Daily Excerpt: The Book That (Almost) Got Me Fired (James) - Onboarding

  

The Book That (Almost) Got Me Fired by Kelly James is now available in audiobook!

#3 ON AMAZON'S LIST OF HOT NEW RELEASES FOR NEARLY A MONTH

Book description:

You're 52. Divorced. Single mom to a teenaged son and a tween daughter. Happily self-employed but worried about the cost of health insurance, the inevitable impact of perimenopause on your body, and whether you should keep dating a sexy plumber who's sweet and funny but lives an hour away and doesn't seem that into you.

So, after 22 years of fulltime freelancing, you take a day job as a tiny, creaky cog in the corporate American machine where you're decades older than most of your coworkers - and you write about it. The Book That (Almost) Got Me Fired: A Year in Corporate America is an entertaining, midlife memoir that shares what (and what not) to do when you make that corporate leap.

Keywords:
Midlife career change; Corporate culture transition; Workplace memoir; Freelance to corporate; Women in the workplace; Single mom career; Over 50 career switch; Workplace humor; Corporate survival guide; Midlife reinvention; Career transition memoir; Age diversity workplace; Work-life balance; Second career journey; Corporate America satire; Female workplace memoir; Workplace resilience; Career pivot after 50; Self-employment to corporate; Midlife professional growth; Business humor; Millennial work environment

Onboarding

 

The night before I started the job, I couldn’t sleep. I passed out sometime around midnight, woke up about 4:00 a.m., and caught snatches of stress-dream-laden sleep before I finally dragged myself out of bed a little before 6:00 a.m.

I followed my regular routine. I peed, drank a big glass of water (always on a quest to avoid optimal hydration), fed the cat, and cracked open a Diet Mountain Dew. I checked my email, dressed in workout gear. and forced myself to the gym where I banged out four miles on the treadmill, a punishing run that smoothed the sharpest of the knife edges off of my anxiety.

After I showered, I did my hair, applied makeup, and slid into my version of grown-up clothes (a gray-and-black patterned blouse, my favorite black skirt, black tights, and black platform shoes), made a sandwich, and checked on the kids, who were both still asleep, thanks to winter break. Ryan would be in charge of his sister for the day.

My commute took 17 minutes, consistent with the test run I’d done the week before. I called Frank from the foyer, and he met me at the door, ushering me into the office, and walked me to my cubicle, diagonally from his and three seats away from the window. I smiled and waved at Roger, met Evie, the editor, who sat behind me, and Daniel, a good-looking 20-something sales guy, who sat to my right.

My name and “Content Specialist” hung on a plastic placard in the corner of my cube, slightly askew. I tried not to take that as a bad omen. A Digital Edge T-shirt, coffee mug, and backpack sat in a neat pile under a sticky note that read, “WELCOME, KELLY!” I went to log onto my Mac only to discover that I had left my datebook, with my Digital Edge password written neatly on the inside cover, at home. I called and woke up Haley, who located it, and I logged on to my work computer for the first time ever.

I already had email! Most were from Frank, about how to request time off in the company’s HR software and notes about Digital Edge style preferences. He and I met in Yahoo, one of the company’s three conference rooms and the only one without windows. “You know, this used to be the room we used to fire employees,” Frank said in passing.

What to say to that? “Okay?” I managed.

Frank then ticked the list on his mini legal pad, listing what was expected of me. I was to be on time every morning. If for some reason I was going to be late, I was to text him and let him know. I could keep my phone out on my desk, but it had to be on mute. If I took a call, I was to step out into the hallway outside the main office or the “cafeteria,” which was just a large room with microwaves, a large refrigerator and several long tables with chairs. “I realize that we all have our phones nearby at all times,” he said. “I realize you’re going to be texting, but be mindful of how you do that. I had one guy who had his feet up and was texting on his phone when one of the partners walked by. That’s not a good look for my team.”

Frank continued along these kinds of expectations. “Your shift is 8:00 to 4:30, with half an hour for lunch,” he said. “And 8:00 means you should be at your desk at 8:00 and ready to work, not coming at 8:00 and then grabbing coffee and getting set up.” He continued in this vein while I listened and nodded.

