It took us 13 years to wise up to it, but we finally watched Breaking Bad all the way through, five seasons, fifty-some hours of content. Prior to the last episode I went back to The Atlantic archives to read the predictions leading up to the last show, September 2013. It put me back into the mindset of that year, a kind of innocence pre-Trump. I went back to that year to remember what I could about my work life then, which started with a new project called ICSC.

I’d worked for two years in a PMO at Starbucks (“project management office”) fresh off a professional certification and lots of training and the recession, thinking I’d spend the rest of my career doing that. Project management aligned to my need for organization and clarity. It felt safe. Project managers brought control to chaos and there’d always be a need for that. Working at the Starbucks HQ, that control/chaos ratio shifted daily. Caffeine didn’t help.

ICSC was the name of a big real estate conference Starbucks would attend and I’d lead the construction of a fake Starbucks store that would serve as a booth for real estate brokers to meet and talk deals. No one called it ICSC though, they called it something else. And thus, lesson number one in project management: you can’t control much of anything. Not even the names of things.

I needed a win, as acknowledged by my new boss. And I learned that new bosses aren’t your friends by default, but someone you need to prove yourself to. She was skeptical. I’d spent two years floundering on a big project with half a dozen project managers, cost overruns, explanations to the board over why nothing got done. (Half a dozen project managers is why nothing got done.)

But on ICSC I was the one, the single throat to choke, and it was do or die. I pored over the files from my predecessor, who’d left on dubious terms. It felt like a homicide case. My predecessor had saved everything, printed emails, invoices, receipts: it was all right there, and I read every last bit.

Running events in Las Vegas, the first problem is the mob. The union. Exhibitors aren’t allowed to move anything themselves in the convention halls, only the union can, and this is called drayage, or material handling. Complex rules and regulations equate to drayage charges, calculated with suspect logic and resulting in obscene charges applied long after the conference is over. You have to wonder how accurate they’re being over the number of pallets used, how much those pallets weighed, and how long it took to move them. I’d say they round up.

So I came into the project not wanting to go over budget. That was the whole thing: build a beautiful store that isn’t a store but looks like one, and don’t let the mob screw you. That’s all the project charter should have said, but I’m sure it said a lot more.

I got a new designer assigned to the project who’d just come over from Nike. He was a real hot shot: he knew his shit and he swore like a sailor. Had just moved from Portland, shaved his head every day, wore jeans and T-shirts to the office, chewed tobacco. Did not check or use email, said if you need to reach me just text. I said I’ll email.

So the next hurdle to climb with the project was the designer. He reported to a senior vice president which is to say he had no oversight. Only me. And I had no authority over him unless I threatened to use my VP or the uber VP, Mike. I managed the designer by tying his work output to what the senior executives would see and used my relationships with them to manage him indirectly. If that all sounds oblique, it was.

The next hurdle to climb was the vendor we hired to build the fake store and to not let him screw us either. The vendors who build booths for mob-run events are one generation removed from the mob themselves. Our designer understood this and used especially bad language with the vendor, so much so I had to make a formal apology on his behalf. Something about anal penetration and a barrel. This is not how people in corporate atmospheres talk, I said. He laughed and said he’d just come from Nike. And actually, they do.

Because our designer knew his shit he managed the vendor from the design side, insisting on the best materials for our paltry budget of $200K. And I managed the budget all-up, insisting to them both time and again, they could not exceed. It may have been the one time I was a real jerk as a project manager, but when I watched the other PMs, the ones who oversaw construction of actual Starbucks stores, the best ones were terrifying. When they summoned people to their status meetings people trembled, their voices shook. The power of the project manager was palpable. It had nothing to do with being nice. Nice doesn’t get you authority; fear and respect do. I never learned that.

The reason it was a fake store is, in prior years Starbucks thought it would be nice to build an actual store, like plumbed-in with working blenders and espresso machines and shit tons of cups and napkins and get this: GIVE IT ALL AWAY FOR FREE. So you can imagine what kind of hell that was for the poor bastards from nearby stores, who got consigned to that. A living nightmare.

As a fake store, it was more the shell of a Starbucks cafe with nifty lighting and paintings meant to evoke the vibe of a Starbucks. My designer’s senior vice president boss was new to Starbucks and worked for the uber VP Mike, whose party this effectively was, since everyone in attendance either worked for Mike or wanted to make a deal with one of Mike’s people. So my designer’s boss really cared about how the fake store looked. Everyone did. And thank god when the show started and they put it all together it looked just fine. Really great, even.

It all had such a happy ending that on one afternoon many weeks later the designer and I got called into Mike’s private conference room for one of his direct reports meetings. My VP praised us in front of a room full of senior executives and handed the designer and me sealed envelopes, gift certificates for a local steakhouse. I had gotten that win I needed. But there was a guy sitting at the table eyeing me and not long after, he recruited me for a project. That was the beginning of the end for me and my time at Starbucks.

If you study the storylines of Breaking Bad there’s an obvious theme of chemical reactions, cause and effect. I went from a high to a low by the end of 2013, just as that TV series was ending. And on a much larger, global scale we had no idea just how low we would all soon go.

Categories: Corporate America, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Breaking Bad, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Starbucks