by Mike Madrid
First let me clarify one thing. I like to work. Or rather, I like working on things that I enjoy. One of my friends thinks it’s funny that I describe a good day for me as being one where I get a lot done. Chalk it up to coming from a working class background, I guess. I like being productive, and have been called an obsessive multi-tasker by some people in my life.
So, when I say that I hated my job, most people assume that I’m lazy, or don’t like to be told what to do. Neither is the case. I was lucky enough to have a great job in my chosen profession, advertising. And all of the things that people find abhorrent about advertising — the image manipulation, the objectification, the slickness, the artifice, the deception –none of those things bothered me, I actually like that stuff. And in many ways I was an ideal employee. I rarely called in sick, I worked long hours, and I always went the extra length to get things done well. And I was very good at my job.
No, I hated my job because it ended up being unhealthy. It made me feel like shit.
When I first started working in advertising, I was fresh out of college, and had that “first job” rush. I was finally independent, making money, and feeling like I was entering the adult world. I got into the whole work routine that made me feel I was finally a grown up — the morning commute, the office camaraderie and gossip, lunch breaks with new friends, drinks on a Friday night. I had a cool boss, and I worked advertising and saw my work in print, while a lot of my friends were toiling away at crap jobs.
Early on in my career, a sedate, 40ish copywriter gave me some sage advice. “Don’t ever assume that they’re looking out for you,” she said. The “they” in question was the corporation, management: “the man”. Young and idealistic, I figured that she was just a crunchy, Berkeley intellectual type who was overly suspicious of corporate America. I would soon learn that she may as well been the oracle of Delphi.
Shortly after this sibyl’s ominous pronouncement, I saw the ugly side of corporate politics. My cool boss was forced out, and I was asked, as I would be many more times in my career, to “step up” and to take on his responsibilities until a replacement was found. So, because my immigrant family background taught me not to shirk responsibility, I said yes. So, you can imagine the rest — I worked round the clock, got completely stressed out, lost sleep, abused my body, and met every crazy deadline. For many months. And through it all, I thought that my hard work would be recognized, and rewarded. If this were a Michael J. Fox movie from the 80’s, as I liked to imagine myself in at the time, I would have gotten a big promotion and an office at the end of the story. Instead, I got to keep my job. And, I got a new boss who, instead of telling me how happy she was to have me on her team, informed me that she didn’t understand what I did. Thud. That was my first glimpse behind the curtain to see how things really worked.
Some time after that, I switched jobs to go to work for a larger organization. Now I thought I was really in the big time. I had my own office and a staff of designers, it was a very late 80’s success fantasy come true. We were doing high profile work with A-list photographers and models, getting great press, the awards were piling up. My new boss was incredibly smart, funny, and larger than life, sort of an Auntie Mame character. I learned a lot from her in short period of time, especially how to be mean. She had a reputation as a bitch, probably as a result of being one of the only female executives in our company, and she drove that concept of managing through hostility into all of us. Keep people at arm’s length at all times, never let them see your weakness. It was at that point that work started to be less enjoyable, and more like entering a snake pit every day. Or a prison.
The “fun” workdays were definitely over. My boss constantly baited her managers to be at each other’s throats, to “stay hungry”. I suddenly began to feel suspicious of my peers at all times, defensive when pressed for information, aggressive when approached with requests. No one seemed to be that interested in developing ideas or doing good work. The people who actually came up with new ideas wound up getting fired, and the sycophants who stroked the boss’ ego got promotions. Those of us who worked “downstairs” and did real work felt like we were the underclass, the grunts whose opinions weren’t really respected. The day before every company holiday, we would still be working away to meet deadlines, while the elite slipped out early for ski trips or weekends at the cabin. “Same old tired faces around here every year”, my friend Marlene would say as her eyes surveyed the galley slaves. But we also felt like our jobs were more secure than the more privileged moths that flew closer to the boss’ flame. She always picked someone to be on the outs with, and that person would be a department pariah, like a witch in the Salem village stocks. While I always managed to avoid this position of shame, I felt about as valued. My annual performance review was summed up in one line from my boss. “I appreciate that you take care of things that I never need to know about, darling,” she’d say, as she slid a piece of paper across the desk with my raise written on it and shooed me out of her office. End of discussion.
