Life's Journeys

One

Appointment with Destiny

That presentation I gave yesterday afternoon was amazing, I can barely hide my excitement as I saunter into the office. My colleagues are going to struggle to keep a composed smile on their faces as they fluctuate between patting me on the back and grinding their teeth in envy at my success. If the demo had been a disaster, I would have called in sick and waited for the embarrassment to wane, but, since my customer actually gave me a mimed applause when I finished, I sense a promotion is just around the corner and I need to be here to reap my rewards.

As I slide quietly into my chair, I glance around the room and can’t help but notice that no one is looking my way with knowing nods or quiet smiles. My excitement reluctantly fades into hopeful anticipation that someone will at least acknowledge that I actually finished my project. Soon, I’m consumed with doubt that anyone even knows I’ve been running a project at all. By 9:30 a.m. it’s obvious that my bosses, the owners of this small but respected IT house, aren’t coming in and haven’t bothered to sing my praises to anyone.

Bill and Ken, the two brothers who own Super Australia, went golfing.

What did you expect? The sun’s out, says Ron after I finish my tale of woe. A rather unhelpful statement of the obvious if you ask me.

I let out a dramatic puff of air and say, This is Sydney. The sun shines like three hundred and fifty days a year. I am so looking forward to the day when I run a company and I never have to come into the office.

Leaning back in his chair and knitting his fingers over his uniform-like white office shirt, Ron responds with, Liar. When you run your own company, you’re going to be a workaholic and you’ll probably set up a cot in the conference room. Don’t even think about asking me to work for you.

I find Ron’s switch to pointing out my faults rather disloyal and try to nip it in the bud. Oi. Cease and desist soldier. Are we here to find niggling little personality blemishes in me or to gut the Bill and Ken show.

Where’s the challenge in that? They’re idiots and snake oil salesmen. I feel like more of a challenge today. Ron looks left and right as if, upon hearing its name, a challenge might jump out of the nearest conference room.

That’s better. So, let’s find you a challenge. I pick up my company-issued ballpoint pen and chew the end, trying desperately to come up with something that can inspire and distract me from my post-project lull. Tossing the pen onto my desk I say, How about helping me figure out how to get my bonus earlier, rather than later?

All our contracts come complete with an irritating clause stating ten percent of the deal is held back until the software passes its final tests. That ten percent payment hold is enough to send Bill and Ken ‘round-the-bend. They never seem to care that ninety percent is in the bank—probably because it’s already spent to pay off their European sports cars. They live for the ten percent. So they offer a sweetener to the lead developer with each delivery. I will bank one thousand dollars when I can get East Bank to sign-off on the software I delivered yesterday.

Ron and I spend a few blissful minutes fantasizing about the things I can do to influence getting my hands on my grand by the end of the week. Okay, we spend about thirty seconds fantasizing. It takes no longer since there are exactly zero ways I am seeing my money in anything less than a month. Still, I know I’ll get it someday, so I don’t wallow.

My phone interrupts our short dreams. Ron swivels back to his work space and I lift the receiver to hear the dulcet tones of my favorite customer. Bernie is really a great guy and, though I’m often overheard bemoaning my customer from hell, he is perfectly reasonable.

Sophie, any chance you can pop by this afternoon for a quick meeting? We’ve appointed someone from the IT department to head our test team and I think it would be a good idea for you guys to meet face-to-face.

That’s not a problem, Bernie, but I thought you were leading the test team. Who’s this new guy? Should I run him through the demo I did for you? I think I’m doing an admirable job at keeping the frustration out of my voice. This perfectly reasonable customer has just done the unforgiveable; he’s changed horses on me mid-race. I’ve been working with Bernie for weeks to get the system perfect. This new guy could have all sorts of different priorities and I see my bonus slipping away.

Bernie either doesn’t pick up on my frustration or is too savvy an operator to let it faze him. You can ask Douglas if you need to do the demo for him, but I doubt it. He’s an IT whiz and probably already knows more about the system than I do. He’s been playing with it for the last couple of hours. Just pop on by, say three? And you can see for yourself.

Are you going to still be my primary contact? Hearing the tone of my voice in my own earpiece confirms that I’m losing the battle of hiding my angst.

Afraid not. It’s been great working with you, but I’m being moved to the next project. I’ve helped design the system, now it’s up to others to make it work. I’m on the business side, Douglas is pure IT and IT is the department who will keep your baby ticking.

I’ve managed to wrap the phone cord so tightly around my fingers that they’re turning blue. I close my eyes and try to keep the whine out of my voice as I say, But, Bernie, I’d feel more comfortable if the handover didn’t happen until after the final acceptance is signed off. Like you say, you helped design the system so you’re the right person to test it.

