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.
“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?”
