6 Lessons From 9 Months in Corporate

Inspired and Reminded by Aspa

On May 24, 2023, while preparing for a day of rot, I wrote in my journal:

“I’ve had enough coffee that my brain is dusted of its cosmic cobwebs. I was born to create! I blaspheme to sit and type numbers! I will do what I was born to do! I can only do what I was born to do!”

[Exclamation points give color! combat the boring entirely lowercase unpunctuated i me mine when we have linguistic pigment]

After finishing my courses two summers ago, I put in my notice at my little undergraduate cafe job, and made preparations for what I now refer to as “my pirate summer”, where I lived in a little shack on Cape Cod, free of all responsibility for the first time in my life, growing my hair and beard long, living on fruit, wild crabs caught before breakfast, Spanish rum, and water-warped paperbacks.

I had this abiding notion that my Harvard degree (which I wouldn’t formally receive until the following spring), was a golden ticket to my financial and occupational peace of mind. I had been told: “You could get a good job with a Harvard degree in basket weaving—you’ll be able to do whatever you want.”

My pirate summer ended, I shaved my coarse red beard, got my hair cut back to length, and applied for jobs. I lived on savings I made in the stock market, and assumed that money would make a fine hourglass.

After three months of consistent application and rejection, I settled for my first sure offer.

I accepted a job in the finance department of an international education company whose name I won't reveal for diplomatic reasons. I worked there for nine months, and in that short time, I believe my authentic self was bruised. Even now, almost exactly one year after leaving, I still don’t feel the same as I did before.

In short, while my job description implied guidance and service, the reality was that I was regularly expected to financially exploit and harm students—many of them just a year or two younger than me—by the orders of shadowy suits on marionette strings, victims themselves, manipulated by Mammon.

Apart from the months of ego-grating action, two specific events led to my leaving. First, I was instructed to raise the tuition of a single student by tens of thousands of dollars. When I fought the assignment and demanded time from higher-ups to explain what the company’s reasoning was, I was ultimately told to “Just make something up.” Second, I realized my entire living was in anticipation of the weekend. I would spend both days off doing chores put off by the other five days. One afternoon in early April, I went to the used book store to get back into my healthy, old, and true-to-self habit of reading, which I hadn’t done since joining my company. That night, when I was getting ready for bed, I opened my book and found that I could not maintain any of the information given. I re-read the same page multiple times, and still could not follow what was happening or being said. This was not the same brain that had recently memorized entire parts of Shakespeare; this was a dead canary.

I don’t know if I’ve learned any lessons, as I haven’t come to any conclusions from the experience, except that I’m certain I won’t do it again. However, a few things still bother me greatly:

1. Large businesses are not designed to succeed in their service.
   
   Every business is a medium for some service. A bakery provides bread; electricians provide electrical connections, and so on. When smaller companies with direct utility fail to deliver, in theory, they fall apart. Therefore, it behooves these companies to provide decent services. This is a very basic reduction of capitalism. However, large businesses are not confined to this economic survival of the fittest. They have protections from this natural selection, and instead exist primarily to:
   A.) make a profit for shareholders, and
   B.) avoid lawsuits so they can continue profiting for shareholders.
   The products they provide are only symptomatic of this process.
   

   My job was to condemn students to as close to infinite debt as possible and to act as a buffer to lawsuits. The company would ‘accidentally’ raise the prices on a signed agreement, and I would respond with, “We are working to fix your case right now,” indefinitely, stringing students along to dampen their justified rage and desire for litigation—litigation that the law would surely favor them in.

   We had thousands of students, and my team consisted of just four people. We processed thousands of cases, each student paying over or near the equivalent of a single salary twice a year. If the company had wanted the financial department to actually function as advertised, helping students resolve their issues, they could have easily hired enough staff to handle the load. Thousands of students—all, without hyperbole—had problems with their finances through the company.
   

   I realized too late that we were never meant to succeed in our jobs. Our entire team was a mask for the company. We existed to create the illusion of support and accountability, delaying the threat of litigation. If (and when) a class-action lawsuit ever materialized, we would be the scapegoats. Until then, they kept us on payroll at the cost of our emotional well-being. We were never supposed to do our jobs well—it was like being handed a mop with no bucket and told to clean up the Mariana Trench before 5 p.m.
   

2. People in positions of authority are not necessarily more capable than lower employees.
   
   Everyone I worked with directly—my team of four and a handful of others from neighboring departments—were decent, normal people. My two bosses, one my age and the other about ten years older, racked their brains trying to fight this losing battle, doing everything they could to help as many students as possible. Imagine Sisyphus sprinting up the hill. Not only were they qualified, but they were human.

