I Didn't Start the Fire

After taking a detour into education for a few years, about which I’ve already written extensively, frustration, burnout, and terrible pay led me back into IT. My oldest daughter had her sights set on film school at the University of Texas, so I started hunting for gigs in Texas. A friend of mine emailed me a link to a job posting he’d found when he was prospecting for clients because he thought it would be interesting to me. It was. It was a business analyst/product management consulting role, and the tongue-in-cheek tone of the advert appealed to me. I applied.

It turned out that my friend Andy’s wife worked for this company, which is probably why they bothered interviewing an eclectic oddball like me. After a strange but not unpleasant phone interview, they invited me to Austin for the next round. I dusted off my one suit, made a plan to couch surf with an old army friend, bundled the kids into the Jeep, and drove down I-35 full of nerves and hope.

After two days of grueling, role-play and problem-solving interviews, I was tired, frustrated, and discouraged. I gathered the kids from the coffee shop where I’d parked them and headed home to Oklahoma to try to figure out the next plan. So two days later when they called with a job offer, I was more than a little surprised. And hesitant, truth be told. But I needed the job, I needed to be in Texas, and I didn’t have anything else waiting in the wings. I took it.

The next step was finding a place to live, which was a challenge in overpriced Austin with no money in my bank account. I made another flying weekend trip and looked at several really nasty duplexes and houses. One was okay but they wouldn’t take dogs. Depressed, I went out to dinner with a friend at an east Austin Mexican restaurant and shared my woes over a glass of mezcal.

The waiter hovered. “I couldn’t help overhearing. I happen to be a realtor,” he said, as he brought us dishes of flan. He handed me a business card. “Call me tomorrow. I might have something for you.” 

Serendipity? Maybe, but he found me a tiny two-bedroom house in south Austin that was in my budget and had a fenced yard. I grabbed it. I had to get a loan from a friend to pay for the deposit and my moving costs, but I knew I couldn’t remain in a tiny, dead-end town in Oklahoma any longer. And thus began the second act of my consulting career.

That adventure lasted ten years, and I still have a contract relationship with the company, so what I write about from here on out will be sanitized illustrative vignettes to protect client privacy and my ass.

The funny/sad/frustrating thing about being a consultant is that clients call you in when shit’s gone wrong. The best-case scenario is that they’re just short-handed for a big project. More often, they are already in the middle of a mess. A project with runaway scope. An organizational switch to Agile that’s run into the ditch. Monthly fines for non-compliance. A pile of disorganized software requirements and no idea how to tame them. Layoffs and mergers. Stressed people and frayed nerves. A consultant is 80% therapist, at least. You not only have to learn how to remain calm when everyone around you is freaking out. You also have to learn to keep your thoughts to yourself. At least, if you’re like me and think “what the fuck” about twenty times a day you do.

One project that presented a lot of interesting challenges was at a bank in San Francisco. I’d once lived in San Fran, so it was fun to return and stay in the heart of the financial district. So many great restaurants, pubs, and things to see! Thanks to public transportation, I didn’t even need to bother with a rental car. The project was supposed to be straightforward enough. They just wanted to automate some reports that they used in their mortgage banking group. Ha ha.

Except it wasn’t straightforward at all. Do you know what an accountant calls a “report?” A cross-linked Excel workbook with a dozen tabs, multiple interdependent formulas, pivot tables, and graphs. And more often than not, the data in that workbook was derived from another workbook and has gone through maybe five transformations before it winds up in its final form. 

“Okay,” I thought, “This is crazy, but there’s a process behind all this, so I just need to figure out what it is.”

Ever ask an accountant “How do you derive this?” Their answer is, more often than not “I apply my professional judgement.”

Accountants are witches. No doubt in my mind about it.

To make it more fun, I was working with four different departments, and the heads of those departments didn’t agree about what should be done or how it should be done. They didn’t even really like each other very much. It’s pretty awkward when you’re sitting in a conference room and one of your clients starts venting bitterly about another of your clients. “I empathize with your frustration” is as much as you can say, and that starts to sound pretty stupid after about five utterances.