After a few minutes, though, I held up my hand. “I understand all of this,” I said. “I realize that you work with Millennials and maybe you have to tell them all this. But you don’t have to tell me. I’m a grown-up.” In grown-up clothes, I almost added.

Frank shook his head. “It’s not just Millennials that I have to have this conversation with. I’ve had 40-year-olds who couldn’t show up for work on time,” he said. “One guy was late four out of five mornings his first week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. He blamed the traffic coming out from the city—well, you knew where you lived when you took this job.”

“I can’t imagine,” I said. And I couldn’t. Who was late to work the first week of a new job? After I spoke with Frank, I met with Sean, bearded guy in his mid-30s who was wearing a T-shirt and jeans like most of his coworkers. Sean used the screen in the Google conference room to demonstrate the company’s CMS, or Content Management System. I’d never had to use a CMS before, but it seemed to function like Facebook—people sent you messages through it, “tagging” you to notify you of tasks—but I came out of the meeting without a complete understanding of how to use it. I could figure that out on my own.

After my meeting with Sean, Frank walked me through the office to meet the various employees. He said a lot of names, and I shook a lot of hands. Mostly with Millennials. Mostly dudes. Some stood up when they met me (good job, Moms!). Some barely made eye contact. All shook my hand, but some had sweaty palms or weak, soft grips (I squashed the urge to correct them on the spot). Men outnumbered women about three to one, and the average age appeared to be mid 20s, though I met a few who were clearly in their 30s or older. The overriding work look was jeans paired with a sweatshirt or T-shirt, and I realized I was overdressed.

When I returned to my desk, I had a few more emails, along with a list from Frank of clients I was responsible for creating outlines for. I started plowing through the list, reviewing client websites, absorbing information, and trying not to think unproductive thoughts like, “How many more years can I do this?” and “Have I made a terrible mistake?”
            But no signs pointed to the latter. I read up on the dozens of clients I’d be working on, and I could feel my anxious brain start to fire and absorb and plot. I’d be writing about ball bearings. Flower essences. High-end trips to Antarctica to see the Northern Lights. Custom athletic socks. Criminal law. Dentistry. Property management.

I settled into my comfortable chair and chose a client to start with. The company sold and repaired compressed air systems. I was to create the outline for a landing page (a page that a company’s home page links to and one that is visible to Google) that highlighted the fact that the client serves clients in the oil and gas industry and included the relevant keywords. This, I’d discover later, was a common SEO tactic—create a “hub page” for industries or specialties or locations, and then list the relevant industries or specialties or locations below it, creating landing pages for each.

The keywords for this particular page were: oil and gas compressed air services, oil and gas compressed air management, oil and gas compressed air system engineering, oil and gas compressed air automation, oil and gas compressed air system audit, oil and gas compressed air systems design. Keywords, I knew from earlier experience with SEO, were the phrases that potential customers might type in when looking for a company to, in this case, meet their oil and gas compressed air services needs.

After reading through the client’s website, I Googled phrases like “how is compressed air used in the oil and gas industry” and found some background that gave me a jumping-off point. I then created a brief outline, asking that the writer “create a new web page explaining that ABC Company serves clients in the oil and gas industry. Describe why/how compressed air systems are used in the oil and gas industry and the benefits of compressed air systems from ABC Company,” and included some links as resources for the writer. Then, I wrote several more outlines for pages for different industries like agriculture, energy, and food and beverage. I still wasn’t quite certain about how compressed air was used in these industries, but I didn’t have to be. It would be the writer’s job to figure it out.

            The next client was B2C, or business to consumer, not business to business (B2B), and was easier to tackle. The company sold one product, a “cooler rest”—a metal backrest that hooked on to a full-size cooler, turning the cooler into a more comfortable seat. The client’s homepage was thin on content, with only about 50 words. To please Google, the page would need at least 450 words of crawlable content, so the existing content would have to be expanded.