You might ask why I would stick around in an environment like this. Well, I was good at my job, I didn’t have any other great plan for my life at this point, and the bonuses and stock options that they would throw onto your prison mess hall tray made up for some of the lousy treatment. I also liked working for a big company, because it gave me an easy to understand identity for when I met people. I didn’t have to explain who I was; my job could define me. I thought that I still had the option to leave someday and figure out what I wanted to do, but I didn’t realize that the mental traps were already in place. When I hit my 30’s, I started feeling like I needed some security, some direction in my directionless life. So, I bought a house, and that’s when I actually realized that the shackles had snapped shut on me. All of those thoughts of what else I might want to do with my life were slowly swept away by plans for remodeling bathrooms, refinishing floors, and mortgage payments. I thought that if I didn’t have the ideal work life, I’d make a home life for myself that was just the way I wanted it. My job became a means to an end, and I saw myself as more of an average Joe, a working stiff. By day I clamped the shackles on and did my work, and by night went home to a cell of my own design.
The other reason that I stayed was a bit more insidious. There was an omnipresent attitude, maybe even a philosophy, that everyone was “lucky” to work at our company. The message that we got was that none of us were really all that talented or smart, so we should be grateful that we were allowed to skate by and keep our highly desirable jobs. And the best way to keep your job was to not make waves, don’t complain, and keep your trap shut, stay under the radar. NEVER talk to human resources, never let anyone know what happens behind closed doors. The threat was that if we left, no one else would hire us, because we weren’t great prospects. This constant chipping away at one’s morale kept you locked in that job, toiling away in your cell. And that’s what it did to me.
So this is what my life had become, and I didn’t question it. And when Auntie Mame flew the coop, and her minions followed, I got a new boss. He was frighteningly smart, driven, and had incredibly high standards. He had a very intense personality, some might say…difficult. It was the dawn of the 90’s megabrand era, and he raised the stakes and decided that we would do work on a much higher, global level. He actually took an interest in me, saw me as untapped potential. My new boss wanted to hear my ideas, gave me more responsibility, threw challenges at me that helped me to grow and learn new things. I became a decision maker on high profile projects, I traveled to New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo on a regular basis. And I was miserable.
OK, so now some people will think that I’m just a complainer. People outside of the prison walls would always say that I must have such a fun job, all those happy young people, and I got to wear jeans to work. But if you’ve never been in these kinds of job environments, you don’t understand that it’s constant bloodsucking. You come into the office in the morning, you jump on that treadmill, and you never what time you’ll get off. You are in the hot seat all day, and you have no idea what time that day will end. I barely had time to go to the odd dentist appointment, so forget about making plans for a movie, or dinner, or a class after work. The day is a constant avalanche of voicemails and e-mails and meetings, all bringing a flood of new unreasonable demands. The only message that you get is MORE, MORE, MORE, NOT ENOUGH! Not fast enough, not cheap enough, not good enough, not pretty enough, not clever enough. The better you do at your job, the harder the next assignment will be. “You’re only as good as your last project,”people would smugly say. If you do your job well, the company seems to want to see what your saturation level will be. How much more can they throw at you before you can’t handle it anymore, and the cracks start to show? Your peers can’t wait to see you fall from grace. Even when you would do a good, even a great job, the only thing that drew focus was the one thing that wasn’t perfect. It could be the most minute detail on a major campaign, but that would be the only thing that you’d hear about. No congratulations, just get it right next time.
People in our department had a hard time handling the pressure of my new boss’ demanding nature. We had tears in the office on a daily basis, someone always freaking out because they couldn’t maintain the pace. My boss wasn’t a real “people person, so he wanted me to be the Evita to his Juan Peron, the Leni Riefenstahl to his Adolf, and explain to the uninitiated why they had to follow in my footsteps and adopt his new way of working. And if I faltered, my boss would talk about me behind my back to my peers. “Is Madrid losing it?” All of this, on top of the mountain of work, became too much to handle. It got so intense that I went to the doctor to get an x-ray because my chest pains had me convinced I had lung cancer. Turned out it was just stress. I was working crazy hours to pay for a house that I only saw under the dark of night. I checked voicemail at nights and on weekends, called in from vacation, just in case my boss left me a message screaming about something I had done wrong. I dreaded getting the call to come to his office, because it meant that more work would be piled on. And if it wasn’t the workload, it was the mindfucks. “You’re not trying hard enough. Your team isn’t good enough. You’re not doing enough. You’re too focused on the details. You’re not focusing enough on the details. You’re not up on the latest thing. You’re not good enough.”