My boss and I took the clients to a happy hour in an attempt to soothe grumpy accountant feelings and get a good team vibe going. “Don’t talk about religion or politics,” he warned me beforehand. We sat down around the table and ordered appetizers and drinks. Then one of the clients leaned across the table, looked me straight in the eyes, and said “So what do these Occupy Wall Street folks want, anyway?” I swear, I didn’t start anything. You can’t blame this one on me.

Back at the client’s office, I just kept on asking questions in the hopes that at some point it would all start to make sense. And I got pretty good at deconstructing Excel formulas. The project went way over schedule and budget. I learned to dread status meetings. But in the end, the client wrote a glowing review of my skills and professionalism, so there’s that. I rode the wave of that good karma for a long, long time.

I’ve been on other banking projects since then, and I always end up with the same thought. “Does it HAVE to be this complicated?”

Dead Ends

We all have jobs that we leave off the resume. Short term jobs. Survival jobs. Dead end jobs. Maybe even entirely different careers that just didn’t work out. I still have an expired Oklahoma teaching certificate in my files, after all. But even these jobs can have moments, or at least lessons, worth remembering.

I moved across the country to Portland at the worst possible time. 9/11 actually happened while we were in transit. I saw the news coverage from the breakfast bar at a hotel. Enron went belly up and dragged Arthur Andersen into oblivion with it. The economy went to shit. Portland was expensive, compared to Texas, and jobs were scarcer than hen’s teeth. I had two small children, a hella big rent payment, and a husband who was suffering from major depression.

My resume ended up in the trash at Nike and Columbia Sportswear and dozens of other local corporations, so after a lot of rejection, I found a local employment agency and went downtown to see what they could do for me. They had me take tests in MS Office and English. That was entertaining. Ever done a mail merge in Word? Well I hadn’t, but I stumbled my way through it. Apparently I was the first person who ever scored 100% on their English test. They were amazed. It wasn’t even that difficult, but whatever. They found me a part-time position with a local court reporting firm. I interviewed and got an offer. The folks seemed nice, the office was close to home, and I wasn’t in a position to be snobbish. I took the job.

The job was essentially to process depositions we had transcribed and package them up for delivery to local law offices. In spite of the ubiquity of computers, most local lawyers still wanted everything printed and bound. My tasks included running and troubleshooting a massive commercial printer, ensuring that printed documents were correct and complete, binding, and labeling for delivery. I also formatted, burned, and labelled the CDs for customers who wanted a digital copy. It would have been deadly dull, but I amused myself (and wasted more than a little of my employer’s time) by reading the depositions. Most of them I’ve forgotten now, but there was one that included a pair of black g-string panties as an exhibit. That one was a real doozy.

My office mate, Amanda, handled the court reporters’ schedules and served as the first point of contact for customers. While the bulk of the work was recording depositions for law offices, we also did meetings for public entities and closed captioning for locally produced TV shows. Printing out the minutes of the local water board meeting wasn’t a very exciting part of the job, and I’m sure the reporters found it dull too. The reporters were all independent contractors, not employees, so they were free to accept or decline any assignment, which made schedule management a little tricky. They didn’t all live in Portland, either, so commute time and availability had to be taken into account. Each reporter had their “regular” customers that they usually worked with.

After a couple of months into the job, I got recruited to help write a grant proposal to obtain funding to provide visual descriptions for local PBS programming. We already did some closed captioning work, but visual descriptions to make programming accessible to the visually impaired is far less common. The proposal was a work in process, but there was still research and writing for me to contribute to its completion. Sadly, after months of work and waiting, the grant was not approved, and the hope of building out an entire new service offering withered.

Sadly, like almost all administrative jobs, the work was necessary to the running of the company but the pay was low ($14 an hour) and there was no chance for the role to evolve or grow. No matter how key you are to successful operations, as an admin you’re considered nothing more than a cost to be managed and minimized. Getting the occasional Starbucks gift card or potted plant doesn’t compensate for the endless grind of poverty and ennui.

I left that job when I left Portland, never to return except as a visitor. The outdoorswoman in me loved the Pacific Northwest, but I needed a future.

