I’ll get this out of the way, the picture is not related to these words. But I took the shot this week, when I was thinking. And, owls are fucking cool.

So here’s the thing. Virginia Woolf had a notion of a room of one’s own, and that notion is in my head. But mine is all about time not money and space. Either way, it’s about agency, liberation, freedom. It’s about having something of your own.

When I first started at my last job, I didn’t have to count my hours. For two jobs before that, I didn’t have to count my hours. I, in fact , managed people who did have to count their hours. I also paid contracts at all of the jobs to consultants who had to count their hours, and each hour was more than I could imagine making.

Once upon a time, I even had to help make sure that people on government grants complied with the letter of the law to be paid hourly. I read the Fair Labor Standard Acts regulations. I enforced the FLSA standards. I wrote or interpreted company policy on this shiznit.

So years into my last gig, after years of not worrying, one day I day I was told that I had to count my hours. The new HR director decided on the most conservative letter of the law. And so it goes.

So, I started counting my hours. It was me, and we, a bunch of administrative types, who had never done time cards, suddenly asked to do time cards. We acquiesced, and there was training.

The payroll woman (who incidentally sucked, and caused me to lose money on my disability when I got my bum hip fixed) trained me and others on this fabulous new process. She said, basically, it just doesn’t matter. She said, put in 4 hours, put in an hour for lunch and put in another 4 hours. The new HR director, she said, it’s still the same, don’t worry, just put down 8 hours.

The other manager in HR, she said, we were lucky for all of the great things the company offered, and she watched your hours and would keep you in line. You got paid 8 hours, unless there was a dramatic reason for more. There was seldom a dramatic reason for more.

So I did what they said. For years. I got paid for 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. No more than that.

Then new people came. They weren’t trained the same way. They counted all of their hours. They put in overtime.

Then, I got a new director. She said, I want to know if you need to work more. But, really I don’t think you do, so put in 8 hours.

And so it went. I got paid for 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. No more than that.

Some weeks, I would lie in my own favor, because god knows I wasn’t counting the times I built social and political currency in the hallways. Although in guilt I’d worry for not holding my nose to the grindstone. God knows, I didn’t count YouTube videos or reading long articles interesting for the context of my work, but outside of its scope. I figured I was ahead.

Some weeks, I would lie in favor of the work. I stayed late, because I knew something was important. I stayed late, because I had a bad day and felt behind. I stayed late, because I wanted to get ahead for the next day. I stayed late, because I felt guilty. I stayed late, because the traffic report said don’t even bother to try to get home. I figured it was worth it.

Meanwhile.

Meanwhile, my director, my boss, the person who had to review and approve these time cards, she told me not to stay late. She told me to hew to the letter of the policy. She told me that I should not work overtime. She questioned me anytime I worked over.

Still, she wanted things done.

Still, she’d hold me to a high standard. Still, she’d work weekends, and email floodgates would open on Sundays.

Still, I would come in to a chipper email at the end of a pay period, “hey, I signed your time card, but I noticed that extra half hour (reflected in my calendar, because someone called a meeting during lunch), and you didn’t ask me.”

Still, I knew, because many people told me things, in hall way conversations or other moments, they told me they put in extra hours all of the time. Or they said, they told their direct reports to put in extra hours, and they’d sign the time card.

Their bosses, they never said don’t, so they did.

I knew people were balancing out what they considered a low wage with extra time, because they told me. One woman told me she was the highest paid in my position, because she claimed so many hours.

Sure, in the end, it caught up with her. But, her bank account was none the wiser.

I knew there was inequity, because people told me. I knew there was inequity, because I helped research it. And, in the end, I betrayed my own pocket book. I helped management figure out the new policy.

I helped write new HR policies to make it clearer when to put in hours and when not to do so. I helped clarify that overtime wasn’t the baseline expectation. When, I helped clarify all of that, I said others should stay in the same box as me.

My boss, knowing I not only knew the letter of the rules but helped write them, she made sure I didn’t waver and followed it all. She grumbled when one week I had overtime, it was overtime that I needed to not just because of all of the work that still needed to get done, which had never stopped, but because I needed more time to spend time helping to define overtime. Begrudgingly, I felt, she OK’d my time.