Maybe in an ideal world, but this is a cutthroat business and I’m looking at some online banking stuff that we really can’t delay. I’m sure you and Douglas will get along fine. Come by at three and we can chat more then. Right now I have to dash.

Is it just me or is that death knell actually audible? I doubt that Bernie for one second thinks this will be no problem for me. I also doubt that he gives a damn. A headache appears out of nowhere and parks itself in my right temple.

Dropping the handset back in its cradle, I roll over to Ron’s cubicle and give him a piece of my mind. Lord protect us from friends at work. Poor guy takes it on the chin and only belly laughs for fifteen seconds before the pounding of my pen on his skull gets through to him.

I hold that moral support close to my heart as I walk into the grand foyer of East Bank for my appointment with Destiny—I mean Douglas.

Two

The Customer from Hell

Bernie meets me in the foyer, cheerily hands me my visitor’s badge, and helps me get a cup of coffee while discussing the weather. I respond just as cheerily and pretend that the vision of his retreating back leading me into East Bank’s dingiest conference room isn’t worrying me at all.

A cocky looking character springs out of his chair at the head of the table to shake my hand.

This might be a time where I could be accused of losing my objectivity. Could he really come across as cocky before he even opens his mouth? Is it the fact that he’s sitting at the head of the table that causes me to jump to this conclusion? Or is it the military style haircut and too trendy suit that put me off? If I had seen him walking down the street I wouldn’t have called him cocky, I would have called him a dork. You know the type—tall and lanky with a really big Adam’s apple. His hair is neither blond nor brown. His skin isn’t exactly fair, but you’d never call him swarthy. He is nondescript and probably compensates by over dressing and thrusting his hand out too aggressively and too early. He should be a non-entity.

Instead, he is about to become my arch-nemesis. I sense this in the core of my being.

As for Bernie; sweet, reasonable Bernie, he sticks around for about ninety seconds to make sure Douglas and I know each other’s names and exchange our business cards. Then he runs for the hills. Smart man.

The meeting doesn’t go well. It doesn’t go well at all. Douglas probably doesn’t think it goes well either. He’s talking redesign, I’m trying for a quick test phase. There’s quite a chasm filling the space between our different aims.

One good thing that can be said about this first meeting: it isn’t long. Thankfully DK (Douglas does not match my image of this man) has other pressing matters to attend to and dismisses me at four o’clock. He walks out of the meeting with the arrogance of a lion tamer, I skulk out trying to ignore the bars of my new cage.

THE NEXT MORNING I rock up to work with a renewed enthusiasm for life. A good night’s sleep can do that. I walk into the office and spot Ron slouched in front of his PC. I thank my lucky stars that it’s him I sit next to and not DK. Sure, it might take me a couple of extra weeks to get that signoff, but my project is going to be finished soon and then I’ll be ready for the next step in my career. When I’m the CEO of some multinational IT conglomerate, I’ll look back at this little hurdle and chuckle. It will seem laughable compared to the cut and thrust of the corporate world that will be my milieu!

Ron’s screen is filled with some rather alarming error messages but he’s happy to stop staring at his monitor to listen to me rabbit on about the terrors of my new customer. Nothing like a good vent. By ten I am positively in great spirits.

At 10:15 DK calls. I see from the project file that you and Bernie have agreed on weekly status meetings.

Yes, that’s right. We meet face-to-face every Thursday but we talk and email whenever we need to in between.

I guess that was fine for Bernie in the early phases of this project, but now that we’re at a very dynamic point, I think we need daily meetings to make sure we stay on track.

Dynamic? What is this guy talking about? We’re at the testing phase. The entire system has been delivered. There’s now just an eighteen page test plan to be executed and signed off. Hardly dynamic.

I don’t say what I’m thinking, it would be pointless. So instead I say, If you think that’s best, that’s not a problem. I can swing by your offices on my way to work over the next few days, that’s probably all the testing it will take. Say nine a.m.? How’s that for subtle?

DK is determined to make his presence felt no matter how much time he wastes. In fact, I suspect he has some diabolical scoring system that means the harder he makes things on his supplier (me) the more points he earns.

Nine isn’t good for me. I start early and I’m normally up to my eyeballs by then, he says and I can hear the glint in his eyes. Why don’t you swing by on your way home, say five thirty, and I can give you a quick recap of the day’s progress?

Oh no. This creep wants me to start a meeting at five thirty every day. I try for an earlier slot but he has some lame excuse about team meetings and gathering input. I’m a big girl and can handle a couple of weeks of late nights, but I promise myself to keep the quick recaps to less than an hour. Okay, if that works best for you, I’ll be there this afternoon.