One Good Guy

I’ve written about this one before, but it deserves another look.

It was the last job I got via a recruiter. I know recruiters are still a thing, and sometimes they even ping me with opportunities, but recruiting has changed. Back then, it was still often an individual with deep ties to the local tech community, someone who had a fat Rolodex and a memory like a steel trap. I guess Indeed and Monster have mostly replaced guys like Jeff.

The company was called Encompass. It was a nation-wide roll up of specialty construction contractors – electrical and plumbing, as well as some commercial janitorial services. Roll-ups were a very popular business model in the 90s. There was an optimistic belief that “economies of scale” would make any type of business more efficient and profitable.

The Houston headquarters were located in Greenway Plaza next to the basketball arena that is now a notorious mega-church. My office was high in the air with a view south of the Astrodome and the construction site of the emerging Reliant stadium, now called the NRG stadium. Businesses come and go in Texas, but football is forever.

The job, as it was explained, was the management of an ongoing project to implement an e-procurement system that was already in development.

As time went on, I came to realize that wasn’t a completely accurate job description.

But for starters, I was excited to be managing such a big, strategic project. I was working hand-in-hand with the corporate procurement department, as represented by Andy. What Andy lacked in stature he more than made up for with courage and heart, and he turned out to be the best part of the entire adventure. The software development was being done by a tech company located in Atlanta, in whom Encompass had invested a significant amount of money. One of our first trips was to their Atlanta office, to work through outstanding design questions. I don’t think the term “tech-bro” had been invented yet, but this software company definitely had a lot of them. At our round tables, a couple of big problems quickly became evident. One was that their current software product was designed around a completely different purchasing model than we needed. It’s one thing to buy pencils and toilet paper in bulk to supply an office building. It’s an entirely different thing to order expensive electrical components for a multi-story commercial construction project. The other problem that we discovered was that “ongoing design and development” was a mischaracterization of our status. We didn’t have a functional design, much less any code.

Without a clear direction or scope, conversations devolved to debates around opinion. Tempers flared. People talked over each other. As the project manager, I knew it was my job to bring order and sanity to this chaos, but the bros were very bad at listening. At one point I just snapped, jumped to my feet, and left the conference room, slamming the door behind me so hard that the entire wall shook.

Andy told me later that after I exited, the entire room fell silent. “I think we fucked up,” someone said.

So, we left Atlanta and went back to Houston. We figured out that we needed to get input from the business units and procurement managers who would actually be using this proposed system. We got permission and budget to travel to a few key locations. The travel agent, a lady with red lips, hair, and fingernails known as BJ, set us up with tickets and reservations, and we were off. It was this road trip that really revealed Andy’s allyship and character.

You see, construction companies just don’t have a lot of women. And the ones who do work there are usually receptionists, HR, or bookkeeping. In every meeting, I’d be the only woman in the room. And the men naturally deferred to Andy.

“I’m not the project manager. Dino is. You need to listen to her,” he would tell them bluntly. And then he’d shut up and sit down. He gave them no choice.

They started talking. They told us about their processes, their systems, their challenges, and their triumphs. They’d give us tours of their fabrication facilities and show off their newest high-tech welding equipment.

“Why aren’t you taking notes?” they’d ask me.

“She’ll remember every word,” Andy reassured them. “She’s scary smart.”

That road trip included some memorable experiences. Like jogging with Andy in Phoenix until he twisted his ankle and helping him hobble back to the hotel. Like staying in a hotel in Appleton Wisconsin that happened to have no hot water in January. Like driving across Mississippi in a taxi while Andy ordered roses for his wife to apologize for being “a jealous twit.” Like bantering with the hippie-chick bartender in Boulder who explained to us that she didn’t need pot any more since she discovered meditation and could connect with the creative force 24/7.

Back in Houston, we convened in my office and started making process flows. We covered every inch of the walls. Some truths began to emerge that we just couldn’t ignore.

1.     Our branch locations were operating on a dozen or more disparate back-office systems (off the shelf and bespoke) that were not compatible with each other or with the e-procurement system we were proposing.

2.     Some of our branch locations had already developed integrated purchasing and invoicing with their key vendors and had no interest in disrupting processes that were already working.

3.     The base cost of purchased products was a minor consideration compared to the big benefits of vendor services like staging, packaging, delivery, and return of unused goods. Having a long-term relationship with a vendor who provided these was very important to the construction projects. Any systems that disrupted this relationship would be rejected.

As I reported these findings back to the IT director and indirectly to the CIO, reality started to bubble to the surface. The project I was desperately trying to make succeed had been conceived and funded as a pet project by the COO and had been actively opposed by the CIO, who had instead advocated for convergence on a standardized back-office platform. Hiring an IT project manager (me) was a concession the COO made after significant push-back. The CIO neither expected nor particularly wanted my project to succeed.

So, fun.

“What we need,” the CIO told me, “Is to put together a presentation for the board with a complete ROI for the project.”

So, back to spreadsheets and PowerPoint. Andy and I wrestled with the numbers. The numbers didn’t cooperate.

“You can’t use headcount reduction as a cost-savings,” the CIO told us. Back to the spreadsheets again.

The day of the board meeting arrived. In suit and heels, I presented my slide deck. The COO sat and watched me with a cold narrowed gaze.

“This is my last day on this job,” I thought to myself, as I carefully and thoroughly explained why they should cancel my project.

They cancelled the project. But they didn’t fire me. So that was good anyway.

Just Saying No

I was pretty fed up with the problems inherent in working for a company that had no marketing strategy and way too much process. I’d applied for an internal position as a product manager and been turned down because I didn’t wear make-up. I’m not kidding. I met Ed, a former colleague and refugee from big consulting, who was now managing a small advertising firm, for lunch at the Saltgrass Steakhouse on I-10.  Between the bread and the entrée I vented a bit. By the time desert came, he’d offered me a job. Yes, it really worked that way back then, sometimes.

It was a nice little company. The guy who founded it had the office down the hall, across from the room full of artists, one of who was his brother. “Creatives” as we call them in the advertising world, were allowed to wear jeans and long hair and pretty much do what they liked. In the next office the account managers, in tidy suits or skirts or khaki, handled all the project management and put on the respectable face for the clients.

I was the odd one in this crew, neither a creative nor an account manager, but an “expert” on this thing that advertising firms in those days called “new media,” aka the internet. Ed didn’t really get the internet thing, but he knew that times were changing, and he hoped I could help drag the agency into the next decade.

I helped out with some interesting client projects, and I did research and wrote a plan for transforming the agency into a digitally savvy organization, with proposed partnerships with key service providers. I had a couple of smart MBA-student interns working for me who handled the financial modeling. I spent hours reading about internet and marketing trends, chasing down rabbit holes following the visionaries and authors and rebels who were surfing this new technology wave. It seemed like this agency could be a good place to stay, expand on the internet skills and knowledge I’d painfully acquired at my last job, perhaps help guide this little company and its clients into the future while creating a team and a role for myself that would elevate my career.

It was the last time I had that dream about an employer, by the way.

The founder of the company decided to retire and go fishing and sold us off. At first it seemed nothing much would change. We were designing a trendy new office space, a little larger and on another floor of the same building. The rest of the company just kept on keeping on with existing projects and clients. But slowly things started to change. The founder had been the face of the company to the clients, and they didn’t have the same loyalty once he was gone. Finding new clients got harder. The parent company was concerned about the cost of the new office space we were building out. Then one day, a new president showed up to take charge. He was retired from Madison Avenue and looking for a nice little vanity job to keep him busy.

One of my projects was the redesign of our own website. I’d had the fun of walking the line between the artists and the account managers, trying to find just edgy enough to be hip without being completely ridiculous. Website performance be damned, we were going to have half-page portraits with bright red backgrounds on our team bio pages. Twenty years later, I cringe at the thought. I was working with the account managers to solicit quotes from our clients about what it was like to work with us to round out the copy, and the new president thought the process was taking too long.

“Just make up something,” he told me.

“That doesn’t seem like it would be entirely ethical,” I protested.

“Just add something in small print like ‘what our clients would say about us,’” he retorted.

