with my laptop taking notes, trying to keep awake. We caught planes and cabs and took long walks to work off the drinks. I felt the coming dread of real life waiting for me back home. I imagined my wife alone in our bed, my daughter in the hospital.

On our last night in Amsterdam I ditched Jackie so I could go to a coffeeshop. I stood on a rooftop terrace finishing a spliff, looking down over the city lights and trams below, counting the church bells as they tolled. In a moment of clarity I wondered to myself, what kind of dad does this? What kind of husband?

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir