All The Signs

Courtney - When I was laid off for the very first time, I was still living in San Francisco. I rarely talk about it, but I remember it well. It was the morning following a Jurassic Five concert. The concert itself was not memorable, but being one of the only people at the concert over the age of 30 was. The only two people older than me at the concert were two people of the people I was with. I was there with my friend Tess, her husband, and our 23-year-old coworker Jim, who I decided to stand closer to so that I could pretend to be, well, his older sister.

Being uncomfortable with my age, I drank a lot. I mean, I drank at least enough that I could no longer remember who was performing. Nor did I remember that I had a meeting scheduled for the next morning. By the time I went home, I got maybe two hours of sleep before the alarm went off. Looking like hell and feeling ten times worse, I managed to arrive at the office in advance of most of my co-workers. As I entered, I noticed the stacks of cardboard boxes in the conference room. Though I had not yet experienced one, I recognized the signs of a lay-off. An all-staff meeting was one sign. Cardboard boxes were another.

I wasn’t sure if this would be company-wide or a selective dismissal, but I didn’t wait around to find out. I decided to play defense to the company’s offense and adopted a new motto: They can’t fire you if they can’t find you. I went home and waited.

Later, I received calls from former coworkers telling me the agency had been closed. They were pissed that I hadn’t warned them, but mostly they were just surprised.

In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to any of us. The writing on the wall at the agency, which I’ll call Ludicrous.com, ranged from blatant warnings like “our general manager has no prior experience managing people” to the not-so-obvious. One one week after I started there, I ran into my boss at a party. Drunk and drugged, Michael passed out into a flower box and broke two of his ribs. I could have considered that a sign.

Then there was my first solo sales call, when Michael asked me at the last minute to replace him. He’d “forgotten” to tell me that this client had been our former creative director, who halfway through my presentation of the portfolio, would stop me to ask if I had anything to show him that he had not personally designed.

Eventually, the signs grew larger, more vibrant, like the weekly new or, rather, no new business announcements, the stock price falling at avalanche speed, and more and more employees occasionally going into 5:00 pm meetings with human resources and not returning the day. However, while the downfall.com was not surprising, it was confusing. How could we go from $11 million in new business in the first quarter of the year to closing shop in the fourth?
There is an old adage that says: “Don’t sell what you can’t do.” At Ludicrous, our rule as more like “Sell whatever you can.” It didn’t matter that we didn’t have the people, the experience or the knowledge, we told clients we could do whatever we wanted. My boss told me, “Just get the revenue. If we don’t have the revenue, we don’t have a company.”

Another problem was that Ludicrous.com was made up of smaller, previously independent agencies that had been bought and spot-welded into an organization that supposed to be a cohesive business entity but, instead, seemed more like a high school full of cliques. The cultural clashes only added fuel to the fires sparked by overworked tensions. For example, our two Web engineers were staffed on three different projects, each of which should have been staffed by teams of six to eight people – or at least according to the client contracts. Those two engineers never slept, never ate, and never talked to anyone. Eventually, we forgot we had engineers, until someone mentioned that they had been laid off.

“Did you hear about Bob and Joe?”

“Bob and Joe who?”

“You know. Bob and Joe, the engineers. They were let go.”

“We have engineers?”

“Not anymore.”

Our own Web site, full of dot-com lingo and buzzwords, further illustrated our issues. Our values section read like a Letterman-quality, top-twenty list of bullshit, but the real highlight was what should have been called the Mismanagement Bios section. The executive team meant nothing to us but a revolving list of names; the most accurate description provided for any of them was the word “acting.” Every time we met a new one, we would leave the meeting with personal agendas to circulate our resumes as soon as possible.

On the way home from my last minutes at Ludicrous, I stopped into the bank next door. A homeless man standing in front of me in line smelled terrible, like he had just shit his pants. As the stain started to appear, I backed away and left the line.

As I left, I looked back over at him, and he stood perfectly still, as if this was a normal occurrence, shitting oneself. Maybe that’s what you have to do – accept that there’s shit to deal with every day, and just keep going.

Or, maybe this was just another sign.