“Every day we advise our clients to be authentic and honest with their customers and their market,” I returned, getting a little hot under the collar. “We should model the same behavior.”

Later, Ed took me aside and said “You can’t talk to him like that. He’s the president of the company.”

“He’s still wrong,” I responded. “And I’m not comfortable just making stuff up and attributing it to our clients.”

“You need to just do what he asked,” Ed replied.

“Well, I won’t,” I answered. “You can if you want, but I’ll have no part of it.”

And that was the end of that. I packed up my stuff and never looked back. The company didn’t last much longer. The parent company just didn’t see much point to keeping them around and shut them down. I detoxed with a few short months of unemployment and daily trips to the gym before calling my favorite recruiter and getting back into the arena.

Murder by Process

It was a great company to work for. The folks were all so nice, the training program was robust, and the work was interesting. It was a family-run business that really felt like family. After a rough 5 years with a big consultancy, it felt like a safe place to land. It was the kind of company that held its own annual chili cook-off, gave every employee a gym membership, where the CEO regularly invited programmers and testers and admins and agents to lunch and listened to them, and you actually looked forward to the monthly all-hands meeting.

The project management team was a good team with a decent manager. We liked each other, helped each other out, and had lots of conversations about doing things better. We were earnest and eager young professionals, most of us holding the title “project manager” for the first time.

We decided that we needed to develop some standard processes and all use the same project management tools to make it easier to track the status of all our work across the different software products we produced and supported. We were in the mode of doing small waterfall/iterative projects, each of us often managing several projects at one time. We settled on Microsoft Project and then turned to standardizing our PM processes and plans.

All of this was reasonably useful, by the way. I enjoyed the vigorous discussions we had and felt that we made solid choices. There were some compromises made but overall, for the types of projects we mostly did, none of it felt too heavy. 

The only problem was that I quickly became the contrarian. I didn’t set out to be, but you know how it goes. I was working with the web team almost exclusively. I started out with a small site design for a subsidiary company. The creative component of web design appealed to me. I liked the team I was working with. My product manager was the wife of an astronaut and given to wildly personal confidences over the salads at lunch. The business analyst was a working musician with a voice like an angel. The webmaster was a fidgety and flirtatious drummer who was a bit of a genius at graphic design. The dev manager was a bass player known for always ordering the largest and most expensive item on the menu whenever we had a team lunch. The QA manager was a handsome Italian-American-Mormon with some weird hang-ups. Over the course of multiple projects, we evolved into a tightly knit, scrappy little family.

For a big internet project like redesigning a site or adding major functionality, the established project processes worked just fine. We had natural and distinct design/code/test/launch cycles of the work. Breaking a big project into multiple releases still worked within the methodology. But our leadership decided that every website task we did had to fall within a project and be managed as such. Adding a link, refreshing some content, building one or two new pages, or other small site-maintenance tasks just didn’t fit into that framework. At that time, self-publishing tools such as marketing teams use everywhere now just didn’t exist, so all website changes went through IT. I found myself wedged into a corner called “do what you’re told and make everyone miserable or do it the right way and get yer ass fired.” Not a fun place to be.

“I need an alternative to our PM process for this type of work,” I told my manager. “My stakeholders are frustrated because things take too long.”

“You’ll just have to bundle all of their requests into a project,” she told me.

“But that will delay our response for possibly weeks,” I retorted. “And there’s no value in grouping tasks together into projects if they really aren’t a project. There’s no relationship between them, so there’s no synergy in projectizing them.” (Consultant-speak oozing out of every pore. I don’t deny it.)

“That’s the way we do things,” she said. “They’re going to have to get used to it.”

Dear reader, they didn’t get used to it. The marketing department loved our work but they hated our processes so much they hired their own webmaster and cut us out of the loop completely. Turns out, about the time I was fighting this battle, something called Agile was crawling out of the swamp. Maybe it would have saved me. Maybe not. More on that later.

Those Old Y2K Blues

Year 2000 projects uniformly sucked. Everyone in IT who lived through the massive boredom of the so-called Y2K debacle has a story to tell. Mine includes the end of my “big consulting” career.