I’d done enough copywriting that I knew the difference between features (attributes of a product or service and benefits) and the reason why someone might opt to purchase it. Both were essential for compelling copy, as was a CTA, or call to action, that spurred a customer to make a purchase. I created several more outlines for additional pages aimed at hunters, tailgaters, and boaters.

While the features and benefits of the product remained the same, the challenge for the writer would be to take that info and tweak it for difference audiences. I’d done this for years as a freelancer, writing about the same subject from different angles for different markets. This kind of “reslanting” let me maximize my research time and helped boost my income as well.

The next client was a retailer of ball bearings. We were adding product category pages, highlighting the different types of ball bearings the company sold; this particular site was an e-com, or e-commerce site, which meant you could buy directly through the site itself. With zero knowledge about ball bearings, I started with background reporting and wound up on Wikipedia. I’d soon spend more time on Wiki getting up to speed on previously-unknown-to-me subjects and industries than I could have imagined.

I’d not known that there were a slew of different types of bearings. Spherical bearings, Angular contact bearings. Ball and roller bearings. Mounted unit bearings. The first outline was for a page for spherical roller bearings with keywords: spherical roller bearings, spherical roller bearing types, double row spherical roller bearing, spherical roller thrust bearing, self- aligning spherical roller bearing, axial spherical roller bearing.

Now, I had questions. Some of the keywords were singular, not plural. Did that matter? Could I add an “s” to a keyword? Could self-aligning have a hyphen, or was I supposed to leave it out for Google? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know as I had implied in my interview that I knew more about SEO than I in fact did. Quite a bit more.

I posed the question to Frank, who told me about “stop words,” or words that Google didn’t “count.” That meant if your keyword was “plumber Naperville,” you could write “plumber in Naperville,” “plumber near Naperville,” or “plumber for Naperville.” As for whether I could make a word plural? “That’s a question for SEO,” he said, indicating the group of guys who sat on the opposite of the room.

Yes, but who from SEO? I looked at my seating chart, trying to determine whom I should ask. I decided on Seth, who sat by in the same six-pack as Sean. Seth told me that typically the search volume was the same for a term whether it was singular or plural, and that a hyphen operated like a stop word, meaning that Google didn’t “read” it. I thanked him and walked back to my desk, recognizing that I’d learned something new today.

I finished the day feeling accomplished. I hadn’t embarrassed myself. I hadn’t succumbed to the giant bowl of M&Ms in the nook. I’d written the drafts of a bunch of deadlines and had participated in more meetings in one day than I had in several years of freelancing. I left the office thinking, “I can do this.”

The second day I took the outline information I’d created in a Word document and spent several hours adding all of the outlines I’d written for my first client into Excel, a program I’d only used once or twice before. I had to move my cursor into the right cell in the spreadsheet to be able to enter information into it, and it took a while to get the hang of it. Finally, I finished four outlines for my compressed air systems client and wound up deleting the entire spreadsheet. I tried to recover it, but it was gone.

“Shit,” I muttered. I spent a few more minutes trying to “undo” in Excel before I gave up and walked across the office to Sean’s desk. So far, he was the most techie person I’d met. I explained what had happened and asked if he could help me recover it.

Sean was puzzled. “You’re not supposed to be using that spreadsheet yet,” he said. “I haven’t finished setting it up for you.”

Frank had shown me where my spreadsheet would live on the server, and I’d found it that morning, opened it, and started filling it out (I mean, populating it) with my first outline. Then, I had deleted my morning’s work and the template. “Oh, crud,” I said. “I’m sorry! I didn’t realize that.”

Sean looked at me. “I’ll let you know when it’s set up,” he said.

“Okay! Sounds good! Sorry again!” I scuttled back to my desk.
            So much for my idea of showing initiative. How had I managed to delete something I wasn’t even supposed to use yet? I went back to my Word document instead and continued working on outlines while I contemplated my mistake.

I marinated in my anxiety for a while before I got caught up in outlines again and was distracted by writing outlines about reclaimed wood furniture and stairs, basketball camps, and aircraft refurbishing. I went for a walk at lunchtime, relishing the opportunity to get out from under the fluorescent lights, and the rest of the day passed relatively quickly.