See you then. Click.

He didn’t even wait to hear me say goodbye. He’s one of those posers who wants everyone to think he’s too busy to be civil. This phone call only cements the impression I had of him after our first meeting. Twenty four hours ago I wanted this testing finished so I could bank my thousand dollars. Now I just want to get DK out of my life for good.

AT 5:25 P.M. I’M WAITING in the lobby. At 5:30 the receptionist goes home. At 5:45 I ring DK on his cell and get his voice mail. I leave a message saying that I’ll wait five more minutes and then go home as I assume he had some conflict. At 5:49 exactly, as I’m gripping my laptop bag in anticipation of my speedy exit, DK arrives in the lobby to take me to the dingy meeting room devoid of all life beyond the two of us.

The room’s been worked over in the past day to make it even more oppressive. There are screen shots, manual pages, jotted notes, red pen drawings and about three thousand yellow post-it notes stuck to all four walls; a few have even made it to the back of the door.

I don’t think my groan is audible. If so, DK ignores it and goes into a long, detailed and disheartening rant about that lovely little system I delivered to that sweet, reasonable Bernie. When I try to point out that he’s going outside the scope of testing, he actually slides a contract in front of me and points out a vague clause about design principles.

At this point I almost walk out telling him to get his corporate lawyer to talk to my corporate lawyer because, to my mind, the design is a done deal. Then I remember I don’t have a corporate lawyer. I try to picture Bill and Ken’s confusion as I explain why I want my bonus even though I’ve landed them in an ugly contractual dispute.

I decide it’s smartest to go along with DK because his totally unreasonable demands are probably easier to meet than fight.

DK is working hard to belittle me, come across as superior, and to make sure that we all go back to square one with him in the driver’s seat. I don’t know if he has something against Bernie, me, suppliers, women, the human race...or if he’d find fault in anything that anyone ever presented to him because of some unfathomable principle. Or maybe he is just a creep. Actually, I just don’t care.

A few brief minutes before seven p.m. I make my escape and stumble across the massive entrance door of the East Bank building. Tipping my head back and drawing in the fresh air of liberation, I make a mental note to give DK one more meeting that runs beyond six before I tell him we have to find another time slot. A quick update on the day’s test progress is one thing—a leisurely vivisection of my person is another.

Three

Girls’ Night Out

Wednesday night—rather conveniently this week landing on the day after I met my customer from hell—is a regular-ish girls’ night out.

Four of us started this Girls’ Night Out tradition in our first months of university. Inseparable for at least a semester, Leslie, Kylie, Melinda and I all plowed through the theory of computers together. Since then our lives have changed and our traditional night out has had to become a bit more flexible to accommodate that. Melinda moved to the UK and is tending bar at the pub she and her boyfriend own. Bartending may not exploit her computing skills but it apparently pays the bills and gives her a network of friends larger than Paris Hilton’s. With her busy social schedule and seven days a week job, she’s become a proxy-friend. We all still email but, sadly, you can’t dish as well online as you can over a glass of wine. I think of her at least every Wednesday night but I wonder if she thinks of me much at all.

Kylie is only a semi-regular Wednesday night reveler since she has four kids and a husband. Imagine, four kids in this day and age! She’s a rebel bucking the sterility trend and I often thank her that her kids’ taxes will be paying my old-age pension. She initiated our weekly sessions in our first year of university right before she fell pregnant and dropped out. The rest, as they say, is history.

Leslie shows up most often, and maybe because of that, she’s my best friend. She is very cool. She dropped out of school at the end of her second year because she got a job as a programmer and convinced herself she didn’t need a degree. At this point, it looks like she was right. She earns almost as much as I do, but since she worked through those last couple of years that I studied, her bank balance is pretty healthy. Mine, decidedly, is not. Sure, my degree gains me respect in some circles, mainly around the family dinner table—my mother is so proud—but so far, that’s it.

Leslie and Kylie are sitting at our regular table, each with a glass of white, when I arrive. The waitress nods and goes for my regular glass of red without me having to say anything. I love having a regular. It makes me feel rather sophisticated.

As I hang my jacket over the back of my chair, Leslie says, Kylie’s had the worst day and we absolutely have to stop her from leaving in fifteen minutes like she says she has to. Tommy threw up and she doesn’t want to leave Tom at home alone with him.