   I wonder if their tireless efforts functioned as a distraction from the indirect harm we were all doing—pouring so much energy into helping the few that it diverted attention from the many slipping through the cracks. If either of these women had climbed the ranks of administration, they would have fought to restructure the system, pulling egregious profits from the shadowy heads and reallocating resources to help those we were designed to help in the first place.

   This is also why they would never rise in the company ranks. People like this don't get promoted—ghouls can smell virtue from a mile away and are repulsed by it. They don't care about capability, only blind compliance. They want people who say “yes” and nothing more.
   
   Our CFO, for example, wasn’t a ghoul—but a clown. Clowns are exactly who the ghouls want to promote because clowns perform asinine tasks for praise. Clowns understand the improv law of “Yes, and…”
   Once, our CFO came to our office for a week to meet us, travel, do business, etc. She was tall, well-dressed, wore too much expensive perfume, and spoke in braindead buzzwords at a frequency only ghouls can hear. She sat at a desk with her back facing mine. I watched her work on one or two PowerPoint slides for four days straight. When she wasn’t messing with PowerPoint, she was aimlessly floating around like a goldfish, dropping words like “synergy” and “incentivize.”

   On the fifth day, she decided that the entire finance department would be more functional if we were crammed into a single room, rather than spread out over the floor. She sketched out a floor plan where 20 of us from different departments would somehow squeeze into a room designed for five. Then she left to catch a flight to be a clown somewhere else. The Monday after she left, my boss’ boss’ boss—looking stressed and confused—oversaw the actual move. To make the plan vaguely work, they had to hire a company to literally knock down a wall. The floor was left completely empty, apart from two rooms, now combined into one dysfunctionally noisy space, packed tight with people and desks, and certainly against fire code.

   I asked my boss why no one just told the CFO no, why we would go through with something we all knew was stupid, counterproductive, and probably dangerous, especially when she’s rarely in the U.S. in the first place.
   My boss said, “This is what she does. She’ll visit an office, do nothing, then make some huge headass change to look like she’s in charge for a reason. Then we all bitch about it privately until the next thing.”

   After that, I started pretending to take important calls, just so I could sneak off to an empty office to work in peace. The whole ordeal wasted time we could’ve used to actually help people. That clown is still out there somewhere, probably on vacation.
   

3. Cultural Exchange Prejudice
   
   Working at an international business, I regularly interacted and worked with people from any and every obscure country in every hidden corner of the globe. Even working in America, I was the only American with American parents on my team. The company would occasionally hold international meetings, flying everyone in or out to one location. These massive travel meetings seemed only symptomatic to business, while their primary function was the decadent dinner parties and outings after hours. When you’re interacting with such a mixed group of cultures, and backgrounds, and apparently strange and normal names, conversations of meaning are bound to come up. One night while out drinking late, me and a group of co-workers got into a discussion of name meanings.
   I told that Andrew is anglicized from the Greek ‘Andreas’ meaning ‘manly’, and my parents called me ‘Drew’.
   Michael, my middle name, is anglicized Hebrew and comes from the archangel whose name means something like “Who is similar to God?”
   My last name, Solo, is an anglicized abbreviation of a name coming from Sephardic immigrants down my grandfather’s line related to the word “shalom” meaning ‘peace’.
   
   Later that night I was pulled aside by my coworker and friend who worked in the middle east, now with a cold demeanor. He said:

   
   “Hey can we have a quick talk?”
   
   I said “Sure, what’s up?”
   
   “Are you Jewish? It’s okay if you are, I just want to know.”
   
   “Oh no, I’m not.”
   
   “It’s okay if you are, I just think you should let people know if you are.”
   
   “I’m not Jewish.”
   
   “It doesn’t make a difference to me. I just think it’s weird if you don’t let people know. You shouldn’t hide that kind of thing.”
   
   “My family is Irish-Catholic, I’m not Jewish.”
   
   “Okay. Your hair is curly and your name is Jewish, but you’re not. Okay. I just think you should let people know if you are.”
   
   It was clear to me that he was convinced I was hiding my "true" heritage and that, to him, I was no longer functionally white and American. I became, in his eyes, the stereotypical, deceitful Jew masquerading as a white American for obviously nefarious ends. It was surreal to experience that kind of cartoonish antisemitism, which has never gone away and likely never will. It was strange to realize that my "Ivy-league American whiteness," often fetishized¹ on the corporate world stage, was entirely conditional on my perceived Jewish identity—as if American Jews are only white until they're identified as Jewish, and as if respect is contingent on inherently "virtuous" ethnicities.

