What a difference a decade makes

It’s been well-documented. In Massachusetts I had a working shelf life of only about 5-7 years. Then my authentic self would irritate like a mohair sweater, and I’d become the pain in the ass they had to heave ho.

I moved west and bucked the trend. Managed to stay at my last gig a whomping 14 years. That’s a long run by any standard. Here in Silicon Valley, it’s comparable to the Pleistocene. It was my own little Belle Époque of working life. Better yet, I George Castanza’ed that shit and left on a high note!

But the real change is I changed “industries.” Air quotes on that baby, since not sure living in the universe of grant-making, grant-getting and not making a profit is an industry.

Somewhere around 1989, I got my first gig temping in Accounts Payable at as biomedical research lab. In my spare time at work–that time was vast–they let me help out the grants management office and photocopy grant applications.

Two historic notes from the paragraph above on the state of technology in the late 80s for any children stumbling across these words. (1) Photocopying involved making documents on paper kind of like the books like your parents probably have on shelves. And (2) Accountants used to match paper purchase orders to paper invoices to paper packing slips that were tucked inside boxes to tell you what was inside the box. As a temp, I innovated and iterated and all sorts of forward thinking reengineering buzzwords on the matching process like no one had done before — I put them in alphabetical order by vendor than numerical order by PO. A day’s task became an hour’s.

A couple of things leapt out to that much younger (childlike really) me as far superior working conditions at the non-profit, touchstones to this day. First and foremost, no one gave a shit about what I was wearing, pantyhose were a non-existent accessory, and sneakers were shoes. Secondly, there were smart people in abundance working on smart things. (As a bonus, they were smart people who were around my age who liked drinking beer even more than I did.)

Thus, a career in grants management, research administration, budgeting and all sorts of office work skills was born. At that one place, I went from photocopying grants to helping negotiate the budget for a chunk of the human genome project. Heady times.

The niche I found — I am good at exactly the kind of things a HUGE chunk of the population think are annoying snoozefests of boring bureaucracy. Deftness with expense reports alone is a career goldmine. Everyone hates expense reports, except for the accountants who make you do them.

Over the years, I sorted out another observation that has served me well. There’s a scoldy, pinched-faced, frumpy archetype as the face of any kind of office administration. She — it’s always a she — favors kitties to people, likes rules and lives to nag.

She doesn’t wear sneakers, swear like a marine or crack jokes whenever feasible.

I’ve never actually met that archetype per se. But, I sure as fuck have met a village worth of people who embraced office tasks as a fiefdom with a will toward severing heads for minor infractions. Mostly, I’ve realized, there’s a subgroup of humans in every workplace who desperately need some control over something somewhere. And, hell, paperwork can be that thing.

I don’t take myself that seriously, and that has been my saving grace. Alongside a sense of humor and not being an asshole.

Honest though — Even when I worked at a hospital, most office work is not life or death. (Out on a tangent, one of the last things I did in my last job was help push for a grant to provide public info on Ebola, which was close.)

I’m babbling here. Setting a scene. Indulging myself. Call me Tarantino.

Zooming to present day — I’ve switched gears entirely. I’m in corporate America. I’m in Silicon Valley–white hot, phone app, VC-courting, insert every single cliche about San Francisco in 2019–tech.

I’m so in tech, I’m working with the engineers. I’m so in tech, I have the logo-ed hoodie to prove it. I’m so in tech, I’m drinking cold brew and kombucha on tap.

Here’s what I’m feeling, since my jump.

The wealthy philanthropy I left spends less daily on making employees happy than the scrappy, fighting for market and funding startup.

So far, they also spend more time emailing, messaging, calling the staff on off hours and blurring life/work balance boundaries, despite claiming the opposite.

The “flat structure” I left in philanthropy is bollocks. I knew that, but holy fuck, by every metric I’m getting treated better and more evenly for essentially the same functional work. I swear if I get called “just an assistant” here, the CEO might fight the person. He told me as much.

With much greater differences in roles, responsibilities and personalities — from sales and marketing and creatives to software developers and data scientists — the vibe is LESS siloed and way friendlier.

The friendliness alone is killing me. I’m pretty sure at least one person from every department has introduced themselves and said something relevant about my new role, my bio or my brief introduction in front of the company. (I wonder when they’ll discover I am far older and less hip than at first glance.)

I lost little in personal benefits, even though I believed with the change in scale, I’d lose more. Ed benefit, check; catered food, check; free coffee, check. And the big one, closed at the end of the year for a week with pay. (On the last one, as I was walking out the door, they were fixing the “with pay.”)