For me, the walls went up as a way to cope with this. If I had a mean streak in me before, I gave myself over to it completely. A hard persona was like a rampart to keep the floodwaters away. I turned away requests with a withering gaze. My acid tongue spit out nasty remarks about a shoe, a haircut, an ill-fitting garment that didn’t meet my high standards, and that was how I maintained order. I gave people nicknames that became a trademark of my mean identity. Everyone wondered what I called them behind their backs, fearing it would be as cruel as some of my other sobriquets — Midget, Fatso, Down’s Syndrome, Hate-Face, Sex Dwarf, Skeleton. The list went on and on. My famous line as I stalked the design studio was “Who do I have to fuck around here to get some work done?” My reputation as a hardass grew, and people kept their distance. One of my bosses referred to me as a “horrible little man.” Within my work prison, I had built my own fortress to put myself into solitary confinement: a monster in a Brooks Brothers gingham shirt. And when the weekend came, my incarceration continued. I was so burned out, my head was always so filled with all of the things that I needed to do at work, that there was no more room for me. I would sit on the couch on a Saturday morning and stare into space, unable to come up with anything I wanted to do for myself. I was traveling so much, I knew what to do, where to eat, where to shop in New York or London, but I’d lost touch with my hometown. “They” had won. I was a prisoner 24/7.
The thing about working in a corporation is that it is often like living in a country that is constantly overrun by war. One regime establishes power, and the citizens try to rebuild their lives under that new leader’s rule for a while. Then, that regime is overthrown, and a new one takes over, with new dictates and ideologies. And often, when that new regime comes into power, the people left behind are punished for having obeyed the previous leader’s orders. When my demanding, difficult boss was forced out, the new boss treated me like I had been a Nazi collaborator. “Why did you go along with everything he said if you knew it was wrong?” Once again, all of my hard work didn’t pay off, as the new regime swept in, with a new set of hangers-on, and restructured my job. Now it was back to no more travel, not as much decision making, just make your people get their work done, and we’ll tell you when we need something. A friend compared the structure of our department to Robert Altman’s movie Gosford Park, because there was a privileged group that gave all of the orders to the staff. She added that I was like the Helen Mirren character, who managed the household staff. But one ursine designer had a different opinion. “You’re not even Helen Mirren,” he said, “you’re just the big fat cook.”
I always noticed that I felt more like myself — who I thought I was — when I was on vacation. Out of that environment. I never actually had time to see anything when I traveled for work, so one year I went to Paris for my birthday in April, and I finally made it to the Louvre. And there, surrounded by these masterpieces of art, I actually felt happier than I had been in a long time. For a few hours, I felt like myself again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was at my lowest point. Later that year, I was in New York for New Year’s Eve, and as I was walking out of Barney’s, I heard The Theme From Mahogany. And at that moment, Diana Ross summed it all up for me-
Do you know where you’re going to
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t like what I was seeing, and I was miserable. I was 40 pounds overweight, and I had pains in my arm that had me convinced that I was going to have a heart attack. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, and I looked like Danny Aiello (who is a good actor and I’m sure is a nice person, but not what I wanted to look like). I couldn’t concentrate on anything; I didn’t even know what I liked anymore. I was bitter, lonely, angry, and had no personal life. I heard things come out of my mouth in a voice I didn’t even recognize. Creatively, I had nothing to show for myself. I’d let my job drain me of all of my energy, and worst of all, I’d lost my confidence that I even had any good ideas. All I had to show for the last few years of hard work and traveling was a great collection of sweaters, suede shoes and handkerchiefs. I had to get out.
And so I began to plot my escape. But I couldn’t just walk out. Besides the monetary considerations, my doubts had forged chains that kept me in that prison. What would I do if I left? Was my current situation so bad that it was unbearable? Was I expecting too much out of life? I had become spoiled by traveling to New York, Tokyo and London and staying in trendy, expensive hotels, going to the Golden Globe Awards, and buying expensive clothes. And loath as I was to admit it, I still wanted some sort of validation, some acceptance from my superiors. The fetters that I had placed on myself would keep me there for another 5 years. Like an inmate who spends years digging a tunnel to freedom, I began to look for a way out. And in the meantime I got myself back in shape. Physically at least. The confidence took a while longer to come back.
New regimes came and went, and I was asked to pick up the pieces in between, to “step up” and fill the void while a new leader was found, time and time again. I had gone as far up the corporate ladder as I could go without selling that last bit of my soul that I still held on to. One of my superiors told me that I could become a vice president if I showed more leadership potential. Hmmm, let’s see. Over the years, I had a rogue’s gallery of managers, from whom I learned nothing about leadership. Two had personality disorders, another had OCD, another refused to speak to me. One was manipulative, one had a drinking problem, one took personal cell phone calls in the middle of meetings, and lastly, one was a fraud. So I had a lot of great role models. At a meeting for executives only, a corpulent finance VP told us all how well the company was doing and how everyone in management had the opportunity to amass substantial personal wealth. In the next breath, he told us how we needed to tell our employees that they were getting small annual salary increases that year. If that was leadership, maybe I wasn’t right for the job. When our company “intranet” stated that if you were not getting the leadership that you needed from your boss, that you should take the initiative to find your own mentor, I was stunned. Basically the company was saying that it was not taking responsibility for hiring bad managers, and that everyone was on their own. Now there wasn’t even artifice that the company was looking after it’s employees. Maybe I wasn’t lucky to be working here, maybe I was actually better than this.