   The name "Andrew" is of English and Greek origin, yet he didn't accuse me of being secretly English or Greek. From that moment until the end of my time with the company, he treated me differently, ignoring my input and offensively code-switching when speaking to me. It's also worth reiterating that, for the record, I am truly—perhaps unfortunately—not Jewish.
   

4. Does it steal the soul or attract the soulless?
   
   The more I interact with people as an adult, the more I notice a binary of curious and non-curious, interested and disinterested, creative and consumptive, which all feel like the same difference. As I wrote earlier, working at this place sapped me of the energy to do things I feel are necessary to nourish my soul. I gave the example of reading, but I could also not play music, I didn’t exercise, I didn’t go to parties, or paint, or any of the things I would have identified myself by recently before. By the end, there was really no Me, and it took a few weeks for me to feel like anyone again.
   
   Being a Harvard graduate, there’s a useless and obnoxious self-conscious demeanor some people take with you. There’s two sides of this: There’s the “You think you’re great but you’re not.” demeanor, which people use when they’re negatively self conscious, and there’s the demeanor where you’re spoken to like a superhero. In the office, if I spoke about basic things I was interested in, or any activities I did in my free time, I would often be hit with an amazed “That’s so Harvard of you.” or something similar. If you ever meet anyone who has apparently achieved some symbolic victory, and you’re wondering if it would be cute to constantly joke about or identify them by that achievement—don’t. It’s just as embarrassing to be fully equated with your achievements as it is your mistakes. Even with my degree, I was working in the same place as any of these people, often under them.
   
   As I’m writing this I wonder if my disinterest and inability to do the things I loved came from a place of feeling alienated. I wonder too if them associating Harvard, and intelligence, and class, and all the silly things the name ‘Harvard’ might imply, was just them feeling alienated by my having interests which I cultivated and cared for. In any case it made it hard to connect with them, and I don’t think this was through my fault of connection.
   Not all, but too many of my peers were aggressively disinterested in any pleasure that appeared to have a learning curve. Having any interest outside of broad stroke common cultural things was a total novelty—anything outside of drinking, streaming movies and television, and top selling contemporary music was a novelty. Conversations about interests would end after a few questions with their self deprecation, like:
   
   “What do you do outside of work?”
   
   “I like to watch movies.”
   
   “Oh? What kind of movies?”
   
   “Probably nothing you’d like, I like dumb movies. Haha.”
   
   This kind of thing is not participation in life, it’s soothing consumption. The longer I worked there, and the more I found myself disinterested in things I thoroughly cared about my whole life, I wondered if jobs like that were a mill to condition a certain kind of personality. It behooves a company to have employees with a limited sense of individuality. It behooves the greater market to convince consumers that personalities are a series of products—that a person is only the sum of products they’ve collected to represent themselves.

   
   A job is only a means to an end to fund true passions, for many it seems like products take the place of passions only to temporarily distract from the job—the real priority. This poisons the self, and makes people strange. A good way to test whether or not something is a passion or a product is to ask yourself whether or not you can get better at the activity. Can you improve in cooking? Can you improve at rock climbing? or piano? Absolutely. Can you improve in collecting² Funko Pops? drinking? watching TV? No.
   
   I don’t know what comes first, the work or the personality. I will say that the stress changed how I interacted with the world for a bit. It bothers me to know some people are satisfied and sustained on consumptive distraction. I’m terrified of becoming that way.
   
   [You are alive! Engage with living! There’s so much stuff! Dip your toes in new puddle! Endless apple varieties! Confusing music! Lilacs! Alien mathematics! Mud in your ear! Forgotten history! Comical mispelling! Hidden blackberries! Generations of clowns! Music forever! Romance! Frogs in summer! Bleed please! Roller coasters! Orange juice canker sores! Mushrooms that bop! Cribbage under a filament bulb! New shampoo! Sea shells! Germany! Vanilla! Glass jars of pigment! Connect!]
   
   [Some things I was called “Harvard” for— drinking green tea, drinking black coffee, reading the New Yorker, going hiking, playing chess, wearing a pea coat, wearing a $15 watch, getting a haircut, keeping my desk organized, having a book on my desk, painting at a mandated company wine and painting night, having a library card, listening to Bob Dylan, listening to brown noise, caring for a pothos while the owner was on vacation, eating black licorice, having been to the Louvre, having lived in New York, etc.]
   

5. Salary work is being paid to waste time
   
   The nature of office work is that it requires the entire team to produce whatever is meant to be produced. This means that if there’s a hiccup on one end, it prevents work from moving forward on the other. During my first week, I didn’t have a laptop. I was expected to hover over others’ screens, observing their work for eight hours a day. Once I finally received my laptop, I had to wait for permissions to access the company’s software. In the meantime, my job was still just lingering and refreshing my email for eight hours a day.

