When Work Doesn't Work

Or... Why I Started Seeing a Therapist.

This is a long one, so I apologize. If you’re using the app, it tells you how many minutes it should take, but maybe you can beat their time. But if you ever wondered what brought me to seeking therapy, here’s that story.

As I have written about extensively, I went to film school and had aspirations of being a big-time Hollywood screenwriter. After graduation, I was sending out my screenplays to studios and contests while also looking for a “real” job, which because of the diabetes, I sorely needed because someone had to pay for my health insurance. Side note: I perused one of my screenplays recently and found it to be just awful. Like, “what was I thinking?” kind of terrible. No wonder nobody bought it. But I was 22 and thought I was David Mamet.

So, I got a “real” job at a small college which was part of a larger university as an Audio-Visual Technician. I had a little training in the field, having worked part-time at another local (more prestigious) university. Probably not enough training, but the school year was about to start so they were desperate and I was a warm body. At the time it was mostly wheeling giant TV’s and slide projectors around the building, so you didn’t need much experience to handle that.

We all rememebr these, right? Well, I reeeeeaaaaly remember them.

I remained at that job for many years, upping my skill set as I went along. Technology moves fast, and I had to move with it. Fortunately, the whole department was mostly me and my work-study students, so I was usually the one deciding how fast our technology would advance. I enjoyed working with most of the faculty, but a lot of them were true luddites. Not that I minded that. In fact, I never pushed anyone to do anything that they were not comfortable with when it came to technology. However, that outlook did mean that I probably had to work twice as hard to make sure that everyone was happy in their classroom. I don’t mean to brag, but I probably worked harder than anyone else in that building, at least physically. I was constantly running up and down the five flights of stairs to make sure that every class that was using tech went off without a hitch. I was physically drained at the end of every day, and it’s probably no coincidence that the amount of alcohol I consumed went up along with the amount of classroom technology usage.

After about fifteen years of basically running my own ship in this small college, I was told that I would be brought in to be part of the university’s main tech department, which had recently been rechristened Learning & Event Technology Services, or LETS. LETS handled the needs of the entire university, and not just classrooms but also, as the name says, events that were held there. This was an important aspect of the job because events usually brought in money. When a conference would come to the university, the speakers would need microphones and projectors to show their Powerpoint slides, and eventually video cameras to livestream their talks, because people love to watch that crap when they’re not physically there. Almost anyone I’ve known who has been to a conference will tell you that they don’t even really like to watch it when they are actually sitting in the room. It seems conferencves are mostly just an excuse to go to an After-Party.

The point is, all that stuff costs money. So, even though the tuition at this school had exploded to just shy of $50,000 a year in 2016, the main thing that my new bosses, and their bosses, and their bosses and so on, were concerned about was, “How much money can we make on this inane conference?” In fact, I was actually told to try and up-sell the conference people on more equipment, just so LETS could make a few extra bucks. They asked for two microphones? Try and convince them that they need four. However, since I was not hired to be a salesman and I didn’t work on commission, and I was the one actually setting up all this shit, I would often do the opposite, and literally “down-sell” the customers. “You only have two people speaking? Maybe they can share a mike.”

So, while not being overly pleased with being brought in to LETS, I was at least going to be making more money and I was allowed to keep my office (The other techs had to share a cramped basement office in the center of campus.) There definitely were things I found odd. Some of their edicts were weird but easily circumvented, like their “no-jeans” rule - I was pushing 40 at the time, and had not adhered to a dress code at work since I was in high school. But they also had staff carry walkie-talkies to stay in touch, and we were required to keep them on at all times. That in itself was weird enough because we all had cell phones, but the really weird thing was we were told that if we were going to go to lunch, we were to say “Foxtrot” into the walkie-talkie, not simply that we were going to lunch, because God forbid anyone find out that we were human and ate lunch. At the time, I would eat lunch every day with the same coworker, and I never once said “Foxtrot.” In fact, I never heard anyone else do it, either, but that may be because I barely ever turned the damn walkie-talkie on.

Yes, as you may have noticed, I did not always adhere to LETS’ policies. I did whatever task I was assigned to the best of my ability, but never really went above and beyond for LETS like I did in my original position. Something about the way they did business just didn’t sit well with me. Like, literally treating it like a business. The “Learning” part of the title was definitely secondary to the part that made money. I was hired to help faculty set up their classroom tech, and the money that was being brought in for the events, and the ass-kissing that upselling that went with it, just seemed dirty to me. I was actually told by one of my superiors, a man named Chris, not to help faculty unless they specifically asked for it. I had other issues with Chris too, and I wasn’t the only one. They mostly stemmed from him being in charge of the LETS ticket request system, which was admittedly new to me. I understood that it made sense for a staff member to submit an electronic ticket if they were in a classroom and the system wasn’t working. But most of the issues could be fixed rather quickly (“just turn it off and turn it back on!”), and so resolving the ticket actually took more time than resolving the issue. And if a staff member didn’t bother with the ticket and just called me with an issue, I was expected to retroactively submit a ticket for them because… “metrics.” Well, here’s a metric: my pay does not increase in accordance with the number of tickets I close, so… fuck it.

Actually, even though I hated it and often had issues with the way Chris dealt with it (I literally got an email while he was on vacation in New Orleans about him not liking the way I resolved a ticket. I really hope he was drunk when he sent it.), I usually closed way more tickets than the rest of the techs. Probably because everyone else was too busy with the events and I was the only one who cared about actually helping the faculty, but still, the metrics don’t lie.