By the third day, though, I was beginning to wonder how long it would take before I felt like an employee, not like someone playing the part of an employee. I’d made the mistake of calculating my hourly rate that afternoon and realized that each day I sat at the office I was making about $160. I’d redone the math three times. Just $160? For an entire day’s work? That couldn’t be right. As a freelancer, my daily nut, or the number I tried to average ranged from $250 to $400, but I typically worked four to six hours in a day, with a goal of making $75-100/hour.

So, $20/hour was … demoralizing. You didn’t take the job for the hourly rate, I reminded myself on the way home. It’s health insurance, remember? And security.

I understood that I was trading time for money. That’s what anyone who works does. What would sweeten the deal? Well, making more money, but that was off the table for the moment. What if I could work from home one day a week? Could I dream of two? That would give me some flexibility back, and some freedom. Why should I sit at my cubicle all day when could stretch out on my favorite corner of the couch, my feet on my ottoman, my cat on my lap, and a Netflix British murder series running in the background?

The next day I headed out at lunch for a 20-minute walk. It was sunny day in the 40s—a rarity for Chicago in January. “It’s day four,” I said to Polly, stepping carefully over a patch of mud on the sidewalk. “And no one has given me a plaque, award, trophy, or anything. What’s up with that?”
            “What? What’s wrong with them? Maybe you’ll get it tomorrow,” Polly answered. “So, what’s it like?”

“It’s … okay,” I said. “I realized I’m trading my time for money. And not much money.” I filled her in on my discouraging realization from the day before. “So, I can either make more money, which isn’t going to happen, or I can spend less time on the office. I’m going to work on the latter.”

“Sounds smart.” We chatted for a couple of minutes about her current book project and her hopes for it. That led us to talking about goals. I told her that the previous year, when I’d written down my goals (as I did every year), I’d included “being open to anything work-wise, even a 9-5 job.” I’d forgotten that I’d written that until I’d revisited my goals over Christmas break. The universe, apparently, had not.

“Do you believe that?” I asked Polly. “That I manifested the job? Or at least helped to?”

“Hell, yeah! I always say, when you know the ‘why,’ the universe will provide the ‘how,’” she said.

“Well, I thought my ‘why’ was health insurance,” I said. “Now I’m starting to realize it’s about managing my anxiety. I may be many things right now, but I’m not anxious.” Discontented. Vaguely out of sorts. Somewhat bored. But some hours passed relatively quickly, like when I became absorbed in what I was reading, slurping down Wikipedia sites like smoothies.

Writing the outline for a bottling manufacturer, I stumbled onto “bottling,” the term for when concert-goers pelt band members with, yes, bottles, and other items. Who knew? Performers ranging from Blink 182 to Justin Bieber to the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been bottled in the last decade. Researching custom socks for track and field athletes led to me reading about Marion Jones, who admitted to doping seven years after the fact and had her Olympic medals stripped as a result.

I loved to learn, and the job let me do that. And I was finding a pleasure in having a place to go every day. In kissing the kids goodbye and heading to Work. Even in pouring the first cup of coffee of the day into my wide-mouthed Digital Edge mug. I eavesdropped on the sales guys who sat around me and started to deepen my knowledge about what the company actually did and how the sales guys pitched and closed clients.

“He thought our web design capabilities weren’t robust enough for his needs,” said Marcus, the vice president of sales, referring to a client he hadn’t been able to close. “So, he’s using Square Space instead.”

I listened, absorbed, and starting using the lingo. I used the word onboarding. I used the word metrics. I used the word populate. I realized that working might let me embrace my inner geek.

Because words are my thing. I like phrases like cognitive dissonance, woefully underemployed, and actively miserable (as opposed to passively miserable). Words matter. I have favorite quotes (just ask my kids), and at the beginning of every year, I choose a word to represent my overarching intention for the next 12 months. My word last year had been open while the word for 2019 was deliberate. Both the adjective and the verb. I wanted to be more conscious about my decisions and to consider all of my options before making a decision. I tended to react emotionally, instead of intellectually, and I wanted to change that if I could.

 

Top Ten Biz Speak Terms Heard Within the First Week (Thanks, Sales Guys!)