   Even later, my work was frequently delayed by international time differences. If I needed someone in Europe to complete a task, I had to wait until the next day to make any progress. On one occasion, my entire team was stuck waiting for approvals, so we raided the kitchen for coffee mugs and set up a mini-golf course in an empty office.
   
   Realizing that a significant part of my job was learning how to appear stressed and busy was hard—especially when I considered that I was being paid to waste time that was supposed to be spent helping people.
   

6. Alcoholism
   

   I was once given the advice, "Be careful of your friends. You become the five people you spend the most time with." I don’t know if it’s true or where exactly I heard it, but it resonates with me whenever I find myself in uncomfortable social situations and think, "This isn’t where I want to be." I won’t say all, but certainly most of my coworkers seemed to live only for the next opportunity to drink, with the rest of their time either spent waiting for or pursuing alcohol.

   Like every drug or habit, alcohol soothes the discomfort of normalcy. While it's a dangerous substance, I still believe people can have healthy relationships with it. What unsettles me is being around those whose character revolves around its consumption—the kind who brag about how well they can drive while inebriated because of their "practice," or how much they can drink without changing their personality, or how well they can tolerate serious hangovers. These are the people with dubious water bottles and opaque coffee cups, making jokes about their own sobriety.

   In one of my first weeks at the office, I was invited to lunch with three middle-aged women. I didn’t have much to contribute to their conversation, so I sat and listened. They talked about vacation plans, speculating on whether Iceland was accessible by car. They were working off very limited information—things like, “My friend went to Iceland; they said it was cheap and nice.” They couldn’t agree on what Iceland actually had to offer, but it didn’t matter, they were only going there to drink anyway—as if Iceland were an exclusive bar potentially within driving distance of Boston, Massachusetts. Their indifference to anything about Iceland itself was insane. They continued to joke about knowing nothing about Iceland, nudging me, laughing, seeking approval and solidarity. I tried to smile.

   
   I never sat with them again, and they were all fired – not let go, fired – for some reason within the next three months. I wont say most employees were like this, but many, many were. Too many were.
   
   One night, the company went out for dinner. Afterward, a large handful of us went bar hopping. I stayed out, wanting to prove I could hang as well as anyone else. I figured any repercussions from late-night drinking were a problem for "tomorrow me." By the end of the night, the last ones standing were me, two other men, and two women. We ordered Blue Label shots on the company card. One of the women started crying about something incoherent, and one of the men drunkenly consoled her in a way that was deniably predatory. The other woman was completely out of it, paying attention to nothing.

   I found myself in a conversation with the other man about his time at the company. I asked him what kept him working there for so long. He went from rosy, slurred giggles to stone-faced seriousness and said,
   “Honestly?”
   I said, “Yes.”
   He said, “Honestly?”
   I said, “Yes.”
   “Desperation.”

   I got home around 4 a.m., with work the next morning. By 11 a.m., I threw up in the bathroom and went home early. That was the last time I drank for the sake of drinking.

Conclusion:

I wrote this in July and it’s been fermenting in my drafts. I met

Erifili Gounari

and

Aspa of Miletus

for coffee in Harvard sq. last week. Aspa reminded me that I had this piece and I had no good excuse for not finishing it, so here it is.
All of the things here are what I hated the most, and what led me to the abiding notion that I will never be happy to work for anyone but myself.
It wasn’t all awful. My small team got along famously. Some of the guys from nearby departments and I started a push-up club where we would do 100 push-ups every day. I played chess with one of the guys too. The big boss was a very friendly, charismatic, and professional man with a taste for strange candies. My reputation with my students was good.

Now I work in a cafe in the morning and tutor in the afternoon. I paint, and run, and play music at beat college clubs. I can understand books again, and read as frequently as I ever did. I’m making slightly less than I was, but the pay cut is well worth the stress and emotional pressure of being evil.

For legal reasons, none of this is true. I made it all up. Any similarities between this post and real life events are purely coincidental. Even Aspa and Erifili are made up. I run both of their accounts with chatGPT. They (I) will deny this.

1. The individual in question previously made consistent complimentary comments, disparaging his own background and skin tone as well. All prejudice is referred self hatred.

2. Collecting is a fine hobby, but the collection should be secondary to the passion. If you collect records, it ought to be based in a love for music and not to own every vinyl color variation. If you collect books, they ought to be books you can speak to. Collecting for collection is market servitude.