Dot-Com Dropout

A year ago, I’d been riding high.

As a psychology major from an Ivy League school, I’d graduated in 1995 with a degree and no direction. I fell into a job at a medical library where I processed inter-library loans, and in my spare time I taught myself HTML and put up a personal webpage. When the Internet boom began, I suddenly found myself in demand with a new career.

By jumping from various positions, each offering more benefits and perks, I soon doubled my starting salary. Last year at this time, I’d been working at a well-regarded financial website. With millions of dollars in venture capital funding and a positive outlook for its eventual IPO, the company had no problems spending money. Every employee had a new computer, and some had two. Our office of about 40 employees had two kitchens, both stocked with a variety of free sodas, juices, and snacks.

The founders of the company, now all paper millionaires at barely 21, came to work when they felt like it. One of them I saw only twice in my three months at the company, including at the company holiday party. Another founder came in more regularly to play golf on a mini-course in his office, and one day flatly refused to do any work when the project manager approached him about some figures he’d been promised.

I got used to swinging by the kitchen on my way in to work each day, and grabbing a juice. We never ran out, though the company nearly doubled in size during my time there, and it never occurred to me to wonder how the juice and sodas got into the kitchens, until this year, it became my job.

I was luckier than most; rather than being laid off, I had voluntarily chosen to leave web development before the meltdown began. But now even non-technical jobs were being affected by the worsening economy, and I was grateful I’d even gotten this part-time, temporary position.

Ostensibly, my position was “day porter”, but secretly, I thought of myself as a cleaning lady. The company I now worked for had six kitchens on four floors. My job consisted of refilling the coffee and tea packets, checking on other basic supplies, and cleaning up the tables. With seven coffees and twelve tea types offered in each kitchen, it was a pity that I didn’t even like caffeinated drinks. And with the hot chocolate and European chocolate coffee available, did people really use the individual cappuccino creamers?

The necessity of refilling the kitchens every other day made it clear that people were indeed using them, despite the rows of empty cubicles that I walked through during my workday. I rarely saw employees, except occasionally in the kitchens while I made my rounds.

One of the few people who spoke to me with any recognition of my individuality was Rob, the delivery guy, who on my third day advised me to lie to my temp agency and tell them I had another job that paid higher. “You’d be surprised how quickly they can find the money to pay you a higher rate,” he said, while he unloaded bottles of spring water into the cooler.

The other person who looked me in the eyes was a quiet, short man on the second floor whom I suspected of trying to pick me up, notwithstanding my wedding ring.

Still, he treated me better than the other employees who preferred to ignore me. The other day, I entered a kitchen and began to restock the different flavors of coffee. Two men in business suits continued their conversation without pausing or acknowledging my entrance. While I tried to move around them, they discussed direct TV, having “the tivo” and how Sudbury still didn’t have cable modem access available, despite its reputation as a rich town. “Even the Cape has it!” one man complained. They mentioned summering at Wellfleet, and I wondered how they would react if I suddenly piped in with, “We have TiVo at home, too.”

My work didn’t completely revolve around coffees and teas, but even here, the difference a year made was still painfully visible. Instead of working at a company where spare computers were easier to find than pens, I was now using a permanent employee’s computer during her lunch break. Due to computer problems (”they said they were going to put this on our network soon”), it took five minutes just to log on to the accounting system to enter invoices. And actually using the system? Well, I could enter digits faster than they appeared on the screen.

Another day I tentatively suggested to my supervisor that I use her existing spreadsheet to enter the data and auto-sum the figures she wanted. I pointed out that it would not only be faster, but less error-prone to use the computer for this task. Tactfully, I didn’t mention that my handwriting was terrible, and that I could format her Excel spreadsheet so that it was easier to read. She briefly considered my suggestion.

“No,” she decided. “I’d rather have it hand-printed. You can just add it a few times on the calculator to make sure the total is correct.”

So painstakingly, I copied her handwritten list of figures onto a photocopy of the spreadsheet with too-small rows, then used her calculator to add up the columns multiple times. Without benefit of a computer, I decided that best two out of three was a keeper, and used that as my final tally.

The greatest reminder of how far I’d fallen occurred one day when the catering company had delivered an employee breakfast to the fourth floor kitchen. While I refilled the individual coffee packets on their stand, an employee helped himself to the buffet. He peered into one metal chafing dish, and turned to me and asked, “Excuse me, but what is this?”

In that mortified second, I realized he had mistaken me for a kitchen worker. In an attempt to distance myself from the kitchen, I quickly said, “I have absolutely no idea.” He looked puzzled, having assumed that someone wiping the kitchen counters was no different from someone who prepared the food. But as the counter-wiper, I knew how many levels of “kitchen staff” there actually were, and felt indignant about his mistaking me for a lowly hash-slinger.

At the same time, I felt embarrassed about what my reaction said about my own assumptions. Who was I to say the hash-slingers were lower than me? At least they had steady jobs.

I certainly didn’t. On day four of my new career, my supervisor checked her budget for the fiscal year that was just ending, and told me they had run out of money to pay me. “Come back next year,” she said.

The new year was only a week and a half away, so I turned in my security badge. On my way out of the building, I stopped in the restroom to wash an inkstain from my hands. I smiled at the cleaning lady, who was busy wiping the water from around the sinks. For all I knew, she might have been a programmer last year, too.

Posted by: ssjane | January 8, 2002 | 4:58 pm
Posted in: Rants