 

1.     Onboarding

2.     Metrics

3.     Populate

4.     Conversion

5.     Migrate

6.     Platform

7.     Deliverables

8.     SOW (statement of work)

9.     Bandwidth

10.  Metadata

 

With just a week into my tenure, Frank called me into a meeting. He told me then that the company was going to triple the number of clients that it transferred to Digital Plus. Over a time span of the next two months.

I took a breath and tried to be deliberate. I used another biz-speak term I’d heard a lot recently—metrics, as in, “what metrics will I be measured on?” (Note that in nearly 53 years, I had never uttered the word metrics. I hadn’t even written it. I had said metric, as in the metric system, which the U.S. briefly flirted with back in the 70s. But metrics, plural? Nope. January 9, 2019 was the first time. Ever.)

Frank’s answer was brief. “Volume, quality, and efficiency.” When I asked Frank to define “volume,” he cautioned me about worrying about specific numbers. My position was the first ever at the company, so there were no parameters to measure my progress against. Anyone else would have thought, great! Instead, I worried. How would I know if I was doing a good job if I couldn’t measure myself against a standard?

As a freelancer, that was easy—the amount of money I was making. If I was making $60,000, $80,000, or even $100,000, I had a daily nut—a specific amount I needed to make every day, five days a week. When I hit that number, I knew that I was on target. I could track my volume, but how would I know whether it was enough? And how to measure quality and efficiency? The former was subjective; the latter again required some kind of metrics (!!!) to calculate same.

 I decided to keep track of my own production. I could then measure my own volume, and I might be able to determine how efficient I was over time. As for quality? I was less concerned about that as each outline was like writing a recipe. You named the page, provided the URL, what type of page it was (i.e., a home page, a landing page, a location page, a blog post), provided the keywords, wrote a summary of what the page was to contain, and provided resources. As long as I included the correct ingredients (i.e., keywords and resources) and my summary was clear and easy to understand, the recipe worked. The quality of the content itself was up to the writer who would create it, not me.

A few days later, I stopped by Sarah’s desk after 3:00, when Frank left for the day. Sarah sat diagonally behind me, at a different six-pack, and had started a week after I did, but I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her. I’d noticed that she wore cool cat’s-eye glasses, colorful scarves, and was a few years older than me—a rarity at the company. I hoped we might have something in common.

“I know who you are!” she said, pointing at me. “I’ve read your books. I’ve freelanced, too.”

“Wow!” I grinned. “Thank you!”

I never got tired of these fan moments, though they were more likely to happen at the writers’ conference in New York that I attended every year. My books on freelancing hadn’t been bestsellers but were midlist titles that still sold and attracted readers who wanted to make a living as full-time freelancers.

“So, what happened? Did you just get burned out on freelancing?” she asked. I liked that kind of directness—I’d learn later it was the reporter in her—and was surprised by it. Possibly because no one at Digital Edge, other than Frank, had bothered to ask why I’d wound up here. What for me was a huge shift in priorities and lifestyle was of no interest to anyone at work.

I wasn’t ready to be honest with her. “It’s not that I was burned out,” I said. “This seemed like a good fit for me and having decent health insurance is a huge plus. And it’s three miles from my house, which I can’t beat! What about you?”

“Oh, I needed to get out of the house,” she said, tucking one foot under as she settled back in her chair. “I needed a reset. I wasn’t doing that much,” and as she continued, I had that familiar flash of envy I experienced when I met a woman who didn’t have to work.

For years I’d eyed the fit, toned moms in yoga pants who sat at Peet’s sipping coffee and chatting for hours with apparently nothing they had to rush off to. I’d envied that kind of freedom even as I realized I didn’t necessarily want it.

Work gave me meaning. Purpose. I liked the satisfaction of accomplishing assignments, of finishing a story, of turning in a particularly tricky book chapter. It had never been hard for me to make a deadline because missing one would not only cause me an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance (having never done so as a freelancer) but because missing one would also deny me of the pleasure of meeting said deadline.