It went like this. The consultancy I worked for was engaged by a big petrochemical company to inventory all of their systems, evaluate for Y2K compliance, and prioritize for remediation. When I first showed up to the endless unadorned beige halls, beige carpets, and brown doors of their office building, our team was literally housed in a closet. I sat on a crate in the corner for a couple of weeks with a computer propped on a cardboard box, pretending to be productive. Eventually we actually got a small conference room to share, and I had an actual desk to sit at, next to Chas, one of those cowboy-boot wearing “my family has a ranch but I’m doing this technology thing” kind of dudes we seemed to have a lot of in Houston.

The partner on the gig was Tommy, a fresh new partner, sort of good-looking with reputation as a party boy. He featured prominently in all the wildest stories that got passed around the office, the kind of guy who hosted an annual crawfish boil, pool party, and drinkathon at his west Houston McMansion where all the men wore Hawaiian shirts and all the women wore bikinis. I showed up in my athletic one-piece suit with a coverup. Clearly I wasn’t playing the game correctly.

On the Y2K project, I somehow ended up assigned to the engineering group, working with a contract Brazilian programmer whose name I forget. Nice kid and quite competent. The engineering software was almost entirely homegrown applications written, used, and maintained by the engineers themselves, and they were quite amused at the corporate assumption that they needed some fresh-off-the-streets consultants to help them manage or fix their systems.

There I was, unwanted and mostly unneeded, yet somehow I was supposed to be impressing the client with my go-getter-super-organized-you-can’t-live-without-me project management. Mostly this involved driving all the way from west Houston to Baytown a couple of times a week to hang with my programmer, who nicely explained what he had done, was doing, and was planning to do, none of which required my input or supervision. But Tommy wanted everything planned down to 15-minute tasks in a spreadsheet which would have been pretty much made up and of no use to anyone. He was a big believer in the official methodology that had been developed for huge mainframe projects and which was too cumbersome, complex, and time-consuming for anyone to actually use, even if they had understood it. None of our long weeks of training included that methodology, so I doubt Tommy comprehended it better than anyone else.

When I was back in the west Houston office, I noticed that, Chas, my friendly officemate, was developing an odd habit of spending hours a day on the phone. At first I tried to ignore this, figuring he had work or personal business that was no concern of mine. But it intruded on my awareness, and it became apparent that he was running some kind of Christian phone therapy service during work hours. With a deep, caring, soft voice he’d express concern and mutter prayers to some anonymous person or other. Knowing Chas as I did, this really stumped me. Wasn’t this the guy who had had noisy sex with the manager of our previous project in a shared hotel room in Chicago during training last year? Everyone heard that story from his roommate. Not to mention teaching every woman on the team how to two-step and jitterbug at the big kicker bar in north Houston? That nice tall blond girl with the fiancé from South Africa got a bad case for him after one of those outings. Well, Chas remained the golden boy on the project regardless of his almost complete lack of getting shit done. After all, he didn’t regularly tell Tommy that putting “sharpen pencils,” “schedule conference room,” and “check emails” on the project plan was stupid. Which I probably did.

One by one the people on that project handed in their notice and went on to other things – NASA, graduate school, Enron. My mentor asked me “how did you go from being a top performer to a marginal team member?” Dude, it has everything to do with leadership, but nobody ever believes that. Shit’s gotta roll downhill, and partners are at the top of the hill. Eventually my recruiter (his phone number was on everybody’s speed dial) turfed me up a nice project management gig at a real estate company and I made my exit as well.

Tommy had a glorious 20-year career with that consulting company. But I’m not jealous about that, because I’d never have been able to play the game that long, nor did I want to.

Chas ended up quitting shortly after I did and went traveling around Texas holding tent revivals. There’s no more enthusiastic evangelical than a reformed rake, or so I hear.

Screw You Specifically

Somehow my first job out of college, I landed a gig at one of the biggest consulting firms in the world. I’m still not sure how that happened. At the time my technology experience was limited to word processing and working a fax machine. Pretty sure I dazzled them with my camouflage and combat boots. Or maybe it was my linguistic abilities. Or maybe it was just my long blonde hair. At my first company Christmas party at the Houston Junior League, one of my fellow first-year colleagues looked around the room and then said to me, “You know, there are no ugly people here.”

