Ever been to Disneyland and gone on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride? Even if you’ve only seen the movies, you will almost certainly remember a striking tableau with some unsavory pirates in a jail cell desperately trying to attract the attention of a nearby dog. A dog who just happens to be holding the key to their cell in his mouth.
Ignore, for the moment, any alleged transgressions these pirates may have committed. Think instead about their mental state. Here are people who desperately want something that is, quite literally, just barely out of reach. They can see it. They can see someone else getting to use it. Their inability to obtain it is preventing them from doing anything other than sitting in that cell, eating what is provided to them and being told they’re lucky to get anything at all.
Now imagine being in that mental state for four consecutive months and you’ll have experienced the job I just left.
For four months, I watched other people coming up with fascinating and creative ideas. Big ideas. The kind where when someone says, “this is my Idea,” you can hear that “Idea” is capitalized. Ideas. Big projects, often with big budgets. Sometimes I even got to chip in a little with the conceptualization. But that wasn’t my job.
My job was to:
- take notes on conference calls
- follow the instructions of the creatives,
- get quotes from vendors,
- write descriptions for the contracts,
- estimate the time and costs,
- re-estimate the time and costs when sales people griped that it would be too hard to sell,
- set the schedule given the reduced amount of time available,
- reset the schedule when people complained about the deadlines and how little time they were budgeted to do the work,
- send out reminder emails that everyone had missed their deadlines,
- send out another reminder email that everyone had missed their deadlines,
- send out an apology email for being so difficult to work with because I called attention to the fact that everyone had missed their deadlines,
- open purchase orders,
- receive and approve invoices,
- take responsibility for everything coming in on time and on budget despite being told to reduce the time and budget because the sales people said so,
- and all while making sure that I hit an approximately 75% billable time mark, despite being told that I had to reduce the hours I could spend on the project so the sales people could sell it.
Sorry, I got a little carried away. The point is that I was the caged pirate, being told to do accounting work and be happy that I had a job at all, while watching creatives do what I really wanted to be doing.
Now, before you feel too sorry for me (and I know you’re on the verge of tears), I put myself in the cell.
I took the job knowing the basics of what I would be doing, though admittedly not having a clue what kind of firestorm I’d be dealing with on a daily basis. I thought I might get to do at least some of the smaller creative projects (that never happened), but I did understand that the bulk of the work would be project managementish in nature. But I also was told that it was merely a foot-in-the-door job and that I would be moved rapidly into a creative role.
So I took the job and I did it and I did it well. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it only got worse once the company decided to start firing people because of “the current economic condition.” My workload doubled, staff morale plummeted, and proving one’s necessity via billable hours became more important than ever. Couple that with me being a corporate jester smartass in a political climate worthy of an HBO drama and you’ve got one heck of a fun workday. It was The Office meets Oz with me, your host, Joel McHale.
It’s amazing how much you can put up with when Something Better is dangled just out of your reach.
It quickly became very clear to me, however, that the creative job carrot was actually the key on the other side of the cell door. (Take that, metaphor police!) Even if times had been good, I don’t think the plan to move me into creative was ever communicated up the food chain. It was certainly never mentioned to me again.
So I left.
There was a time in my life when I would have stayed on for at least a year or two, silently hoping things would get better while knowing deep down that they wouldn’t. I would have ended up seriously depressed and transferring my stress and anger somewhere else, probably in the form of bitching to my wife. Or smoking crack. One of those. And neither of those is a “Plan A” option.
But I am, in all likelihood, past the halfway point of my life and don’t have time to waste on things I don’t want to do. I feel bad enough playing World of Warcraft, and I like playing World of Warcraft. Why would I want to spend one more minute in a dead end job?
In some ways, my decision was an application of a lesson from grad school: there’s no way to recover sunk costs, and you shouldn’t factor them into a decision. In this case, I decided that between not liking the job, having concerns about the internal culture, and having a very different philosophical approach to business from that of the company, that no amount of time spent in the job would ever make it better, nor should the amount of time I’d been on the job play a factor in deciding to stay or go.
So I start my new job next week. It’s taken about two months to get everything lined up, but this time, there’s no cell door and no dog taunting me with a key. I’ll get to use my creative, communication, and business skills from the start, in an environment much more conducive to my way of working. It’s going to be an invigorating and inspiring challenge and I can’t wait to get started!
Avast, ye scurvy dog! I’ll be takin’ that there key, if you please.
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