I thrived on to-do lists, and on the idea of making progress, and tracking that progress — even if it was only the progress of meeting that day’s goals. Meeting my daily nut was one way of doing that, as was accomplishing whatever I needed to do for the day.

Sarah had been an editor for publications including The Wall Street Journal, and more recently, Patch, a hyper-local community website. “So, you know all about the Associated Press Stylebook, then,” I said, admitting that I was more familiar with Chicago Manual of Style, the stylebook most book publishers I worked with prefer.

“I’m brushing up on it now,” she said, tapping the style guide on her book. “There is a lot to learn here.” We talked briefly about her position there as editor. She was given a list of pieces to edit—landing pages, blog posts, content assets (off-site infographics and guest blogs that were published on other websites, not the clients’)–called the “queue” by Frank every morning. As she edited them, she turned them in to Frank, who then sent them on to the account manager, or AM, who shared them with the client for feedback. If the client approved a piece of content, it was then sent on the web developer who uploaded the page to the client’s site, or to the content marketing specialist (or CMS, not to be confused with the company’s other CMS, the content management system), who looked for a website to publish it as a backlink.

Backlinks were a sometimes-overlooked aspect of building an SEO campaign. A backlink is the term for when another site links to yours, driving traffic there. Google considers the number of backlinks a site has, and the quality of those backlinks (i.e., are the sites legitimate websites or have they been created simply as “link farms”), and takes that into account when determining how high your site will rank on a search.

After I finished chatting with Sarah, I headed back to my desk, and checked my personal email to discover the bill for Haley’s after-school care was due. I logged on to the site, paid the fee, and then had a surge of money anxiety. I was going to be making barely enough to cover my bills, and childcare for Haley was one cost I had underestimated.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. This was how I got into an anxious spiral. I chanted one of my abundance mantras. “There is enough money. There always has been enough money. There will always be enough money.” When I remembered, I started my day with affirmations, most of which centered around trying to attract what I wanted (meaningful work, enough money, fewer intrusive thoughts about money or whether I was a decent mom or whether Walt and I had a future together, you name it). While my spiritual beliefs were never crystalline, I did believe that focusing on good things was likely to attract good things and that focusing on my worries never helped. I mentally stroked myself back into a place of, if not grace, slight contentment, and resolved to continue what I was doing — monitoring my spending and not making myself nuts about the money going out the door.

In the meantime, I’d continue with my deep breaths — and hope not to breathe so deeply I wound up passing out.

 

The Corporate Newbie’s Cheat Sheet: Starting Your New Job (Yay!)

 

You’re about to start your new job. Woo hoo! You’re likely nervous, anxious, worried about making a good first impression. Here’s some advice for your first day.

First off, do a trial run of what your commute will look like, and give yourself plenty of time to get to the office a few minutes early. Choose an outfit that makes you feel confident, smart, attractive. (Because you are! You got this!). Get a blowout the day before, or get your nails done. You want to walk in feeling smashing.

I also suggest bringing some emergency snacks in your purse. A protein bar, a bag of nuts, a banana. I wasn’t used to sitting at a desk all day when my kitchen was ten feet away if I got hungry. Don’t let your first day be spent hangry because you didn’t have enough for breakfast.

You’ll meet a lot of people your first few days. Shake hands. Make eye contact. Smile. Ask people what they do. Then at your desk, write down their names (on a seating chart, if you have one) and any information they gave you. It will help you get people’s names down, which will help you acclimate more quickly (hopefully!).

Look for the helpers, as Mr. Rodgers liked to say. Note who seems genuinely welcoming and who tells you to come to him or her with questions, because you will have them. And if you can’t figure out how to do something, Google that shit before you ask your boss or anyone else for help. But don’t flail around for hours when a quick explanation from your coworker may give you the answer you need.

Finally, recognize that your first few days, or likely weeks, you’re going to feel awkward and unsure and sometimes stupid. That’s normal. It’s part of starting a new job. Suck it up and make sure you give yourself plenty of downtime at home, if possible. In a few weeks, you’ll settle in and much of what you may be struggling with (like finding documents on the company server or figuring out how to contact your company’s tech support department) will be automatic.

 

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