Where Have I Been?

What we're gonna do right here is go back. Way back. Back into time...

The year was 2022. I was finally living the life I believed I was always meant to live. I was young(ish), fine (as hell), making six figures, living in a luxury apartment near downtown Dallas, my friendship business and my man business were both flourishing—your girl was doing her thing.

Then my company hired a new director to oversee my team.

Actually, before I get into that, let me talk about how my job was set up when I was first hired. I was the last hire among a cohort of maybe six new Cybersecurity Consultant hires. Now, I'll admit that I had no idea what all being a consultant entailed when I first started the job. I thought consultants were simply outsourced to other companies to help better their business in whatever way was needed at the time. And technically, that idea wasn't wrong.

What I was unaware of was how, unlike almost every other job in the world, you're not assigned tasks by your manager. You have to actively look for projects, and then you're punished if you don't find enough work. Now, this asinine expectation wouldn't have been that big of a deal if:

1) I received any type of relevant training,

2) I was aware that this expectation of me existed,

3) There was a database of projects available for us to scout,

4) There were enough projects to go around, and

5) My team team had a manager.

Yes, when the six of us were hired, we had no manager. We literally had no idea what we were expected to do. My older, more experienced colleagues were stressed out about this, but I was having the time of my life. I thought we were getting paid to do nothing. I had no idea why the rest of my team was unhappy about that. It turns out, as the only first-time consultant on the team, I was the only fool who was unfamiliar with the whole concept of billable and utilization hours. Unbeknownst to me, despite everything being stacked against us, we were still being held to an unstated standard.

Luckily for me, I was assigned an amazing mentor upon hire. He was so passionate about the work and equally as passionate about teaching me as much as he could. Again, he didn't know I was a first-time consultant, and I didn't know that was important information to divulge. That said, our talks were never about the administrative side of the job, but more so, how to be the most helpful for our clients.

And helpful I was. I made friends with a few other colleagues who took me under their wings and included me in their projects. It didn't take long before I was killing it. My colleagues loved me, and my clients loved me even more.

Then my company hired a new director to oversee my team. Now I can finally speak in detail about this and how it was the genesis of the most tumultuous two years of my life.

This man, at first, seemed to be a good fit; my work style matched his managerial style. Then again, if you've read any of my other blog posts, you'd know that I've never been a good judge of character when it comes to men (more on that in future posts). Anyway, he was chill, we'd meet once or twice a week to discuss what I was working on, and then we'd both go about our days.

That was until he suddenly stopped being chill. I'm pretty sure profits were low and he was being pressured by the powers that be, but I don't care. I still blame him for everything that happened to me from that point forward. Out of nowhere, he began accusing me of not working hard enough. That accusation was baffling because I was clocking in at least 50-60 hours a week and received rave reviews from everybody I worked with. How could he not only tell me I'm not working hard enough, but be inconspicuous and unclear about what he meant by that?

In the span of maybe a month, I went from feeling as though I was working my dream job to being riddled with anxiety over the security of said job. I was miserable. At least three times a week, my director would set up meetings with me just to berate me and tell me that I wasn't good enough.

During one of these meetings, I snapped and told him that maybe I needed to be with another manager because I didn't understand what he wanted from me. When the call ended, I immediately went to the lovely man who hired me to ask for his advice. After hearing my side of the story, he quickly apologized on behalf of the company for me being in the dark about my expectations. He admitted that everyone dropped the ball and from there took his time to clearly explain what the company needed from me.

Still worried about the security of my job after this helpful conversation, I decided to write my boss an email explaining the misunderstanding, taking full accountability, and assuring him that I intend to meet my expectations now that I'm clear on what they are.

He didn't respond. For two weeks following the delivery of that email, I basically begged my colleagues to include me on their projects. Most of them kindly declined because they were also running low on their billable hours and couldn't afford to give any away. At the end of those two weeks, I had received a written warning for not being able to predict and write down my workload for the subsequent work weeks because I didn't have any work to do during those weeks, of which my director was aware.

Two weeks after receiving the written warning (which I refused to sign), I was fired and offered $1,200 in severance. My rent alone was $1,800.

I’m going to end this traumatic, yet juicy, story here. I don't know when I'll have the energy to write part two, but please continue to stick around!