Exactly ten years ago, I quit my first office job. I was a sys admin (the IT guy) for this hilariously dysfunctional company – the sort of business that stayed afloat only because it had cornered the market on an obscure machine that big manufacturers were willing to pay silly piles of cash for.
I found the job on craigslist. My interview was to get their emails working again because they’d gotten a virus that was sending out ads for homeopathic pills from their servers, so they’d been blacklisted as spam by Microsoft. I didn’t know what I was doing but I wore a belt clip for my blackberry and that meant something in those days, dammit.
Everything about it was comically toxic. The lead engineer left in the middle of a Tuesday and sent an email a week later to let everyone that he was kayaking for a month. The secretary was desperate to get fired; she would intentionally fuck up in the most obvious ways possible, but the CEO refused to give her the satisfaction of receiving unemployment checks. He was a shrill, anxiety-inducing person by default. He relished in the chance to berate his underlings, and his shrieking carried through the whole building. It was the kind of office where you’d walk in and hear someone crying, and you knew he was in today.
One day the internet cut out in the conference rooms. To find out where the cables had been run, I met with the architect of the building. His office was in the loading bay, where he could chain smoke through 3 packs a day. While we pored over blueprints of the building he told me how the magic of marriage died after the first time he saw his wife taking a shit.
My boss had a remarkable ability not to absorb the chaos around him. In his little bits of free time, he’d teach me how to run scripts or crimp cables. He ate pasta salad for lunch every day while he watched Greek, a show about frat culture. He told me he used to compete in professional beer pong competitions.
I lasted about 4 months. It was Christmas Eve and I was on the phone with our internet provider trying to restore service (again). The CEO rushed up to me in a panic, demanding that I show him how to delete voice mails on his new iPhone so that his inbox wasn’t full any more. I tried explaining I was fixing the company-wide internet outage, but he was uninterested. Something about juggling those two tasks broke my brain, and I never showed up again. I told my boss I was going back to school. I didn’t, but I wanted to, because I was terrified of falling into a future where I’m stuck. Cornered into eating shit from bad people.
Work is a lot better, these days. But I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it means to work in technology this last year. And I’m not happy with it. This is the first in a series of meanderings on that.