Irony, you literary, Alanis-Morrisette-loving bitch. Irony, you complete me.

Check it out and let’s be clear — I held paper to pen, or keyboard to digital records, I helped my company write policies. The president knew I was helping. The general counsel knew I was helping. The HR director knew I was helping.

HELL. They all asked me to help.

But, going back to the Fair Labor laws AND California labor laws, they all somehow thought it was fair and cool and fine and just and all sort of regulatory right, that I should be punching a clock and filling out a time card and was not worthy of a salaried position. Because even while helping write the rules, I was not responsible.

They said I was not responsible, because they paid me like a secretary who held no responsibilities. But, they sure as fuck held me responsible.

For anyone playing the home game — I exceeded the FLSA guidelines for contributing to the work and should have been salaried, paid higher, and, as the lingo goes, exempt from overtime.

And, even in California, where the fair labor shit is a motherfucker, my duties should have made me salaried. There’s a “white color job” standard. Check. Then, there’s this paragraph:

Examples of duties that relate to management or general business operations include responsibility for marketing, research, budgeting, finance, accounting, purchasing, quality control, human resources, labor or government relations, regulatory compliance, and database administration.

– Source: https://wrklyrs.com/Exempt#p54

Every single damn day at that job, those things fell into place. For example, the whole company trained and trained and made everyone with my title experts on regulatory compliance of grant making more than anyone in the damn building.

So, why am I writing this shit down?

How the hell do I know?

But, I will say, this week I woke up and realized how much this stuff all bothered me.

Call it PTSD. I’m getting saltier than the sea right outside of Jordan. I’m getting so salty, the FDA is gonna say I cause hypertension. Today, I’m looking back at about two months ago, when I submitted my resignation. A couple of months when I accepted a similar job. A job still in California, making many, many more ducats an hour, and no one is expecting me to count those hours. I am salaried, and a much better salary it is.

Back to Virginia Woolf. I feel freedom.

The emotional toll of even the nicest most generous system (which I didn’t have) is still pretty fucking high when you are a grown ass woman, and someone outside of you looks over how you spend a day.

A humongous weight is lifted. I show up to work when the subway brings me to the neighborhood, and no one watches. I leave when it feels like things are done enough, and no one watches. I check my email or I don’t. I read Slack or I don’t. I do what needs to get done, and I go home.

For years. I got paid for 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. No more than that. No extras for caring, reading, reading supplementary stuff, getting criticized for things I didn’t do. Getting criticized for reading emails, answering calls, sent outside of those 40 hours.

Now, I am not in a fortress of 40 hours. It’s not clear what a day is, and there’s no time card to lie on and pretend we agree on a work day. When I arrive, no one knows or cares. They, the bosses, the company, the job, they are not watching me by hours. The work gets done the best that I know how to do it. And that’s enough.

I get more money. I worry less. People are nicer about it.

The kicker is, the pockets where I work now have so much less money in them than the last place. They MUST worry about money, because the company’s existence depends on revenue and wisely managing what they have.

At my last place, they gave money away. That was the business. Their pockets were deep, their endowment solid, their worth in the billions with a b. And, that’s where they used to watch my time. That’s where they not only watched my hours, they stopped giving me cost of living increases, because my pay was the highest it could be at the job. They have billions in the bank, I made 5 figures.

I know their scale is wrong. I know my position should have been salaried. I know because when I decided to leave and get exactly the same type of job — both non-profit and profit — they offered me more and with a salary. (I will, surely perish from this earth not comprehending the riddle of why ALL other jobs I chased were willing to pay me more and how in god’s fucking name the old job sets “competitive” wages.)

I get to contribute on my own terms. And, today’s shallow pocketed company may very well become deep. Who knows.

How absurd that I spent so many years justifying time. How absurd I was even asked. And how crazy the ending of this story should be if I end up with successful corporate shares enough to create my own philanthropic world that will be better than the one I left. But, even without that thought, my life is measurably improved by walking away.

Time is on my side.

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.

San Pedro Creek