In spite of my new position, I mostly kept doing things the way I had always done them, and when an event would come my way, I set it up and then went back to my office and helped my faculty. However, I didn’t do handle events with my trademark vigor. I suppose the term now would be “quiet-quitting,” but I had never heard that term at the time. I would probably have said I was ‘foxtrotting' through the job.

This eventually became a problem because I started to fall behind on some of the latest technology, and no one ever pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Matt, you want to help me with this livestream set-up? I can show you the ropes.” We only had a handful of techs and tons of jobs for them to do, so nobody really had time to show anyone anything. So even if I volunteered to tag along to see how things worked, no one had to time to actually explain what they were doing. Still, I would get asked to do things all over campus, even on weekends and holidays, when I would make time-and-a-half because I was a union employee. So I would usually do them, but it got to a point that I was just tired, so even if I was free and the money would have been good, I would say that I wasn’t available.

The fact that myself and a couple of the other techs were union was probably the real issue that some of the superiors had. For one thing, because of the overtime pay, if you broke it down, I think I made more money than Chris, who earned a good salary, but constantly worked nights and weekends (and when he was on vacation) and wouldn’t make an extra dime for it. I didn’t see that as my fault. I was hired for a union position all those years before, so even though I only went to one meeting in my entire time there, I was still a member, so I made overtime pay whenever I worked extra, plus a small, union raise every year. The higher-ups at LETS probably felt I and my fellow union techs were simply not worth the money.

Eventually, I was told that I was going to be moved to the main office and given a cubicle. The reason I was given was to have all of the techs under one roof, but I actually think this was them just dicking me around. After almost 20 years in my own space, I admit that didn’t sit well with me. I fought it for as long as I could, but eventually I was moved. This change happened to come around the same time as my employee review. The reviews were based on a point system, and if you reached a certain score, you would be eligible for the merit raise. I fell 2 points below that level, and refused to sign my review. I met with my bosses and told them, “Message received. You are not happy with my work. I will do better. Can you at least give me the 2 points? You are literally costing me a lot of money.” They refused, so I brought in the big guns: I went to the union. Interestingly enough, the other union techs were also given rather poor reviews, and 2 points short was pretty good when they told me their scores.

Unfortunately, our union rep was an obese, cranky man named George, who was completely ineffective. He and I met my supervisors to plead my case, but he basically just asked them for mercy, and Linda, my “big boss,” was not going to budge. In fact, she kind of doubled-down, telling me that I wouldn’t actually be hired for the job if I applied then. I found that pretty ironic, since I probably wouldn’t have taken the job if I was offered it then. It got pretty bitter, and at one point, George asked for a few minutes to speak with me alone and we went into the hallway.

“Dude, your body language sucks,” he told me. It was the only constructive thing he said all day.

“Well, come on. I’m getting taken to pieces in there,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

I thought he was there to represent me and use the power of the union to fight for me, but he clearly had no power at all. In the end, I think we both knew where this was going. Linda was trying to make my life so miserable that I would quit, and in July of 2019, after starting the job in August of 1999, that’s exactly what I did. I had spent a week in the main office and that was all I could take. I had been asked a couple weeks earlier if there was anything that would help me make the transition smoother (which I thought was actually nice of them), and I told them my sole request was, if possible, to not have to sit next to Chris, who had become my arch-nemesis. When I arrived in the main office for my first day, that was exactly the space they had reserved for me. I was pretty sure I was going to leave anyway, but that was the last straw. My therapist agreed that was the only option. I remember it because it was the first time I swore in front of her. I believe “bullshit” was the term I used.

On my final day, I handed Chris my keys and he asked if the keys to my original office were there. I told him no they weren’t, that I had already given them to the folks there, since they belonged to them (my loyalty to my original department was always going to be stronger.) Ever the control freak, Chris said, “Well, that was kind of the problem,” to which I wanted to reply, “No the problem was you.” I really wish I had said it. That would have been such a high note.

A couple months later, I found out that they eliminated the other union positions, which was sad but not unexpected. I guess when your uinion is represented by a guy like George, it’s really only good for free lunches. I originally surmised that with me gone, getting rid of the couple other guys, who had already gotten bad reviews, wasn’t such a hurdle. But looking back, I probably would have just been let go, too. Just life in the corporate world, and when you treat your higher ed job like it’s a corporation, this is what happens. I always felt Linda was annoyed that she had inherited the union techs, and resented us for it. And in my case, the feeling was definitely mutual. Now, she had her wish and we were gone. I did some sleuthing and found that she was still there, and that she actually went to the same college as me, and it’s possible we were classmates, which is the only thing we have in common. Chris is still there, too, and now holds the title of Measurement & Reporting Manager, which sounds like he is still dealing with metrics. Probably while on vacation.

I realize that leaving a job isn’t a huge thing these days, and people leave or get laid off all the time (The job I went to after this one recently gave me a “longevity bonus” for being there for five years.) But I made lifelong friends at that job, and never thought about leaving until I did, and for them to intentionally make me miserable so I would quit, well, that’s just shitty. It's possible that I made them miserable too, but whatever. They can write a Substack about me if they want. In the end, I miss seeing my friends at work every day, but I don’t regret leaving when I did (A few other techs followed soon after, which tells you something). I still deal with technology and tickets, but there's no Linda here, no Chris, no working nights or weekends. And in almost twenty years, I never got a longevity bonus. And if the best revenge is living well, then I have my revenge.

You made it! Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to check out the podcast, the comic, and the RedBubble store. I’d say you can Buy me a Coffee, but nobody ever does. Still, thanks for the read!