The local philanthropies could learn from scrappy startups in Silicon Valley. Here are some things that could easily be adopted:

  • Real investment in sustainability – not only with staffing to lead the effort, but with physical changes, like available containers and what not to be used by staff. Did you know in California, you can bring your own reusable takeout containers to restaurants?
  • Monthly commuter and health and wellness subsidies
  • A more flexible education subsidy
  • A less traditional approach to time off/time cards
  • Much more generation health benefit subsidies
  • Recognize anniversaries. I went to work for 14 years, and several colleagues even longer, and got nothing. At 20 years, one person got a card and small party, because her coworker pushed for it. Thank people for showing up everyday with even the simplest gesture. There are different balloons for new employees, birthdays and work anniversaries floating everywhere. It’s a tiny corporate investment for a smile.
  • Fig newtons. OK, it’s not the branded “Newtons,” but there are fig bars aplenty. I shall endeavor to eat my weight in fruit and cake.
  • Dispense carbonated water without wasteful, individual bottles. Carbon dioxide isn’t rare or hard to get.
  • Set up the office space for use by humans over aesthetics. Wider array of conference rooms and configurations, better tech, etc. Here’s another example, there’s no way I’m not sorting trash/recycling/compost when I pass multiple rows of each container throughout the space.
  • Practice more transparency and better communication. There are actual secret, private things where I work — IP, customers, strategies. For the first time I had to sign an NDA, even just to interview. Yet, in the four walls, calendars are all open at all levels, important info is kept on the corporate-wide shared drive, open permissions on Slack groups are the norm. Information roams free.
  • Imbed volunteering and community service into the culture. Next week, a group of new hires including moi, will spend an afternoon volunteering at an org in the community as part of our training. They also use caterers who partner with the local food banks for leftovers.
  • Pay to the real market. It’s nonsensical to pay less than what is needed to survive in the expensive Bay Area. Not scientific, but my own job search showed me I was underpaid EVEN matched with an offer I didn’t take from a nonprofit.
  • Turns out, even in the cold, corporate world, people can do good work, be smart, care deeply about a mission and help other people and their communities.

    And so the adventure continues.

Another day, another dollar

Some days, I figure I have a couple of things worked out, and I fancy myself clever for working to live not the other way around. Other times, the universe isn’t what you might call kind and kicks me in the head just enough to remind me I have to work any way I can.

Could be worse – I type type type in a cubicle not dig dig dig in the dirt or bleed bleed bleed to make one piece more. But, with my addictions to having food, clothing and shelter, rather than racing hungry and nekkid in the streets, work must be done.

That’s my preamble. That’s my reality when I pull on my bootstraps or whatever other cliche working stiffs are told and remind myself of all of the choices I made that got me here.

Truth is, somewhere around 1989 or thereabouts, I sorted out a pretty major truth for myself. I like doing something where I’m helping out on something useful and good, but I’m not the captain of the ship. I don’t want to be on the bridge responsible for saving lives, steering clear of the shoals or icebergs. I like being a reliable deckhand, pointing out the rocks up ahead.

In ’89, I had my first not-for-profit gig. In the dark ages, we–the world–hadn’t mapped the human genome, cloning mice was sexy and got magazine covers and tumor suppressor genes were undiscovered. In those same dark ages, grant applications were on paper and giant boxes with multiple copies to hand out to the peer review committees were mailed into government repositories for sorting by human hands.

Copies I made and collated and put in boxes, narratives I edited and budgets I helped craft and checked and re-checked with long strands of old-fashioned calculator tapes were a tiny contribution to science. In small ways I contributed, and in more significant ways, I did too. I helped post docs decode their first grant applications. I sat on the floor and collated appendices alongside a young scientist who was the first to map the Y chromosome. Shit, I even fought another genomic rockstar when his brand new Mac computer was an allowable expenditure under government rules, but he’d have to pony up the cash for KidPix and other software for his kids.

It was fun. I got to hang out with smart people. I got to carve out a corner where I was smart and reliable people myself working alongside them.

When a crazy chain of events ended one job, it was amazing to realize how many friends I had made with the scientists. Real friends, ones where we broke bread, drank beer and danced at weddings together. We joked about putting a special sign in my condo that the leading lab in the country working with listeria had shat in my tiny bathroom. The most senior of the senior scientists called me at home to let me know he’d be a reference for whatever gig was next.

After that, my grants voodoo had me writing budgets for grants discovering the BRCA1 gene, lumpectomies that spared countless breasts, the statistical underrepresentation of African American women in cancer studies and overrepresentation in death. My strength is and was being able to connect what people wanted to do with aligning the bureaucracy to make things work.

Never has anyone said, “Boy howdy, that was some interesting science, but those forms, they were filled out flawlessly.” But, still in all, I have met a lot of people, I have trained a lot of people, and I helped move some stuff along.

I’ve mastered most administrative tasks and gravitated toward supporting executives who run centers and teams. Today the science is social and the work in different areas.

Here’s the thing, though, by definition good administrative support is invisible administrative support. When text reads how the scientists intended and their fingerprints overlay whatever I touch or people remember the meeting content not the dimensions of the conference room or that food, water and caffeine were plentiful but unobtrusive, I’ve done my job well.