So I bided my time, and waited for a sign. In the meantime, I tried to do a great job. Up for any challenge, I still had this need to be able to come in and save the day, solve any problem, prove how valuable I was. They said I was too mean, I became Mr. Cooperative. I tried to be a better boss, a better business partner, a better employee. But it didn’t really matter. I was all about the work, and very few others seemed to be anymore. Suddenly everyone had an MBA, and work became theoretical. My days became an endless string of meetings about strategies, brand positioning, and briefs. When I tried to bring things back to the real world and talk about actual work, I was treated like a relic from a bygone era. It felt like everyone was playing this big game called “OFFICE”, where you acted like you were at work, but got nothing done. It all seemed like a farce to me. Most of my friends had left, and all I had were prison friends.
Prison friends at a job are the ones that always are looking for a bit of gossip, who want to sit in your office and speculate on how soon everyone was going to be laid off, and with whom you can bitterly down cocktails with at the end of another humiliating week. You were told that you were in a supportive environment, when in reality, every day was a treacherous ordeal. A friend of mine described a meeting of presenting new work to upper management as “dinner with the Borgias”. Everyone was more concerned with company politics that they were about the quality of our work. It was all backstabbing and manipulation and plotting people’s downfalls to get a promotion. They could say that I was too cynical, but I felt like the “powers that be” knew that I could see through all the bullshit, and that was why I wouldn’t go any further up the ladder. And I was fine with that, because at this point I didn’t really care. It was not a club that I wanted to belong to. I got to work later and later every day, I could barely muster the energy to fake it. First thing in the morning, I would check my computer to see how many back-to-back meetings I had been scheduled for. I felt like I was suffocating.
And just when I thought I would be sentenced to Tartarus for eternity, hope came in the most unlikely form. I got a new boss who was a perky efficiency expert, a problem solver, and a complete fraud. And she turned out to be the answer to my prayers for liberation. She came up with a new job description for me that completely drained away any creativity from my position. In her vision I should be looking at spreadsheets, creating schedules, and upgrading the computer systems. And in the moment that she excitedly presented her new job description, I saw hope. Because, I saw the cell door open. Now I could go to my surgically enhanced human resources representative and tell her that my new job description no longer fit my job skills. This job didn’t suit me anymore. My sentence was ended, and I could leave.
In the end it was so easy to be released from my prison. People were sad to see me leave, because at least I had always been honest. When asked why I was leaving, I had this simple response, “I can make myself feel pretty shitty about myself on my own, I don’t need someone else to do it for me everyday”. When they asked what I was going to do with myself, I gave an answer that sounded so Northern Californa, but was accurate. “I want to try and get back to being the person that I thought I was going to be someday”. When I had my exit interview with my boss, she said that it would be interesting to see if I could duplicate my success at another company. What she didn’t know was that I didn’t want another job like this. I had gone on interviews at other companies, but it was just the same prison with different wardens. Another creative director with $200 jeans and Italian shoes, another pretty, skinny advertising director in a ballet flat shivering under a pashmina shawl. After all of these years of being made to feel inadequate, I decided that I deserved better.
When my erstwhile boss asked me if I regretted leaving, I said absolutely not. I felt about leaving that job as I would about quitting smoking. I needed to do it to save my life.
So I signed my own release. And I don’t want to make it like my old job was completely horrible. I go to experience a lot, good and bad. I met a lot of great people, made some good friends, and we helped each other get through some tough times. My old job gave me the opportunity and means to live the kind of life that I have now. And, I’m getting back to being that other guy again, the one I was before I started working. I’ll never be the nicest person in the world, but I’m not as mean anymore. I don’t say cruel things just to make someone else feel bad. I get along with my family again. And I’m not angry all of the time. I have a different kind of life.
Now when I talk to former co-workers who still languish behind the prison walls, I give them hope that there is life on the outside, and that’s it’s good. And every once in a while, when I’m volunteering at the museum or out somewhere in the city, I’ll run into someone that I used to work with, who also escaped. After a bit of small talk, I’ll ask the question that always puts a big smile on their faces, and a brings a look of relief to their eyes.
“Aren’t you glad that you’re out of there?”