Unbelievably, Kylie and Tom gave their first born the same name as his father. There had been a minor domestic over these naming rights, but Tom’s pedigree and his old-fashioned, verging on archaic, attitudes won the day. The best Kylie could do was to try to get everyone to use Thomas when talking about her little one, but somehow Tommy stuck. Poor kid.

As they both knew I would, I jump in with my bit of moral support, Leslie’s right you know. Tom can take care of the kids for one night. It’s been three weeks since you made it out for drinks. Don’t you need to recharge your batteries once in a while?

We can see Kylie is wavering, when Leslie leans over to me and in a stage whisper, as if she’s imparting a huge secret, she says, If I ever tell you I want kids, remind me of tonight. This is an ongoing thing between the three of us. Kylie sings the praises of domestic bliss as she juggles meal prep, doctor appointments and three a.m. nightmares, whereas Leslie and I are convinced that kids will ruin our lives. Or that’s what we tell anyone who will listen and sometimes believe it ourselves. It’s just so hard if you want to have a career, be independent, keep a close circle of friends, and...oh bugger it, who wants my career!

I slap my hand on the table and say, Honestly, I think I might be better off with a dozen brats underfoot than with the customer I’m stuck with. I pause to wonder if I should dump all my work stress on them, but they’re both leaning forward ready to lighten my load with a sympathetic ear. When I take my cue and dive in to my story, Leslie signals our waitress and orders a bottle of wine for us to share.

I do my best to keep a sense of humor about my ordeal as I regale them with my rendition of DK’s antics right down to his handshake. All of my complaints are received with gasps of horror or knowing nods. Aren’t girlfriends fantastic!

My story reaches its end when I get to the meeting I’d just left. I actually had to walk out on him mid monologue to get here on time tonight. I swear to God, if he had tried to stop me, I would have flattened him with my laptop.

Kylie scrunches her eyebrows into a face that she’s learned since having kids and says, Come on, Soph, it’s not going to do you or anybody any good to stir up violent feelings. She can be a bit literal at times. And you really need to be careful that you don’t project your career frustration onto someone at work. I love Kylie dearly but motherhood has made her a little too... in-tune with things, I guess that’s the best way to put it. I blame all those pseudo-psychological self-help books she reads. She’s become very concerned about people’s self-esteem. And even worse, she honestly believes that what you say happens. You know what I’m talking about, saying things like, I’m so angry I think my head will burst, leads directly to a brain aneurism. No doubt this kind of outlook makes for a great mother, but it’s ruining my entertaining over-dramatization about DK.

I set down my glass, paste on my best nonviolent face and say, "Kylie, I don’t want to actually flatten him. Bruise him, yes. I try to introduce a mischievous twinkle into my eye as I give a slight grin, Flatten him, no. And I’m not projecting angst about my stalled-career onto anyone. My career might be creeping along at a snail’s pace, and DK might be doing his bit to hold me back, but the two are totally separate in my brain. In fact, DK isn’t in my brain at all, he’s more like a pain in the bum."

Leslie jumps in before Kylie can say anything about hemorrhoids, DK? That’s your customer’s name?

I call him DK in my head. His real name is Douglas Knopf. Confession time—I don’t call him DK in my head, I call him Drop Kick. I shorten it to DK because it would be just a bit unprofessional to call your customer Drop Kick in some untimely Freudian slip.

Kylie is all over that one. Freud wasn’t a total fool you know. If you suppress stuff, it can come back and actually affect you both mentally and physically.

If you’re suggesting that I stop repressing my aggression and I drop-kick DK right out of the conference room the next time he keeps me waiting for twenty minutes and then rambles on about something he doesn’t understand, I’m all for Freud.

Leslie and Kylie spend the next thirty minutes helping me finish the wine and coming up with inventive ways to deal with my DK dilemma. They have all kinds of suggestions like talking to my boss about it, talking to DK’s boss about it, and taking DK to lunch so we can reach some meaningful understanding (that last one is Kylie’s suggestion and turn of phrase). Truly, they have no clue about the corporate world.

I may be fairly new at this career thing, but I’m pretty sure that there’s no quicker way to ruin your prospects than to go to your boss and tell him you can’t handle your customer. Honestly, even your customer going to your boss complaining about you isn’t as bad. If a complaint is laid against you, you have two choices: either write the customer off as insane (which most are) or, if you’re really good, you can explain how your customer is trying to screw you over but you’re standing your ground for the good of the company. Bosses love it when they think you’re getting tough with a customer. It not only makes them think you’re a strong employee (leadership material?) it also gives them a ready-made scapegoat in case things go bad. Never underestimate the value of a good scapegoat to your boss. Just try never to be one or your career might get a teensy bit uncomfortable.

Given Kylie’s lack of corporate