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.