When directors are well-prepared and organized or know every detail and bump in the road when they walk into the meeting, even if it’s minutes after a red eye flight, no one has seen me compiling the information they have in hand. When a few hallway chats or emails quiet work teams concerns, no one sees the ghostwriter. When departmental leaders trust me and my team, it’s through relationships I have steadily built. It’s not a coincidence in three decades of work, I’ve beta-tested, gotten equipment early and have special access from every IT department I’ve encountered.

Even when I have had major career setbacks, my performance feedback has been complimentary, and I’ve made friends at every level of the organization. In my current job, a senior manager told me I’m seen as an honest broker, willing to help others and speak up even on the hard issues.

And, even as I do well, including bonuses and other recognition, some people flat out dislike me or disagree with me or my style. I plug on — Mostly, the good outweighs the bad, and no one knows my shortcomings better than me.

But always there comes a time when–because my work is invisible, systems I’ve created are working and second nature or information I’ve created or complied is used by others and absorbed into the tissue of the work–there comes a time when my contributions are forgotten. Coming into work, newer people or growing teams see me only as today’s veteran doing daily work seemingly by rote.

It’s not just me. I see it around me with others like me — middle-aged workers in support roles, because we like it and are good at it and are actively contributing. We are not too stupid or ambitious to have done more with our lives.

Now when people see me, new people, younger and younger people, they don’t really see me. They don’t see my value as a mentor, because on their career paths they self-assuredly know they will do better than me.

Managers see my inevitable, all too human mistakes, which are mostly rare, in a harsh light, because the bar for me is higher, and they no longer afford me the patient tones provided new recruits. Performance reviews evolve and paragraphs are spent on what still can be tweaked rather than all the forgotten moments when things went well or smoothly.

My sisters (they are all women) in arms, other career administrators, face the same challenges. We talk in hushed tones in corners about our jobs. We wonder to each other how to work with new people and come up with plans both formal and blessed by leadership and informally. We give each other advice when new managers come in and smile as we train those with higher salaries and more prestige who will soon also not see our invisible work.

We back each other up, providing advice or a shoulder, when the very thing we took part in creating is torn down or taken, or others casually insult the nature of what we do by choice or actually like to do. We commiserate when someone comes in with a “new” idea and is praised vociferously, an idea that we tried or suggested years before that hadn’t taken root.

We notice when no one asks for our input about things we know. Right now, as I face a management change, I can see in calendars, my teammates’ meetings to discuss what to do. I’m not invited and no one has asked for my input or my colleague’s, even though she and I were put in charge of a similar change in years long past.

Over time we watch how people stop asking us questions on how things work. New people assume we only know the simple tasks or only are driven by maintaining the status quo. New committees form, and slowly my dance card empties.

In my current job there is no special recognition for years of service. Some people are term-limited and the company ethos focuses on them. It’s the only job where I have not gotten even a certificate or paragraph in a newsletter or simple thank you at 5 or 7 or 10 years let alone a gift or bonus. So, it’s no surprise younger and newer workers don’t even learn the veterans’ names.

I brace again for change, and I have to look forward to a new manager. It’s simultaneously daunting and refreshing to face a clean slate.

All I know is I’m not “just an administrator.” I’m an administrator. Somebody’s got to do it.

Happy Pat’s Day 2019

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It’s not unusual for me to think of my mother.  She was a force to be reckoned with and from feminism and progressive politics to arts, crafts and approaching the mundane with a creative flair to just wanting to be a contrarian, she formed a lot of who I am today.

With the hot fucking mess that is Donald Trump in the Whitehouse and the latest wave of Catholic scandals, she’d be on fire.  Her acid wit would burn holes in the atmosphere as she would undoubtedly be glued to CNN fueling an internal flame of discontent.  “Me too” would likely create rants of how is it that men have stayed in power this long and why not give women a chance?

Lately, though, there’s a restlessness that has me thinking, “What would Pat do?”

I keep wondering if I’ve stayed too long at the fair in terms of employment.  She’d totally understand my simmering thoughts about appreciation.  Much more basically, she’d probably remark casually that the longer you stay anywhere the easier it is for your contribution to become the status quo, and everyone forgets how hard you work. You know, she’d say laughing, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”

But, at the same time, she’d be the worrying voice that tells you to keep a good job and not take any chances.  My worrying voice about money, work, the mortgage, all of it is her voice.

Yet, we both know, she knew when she was here on earth, that I probably shouldn’t let myself become too complacent.  We’d fight, of course, and she’d find many, many ways to tell me that I’m crazy.  And, she’d be absofuckinglutely right.

But, yet, there would be a glint of appreciation. Some pride.  And, she would agree,

“Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.”

And, for you, Pat.  For everything you’ve taught me, I still tilt at windmills to mix a literary metaphor.  I still fight the power.  And, I always just laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Finally, for the tulips at the top, a friend–who also remembers and needs herself to be reminded sometimes to never allow yourself to be ground down–shared them for the ides of March and esprit to guerre.  Maybe somewhere in the infinite space the spirits of those who make this date important to each of us are sharing a joke.