Whether I met the beauty requirement or not, I was definitely a square peg in a round hole at that place. At the time, they didn’t allow women to wear pants to work! We’re not talking the 1960s; this was in the mid-90s. Prim little suits with pleated skirts was a far cry from my previous work uniform of BDUs and combat boots.

I learned how to code, in COBOL, RPG, JPL, and then C+. I worked on a project for a big corporate merger trying to integrate wildly disparate systems. (Why do people insist on doing that?) I learned a lot, found that I actually enjoyed and was pretty good at programming, and had fun with my teammates who were mostly smart, cool people.

A couple of years into this job, my husband and I decided it was time to start a family. After a normal amount of time, I got pregnant with our daughter. When I finally got around to telling my team, their unified reaction was “Great, you can be the designated driver!” Um. Thanks?

I planned to take 6 weeks off when the baby arrived. The company didn’t offer paid family leave, so that was a couple of weeks of saved vacation time plus unpaid leave. However, after my daughter was born, I was blown away by the responsibility, the love, and the challenges. She was an extremely sensitive and colicky baby who spent most of her first year screaming. To say it was stressful would be an understatement. When I took her to the local grocery store, they opened a new cash register just to allow me to bypass the line and get the hell out of the store. When I went to the local taqueria, the waitstaff would dance around the restaurant with my baby in their arms, trying to calm her enough that I could eat the lunch they had brought me. When my neighbor (and mother of 4) baby-sat her, she said “Wow that is a really difficult child.”

The 6 weeks went by really quickly, and I knew I wasn’t near ready to return to work. So I contacted my mentor and arranged to take 6 months more leave. That time at home with the baby was a life-saver. I healed, I learned how to be a parent, I learned how to juggle childcare and all the other things a full-time parent has to get done in a day. I found friendship and support among my older neighbors who had been there and done that. And I was able to find a day-care that seemed reasonably well aligned with my budget and philosophy. But when my leave came to an end, I knew I wasn’t ready for a full-time schedule. In fact, I really had no interest in going back at all. Coding and designing software seemed a lot less important than it ever had, which honestly wasn’t that much to start with. But the bills were piling up. My previous project manager said he’d be happy to have me back part-time, so we arranged that I would return on a 3-day-a-week schedule. He was one of the good guys, a chap from Ohio named Chris. I don’t remember a lot about Chris except that he drove a Trans-Am which I thought was pretty sweet until I had the misfortune to drive him home one day after he’d had a few too many. What a pile of rattling junk that car was! Later, he married one of our colleagues on the project, which totally surprised oblivious me because I had no idea they had a thing going.

Going back to work was still a really hard transition. “They” say that babies in daycare cry for a little bit, then settle down into the new environment. Not so my baby. She cried non-stop. For days. It nearly killed me. It nearly killed the day-care workers too. They were at their wits end with this baby. I hated every minute I was away from her. But finally she started to adjust. At the end of the first year, I moved to a 4-day schedule. That was really ideal because it gave me that one weekday to handle all the family logistics without having to take PTO, while still providing a nearly full-time income. Honestly I did just as much work as I had on a 5-day schedule, so it was a bargain for my employer, which I was well aware of.

The local office, seeing how well this was working out, and getting pressure from other employees who wanted to work part-time, began crafting a policy. Possibly they saw a competitive advantage in being able to provide the flexibility that would help retain good employees. This was a long time before WFH or flex became common, so it would have been a big selling point for them. But the managing partner of the company, a guy who once bragged in a meeting how his teenaged daughter was in the hospital AT THAT MOMENT having surgery but he was just so dedicated to his job he was in a conference room with us instead, got wind of this radical happening down in Houston and put the kibosh on the whole idea. No one under the level of manager was to be given a part-time option, ever.

Between this and the horrible Y2K project I had been assigned to when my other project ended, I’d had enough. I quit that month. When a guy who has hundreds of thousands of employees decides to fuck with your life in particular, it’s time to go. Besides my daughter is way more important than any job, ever.