One of the most important influences in my life was a director I worked with in College. Her name is Dana Tarantino, and she changed my life with the following line:
“Writing is rewriting.”
Welcome to my next day experiment, called 5 drafts.
Instead of writing five blog posts in five days, I’ll rewrite the same one through five drafts of thinking. No idea where this will go. Welcome to the sausage.
Escape from the Mailroom, Draft 2
(Write well.)
Pushing a mail cart for a living is humbling.
Every time you put a piece of mail on someone’s desk, there was is a stigma attached to it. You are the hired help, trying to silently leave the package before anyone notices you.
When you sort mail for a living, it’s the universe telling you that this is all you’re good for. It’s the company telling you that this is all you’re good for. Eventually It’s you telling yourself that this is all you’re good for.
I was once helping someone set up for a meeting in a conference room. My job was to move chairs from point A to point B.
She couldn’t decide if she wanted this set up, or that. I offered her my opinion, because my back hurt and I was tired of lugging the same ten chairs from one side of the room to the other.
“Yeah, I’m gonna listen to what the mailroom guy thinks.” She said with a hint of twisted pleasure.
I was the help and the help does not speak.*
At that moment, I felt my most worthless. I was distraught. Yet that was the spark that set my my plan in motion.
It was time to escape from the mailroom.
The Plan
Truth is, I was too lost and depressed to have a plan. I just knew that I needed to be defined by something other than my job. It was a survival mechanism at this point.
If I wasn’t fulfilled at work, was my life outside of the grind any more fulfilling? And could I lean into that?
The Stanford Prison experiment isn’t banned, it’s alive and well.
[talk about the social dynamics that the Stanford Prison experiment found, and about how the bosses office/cube farm dynamic is a real life version of that]
Does your boss exhibit any of the following characteristics?
Megalomaniac, no regard for other people’s time? Has no idea what your workload is, yet has the gaul gall to assign more of it? Has no regard for other people’s time? Doesn’t know A adult that acts like an insecure child? Loves the sound of their own voice? Has absolutely no interest in your feedback? Doesn’t empower you, or recognize the potential that is you?
Good.
This is the fuel that will feed your fire. This was the pain that fed my own growth. Not my professional growth, my personal journey. The career was a side effect.
Pushing a mail cart is the most humbling feeling I’ve ever experienced. Sorting mail into bins was not a complex pattern recognition that I expected to apply. Every inch of that cart Every foot that I pushed that cart, a little piece of my soul died.
I was once helping someone set up for a meeting in a conference room. My job was to move chair from point A to point B.
She couldn’t decide if she wanted this set up, or that. I offered her my opinion, because my back hurt and I was tired of lugging the same ten chairs from one side of the conference room to the other.
“Yeah, I’m gonna listen to what the mailroom guy thinks.” She said with a grin.
I was the help, and the help does not speak.*
The Notebook
Your notebook is your best friend – talking back when they’re on a diatribe will do nothing for you. Write random words they say, or just reminders to listen. I can’t tell you how many pages of my notebook are covered with the word “listen”. “Keep Listening.” Write down random words that they seem to emphasize more, and repeat them as you write the words, while nodding yes.
In their eyes it looks like you’re taking diligent notes on every unreasonable, illogical and inconsistent thing they say. Good mailroom guy.
Don’t get a flashy or fancy notebook, don’t get a smart or digital-scannable notebook,
Stop Networking
“I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to work.” – every miserable middle manager I’ve met.
Instead, build relationships. Make friends. In the dark days of the mailroom the thing that helped me survive was being friends with my co-workers.
And ultimately, it was friends outside of the department that dragged me out of the mailroom, in spite of the evil forces clawing me back into the abyss.
It’s a hostage negotation, and you’re both hostage and negotiator
Just finished reading Chris Vosses’ unbelievable book, Never Split the Difference. It’s one thing to learn about negotiating contracts, another thing to learn from an FBI Hostage Negotiator.
Here are the critical points that you can apply in your next exchange with your insane boss.
-Mirroring
-Labeling
-Listening – Listen for their religion.
Hobbies
Meeting new people was really hard.
“Hey Jack, this is Vlad. He works in…uh…office services.”
People would be ashamed for me.
What they didn’t know is that, in my mind, I was Vlad the reader, the tinkerer, the insecure writer, the magician, the occasional sketcher, the budding body builder. As soon as I met people, I felt the need to say smart things, because everything about the business worled world said that I wasn’t. I didn’t realize how much I was trying to impress people with my intelligence, and it put them off.
But that didn’t matter.
I had my hobbies. I never stopped tinkering or learning. I was a collector of random thoughts and curious self experiments. It was the thing that defined me, the way that I coped with my station in life. I leaned into being a nerd, and it was my solace from the hours of sorting mail and carrying boxes.
Ultimately it was a curious experiment in Google sheets that taught me one of the most important mailroom lessons of all: those things that make you different and happy, find a creative way to weave them into your daily work.
Using Sheets, I built a scoreboard to track conference room cleanliness for the team. That planted the seed for a future expertiese obsession with system flows and Excel. It wound up being the cornerstone of my professional development, and a thing that built my reputation.
The stacking of skills that I was kind of good at became my unfair advantage. I wasn’t the best Spreadsheet editor, but I was the best spreadsheet editor in the mailroom. I wasn’t the best writer or people person, but I was the best at it in Ops.
The hobbies became the point of difference that contributed secondary skillsets and helped me stand out.
Be First to Comment