The Wild Winds of Fortune

I have eight job applications I have to fill out this evening, and I am sitting here writing this. I am frozen.

A friend lost her job today.  She is a wonderful, smart, funny woman, but more relevantly in this case, she is insanely good what she does.  She took an event that raised $19K in 2011, and managed to raise $50K in 2012.  And yet, all the time she was working with her head down accomplishing miracles, she was being given veiled threats that her job was in jeopardy. (By the way, if anyone is in the market for a kick-ass events manager, email me, and I will send your information along to her.) She asked me if I could be a reference for her, and I said that of course I would. How can anyone that talented be fired?  Yes, office politics were responsible for most of it, but still…

And I look at me.  How much is a sense of humor and proportion worth?  How do you convincingly convey how good you are at fulfilling what people need, sometimes even before they know they are in need?  How can your cover letter show your talent for understanding organizational missions, and evaluating details to see if they are in furtherance of that mission?  How do you tell people, “just tell me where your desired end is, and I’ll figure out the steps to get there?” No.  They want excellent attention to detail.  Yes, I can attend to details quite fairly well — you need to be able to in any professional environment — but that is not why anyone should hire me.  They want expertise in Office Suite.  I am decent in Office, but that is not why anyone should hire me. That is not my value added.

My value added is brains.  A lot of them.  And I, who can think and analyze problems inside and out, freeze when it comes to selling myself.

And writing. And I, who can write clearly and convincingly, cannot for the life of me write a cover letter that sounds anything other than forced and fake.

And flexibility to learn new things.  And I, who can learn an online database system in an afternoon given enough to do with it, am having trouble finding the flexibility to see myself as anything other than some sort of entry-level admin assistant.

And interpersonal relationship and customer service skills.  And I, who can with compassion and gentleness listen to the cares of strangers in distress, who can calmly and pleasantly deal with the crankiest of customers, cannot bring myself to call upon people I went to law school with to see if there are admin jobs in their offices.  In one case, I know that there is a job in one woman’s office, because I have applied to it online.  Everyone tells me I need to contact her so that my application does not get lost in the wilderness of the H.R. department, and I should, but I am worried that she will think me shallow and grasping.

It all comes of shame.

When I was raising young children, I was ashamed that I was raising children and not working.  I knew no one else at that time who had left their professional life so completely behind like I did.* The women I knew who were full time stay at home mothers (and in this day and this area there really are not a great many of us) often had meant to do that.  I sort of fell into it by accident:  because of who our children were, they needed more attention than many, and as I told the Rocket Scientist at the time, lawyers are thick on the ground.  People who did what he did were not.**

Since then, I have been ashamed at my lack of credentials for anything.  I’m not a lawyer, unlike most of my classmates.  Those who are not lawyers have all seemed to go into other fields where they have interesting and varied careers.  I raised children.

But I did do more than entry level work at the Pacific Art League — I went from being a volunteer to running day-to-day operations in two years.  And I did all that by virtue of the exact qualities outlined above.  Need a financial report from a system we’ve only been using for class registrations?  Okay, give me half an hour to learn how to produce that.  Need a room usage report for the past three quarters for each of the classrooms, something the system cannot generate?  Okay, give me a day, I’ll find the relevant statistics and whip them into manageable shape.  Need to coordinate all the classrooms and figure out what fee increases are needed for this quarter?  Not a problem.  Need to prevent a cranky member from yelling at the poor young woman behind the desk? All in a day’s work.  Need a catalog produced?  1200 pieces of promotional material mailed? A membership renewal campaign mapped out and run?  Done. Done. Done.  And much of that time I was working in an organizational environment so toxic that at one point the entire staff (including me) quit in protest.  The entire freaking staff.***

Then there was the Census. I started out as one of the two most junior (of about sixteen) clerks in our department.  By the time we had to bring people in from the field to train them to review questionnaires because we were so backed up, I was given the task of training the newbies how to vet questionnaires because, as my boss said, I was so good at it. We were working on a backlog, and I was handed a huge stack of “adds” to deal with — questionnaires which required special attention — by myself.  I became the second fastest data entry clerk in the department, because I drove myself to learn how to be fast — including learning how to key entries (rather than use drop down menus) from the fastest clerk  in the office.

I was so good that I was sent to another department for a week to work on a database so private that we were told that if we misused it we would not only be fired on the spot but also prosecuted.  When we went to the next phase of the operation, where we had to prepare binders to be sent back out in the field, I was tied with another clerk for the most done, and unlike him, I had no errors. When we were being trained to do this task, I was called out to be the trainee in front of everyone, and at the end of the demonstration, my boss said “We don’t need to QC (quality control) this, because Pat is so freaking good at her job.” I learned the systems well enough that any field supervisor could call in from the field and I could give them any piece of information they needed.  I was once handed a binder and told, “this is a real mess — lots of duplicate and missing entries — look at it, figure it out, and write a report.”  I did it in a couple of hours.

When they cut back to five clerks, they moved the most junior supervisor into being a clerk, and kept four of the other clerks.  I was kept, over many people much more senior than I was, because as the head of the department said when he told me I was going to stay, I “do fantastic work.” [Emphasis his.]†   I ended up doing some tasks that had been previously done by supervisors.

I once told my boss, that had I been hired earlier, I could easily have done his job.  He replied that had I been hired earlier I could easily have done his boss’s job.  So it wasn’t rocket science, or law, and many people would have called the work I did menial:  I handled myself with professionalism and gave my work the same attention I would have given work that had much more prestige.‡

I have a wonderful work ethic.  In five months of work, I only missed two hours of work, in spite of dealing with sometime severe chronic pain from fibromyalgia.  (I missed the two hours because I had a migraine, went home, took some meds, and when it eased up a bit, came back to work.  Remember, I was a clerk. It’s not like I was a salaried professional.)

I am not perfect — no one is — but I learn from my mistakes. I learn from other people’s mistakes.

In short, I am damned good.

Maybe I should give prospective employers a link to this post.

*My social circle certainly did not help: few of them had kids, and only one of them was a stay-at-home-mother, and even she ran a business on the side.  In one memorable, shame-producing interaction, a woman at a party was telling me about the intricacies of the litigation she was currently involved in.  She asked what my practice area was, and I replied that I had done real property, but now was at home raising kids.  “I could never do that,” she replied, and turned without another word and went to talk to someone else.  I wanted the floor to open up and let me fall through.

**And as he has changed through the course of his career, that has become even more true:  he is one of less than ten people in the world who have his exact specialty.

***I came back as an independent contractor mainly because the interim ED convinced me that the organization would be in dire straights if I did not produce the next catalog.  I did, and then left again, until the ED I originally worked for came back from medical leave and hired me on as her Director of Operations (which was really the ED’s designated flak-catcher, a role I handled with grace and dignity).

†A somewhat unnerving coworker insinuated to me that I had been kept on because I was a favorite of one of my bosses, stopping just short of the outrageous suggestion that I had been sleeping with him to protect my job. I mean, he was really cute and everything, but sleeping with coworkers is usually not a good idea and sleeping with management is almost always stupid.  I’m not stupid.

‡When we were trained the first day, the office manager stated that we would be working with people “all of whom are massively overqualified for this job.”  He was right: because of the economy, I ended up working with lawyers trying to pass the bar, web designers whose businesses had taken a hit, bioengineering consultants between gigs, and many other people like them.  In spite of the nature of the work, it was a fun place.