The Journal of Best Practices (21 page)

Four years later Kristen and I got married, and after our honeymoon I returned to work and learned that, due to a strategic reorganization in our company, my position in the laboratory had been terminated.

While my manager delivered the news, I thought about Kristen, my bride of fifteen days. I wondered how I would tell her that my job had been eliminated. I wondered what it meant about me as a husband and as a man. As a provider. A good husband, as I understood it, had a good job that paid for everything the family needed. A good husband brought home a good paycheck, and a husband without a paycheck was a failure. I didn’t want to think about myself as a failure, so as my manager spoke I looked out his fourth-story window, down upon the intersection of the four- and six-lane roads that met behind our building (seven and nine, if you count turn lanes). The roads were made to accommodate massive amounts of suburban traffic during the rush periods, but at ten o’clock in the morning, they were desolate. Crossing them by foot seemed to take days; pedestrians would start walking with the signal and would find themselves sprinting the last twenty feet to make it across before the light changed. I looked down at one car sitting pathetically in a turn lane, waiting all alone for the arrow to turn from red to green, and I wondered what that driver was thinking about. Had their job just been taken away from them? Were they seeing themselves as a failure? Were they now being forced to accommodate a life change they hadn’t anticipated?

My manager went on to explain that I did excellent work and that my customers spoke highly of me. In light of this, it was my position that was being terminated, not my employment. He offered me a spot on the technical marketing team.

Marketing. It was a decent-enough consolation, but I had my reservations. As a marketing engineer, I would be responsible for developing technologies that our customers would need several years down the road. I would have to pay attention to what was going on in the industry. I would have to build relationships with people, the way salesmen do. Did I mention I had my reservations?

There was also a significant cultural shift to consider. The marketing guys weren’t quite as frat-boyish as the salesmen in our office, but they came pretty close. The marketing team were like party nerds—they had to be social enough to schmooze customers and technical enough to converse with engineers. Because they all reported to the most aggressive manager on the planet—a man who was, in my estimation, the human equivalent of a startled grizzly bear—they had to be aggressive, too. The marketing guys were forever barging into the lab and telling us engineers what to do, brandishing their PDAs and strong-arming us into whipping up a prototype circuit or banging out some code. Or worse, they’d nail us with the adult version of a wedgie: “I need you on a conference call in two minutes, Finch. The customer is
really
pissed off, so be prepared.”

The thought of working as a marketing guy day in and day out wasn’t a pleasant one, but it was a better option than quitting and trying to find a new job. So I accepted the position and was shoved rather unceremoniously into my new career. Little did I know what an ironic impact this move would have on my marriage.

As a marketing guy I was surrounded by highly, almost comically motivated people who seemed to think about only one thing: business. Win the business. Track the business. Get down to business. They also talked about achieving their goals in rather violent terms: Crush your goals. Destroy your goals. Punch your goals in the face. It was a far cry from the laboratory, where people spoke admiringly of their oscilloscopes and generally kept to themselves.

The only marketing guy who didn’t seem interested in steamrollering everyone in his path was Clint. He was not yet a manager when I joined the group, but he took time to show me the ropes. Clint taught me useful business strategies, took me golfing with his customers to show me how to entertain clients, and advised me whenever I was about to jeopardize my own career by doing something incredibly stupid. Because we spent so much time together at work, people often referred to Clint as my work wife, a term to which I never really cottoned. But looking back, I suppose that’s what he was. Clint was my very supportive, very homely work wife.

Even with Clint’s support, I worried how I might survive in my new role with the company. I was nothing like a marketing guy. I wasn’t interested in business or sales or annihilating superficial goals handed to me by someone else. Funny how the challenge of becoming a marketing guy was not unlike the challenge of being a better husband: because I wasn’t particularly qualified to do it, success would require an outrageous amount of work. I wasn’t born with the resources that would have naturally made me a marketing guy or a great husband, but I dove headfirst into the responsibilities of each role, albeit at different points in my life.

Not only did I have to become a marketing guy, I felt I had to become a very successful marketing guy because I was now married. The bigger the paycheck, the greater the financial security, the better the husband and father. Such a simple formula. What could possibly go wrong?

To become a marketing guy, I did what had always worked for me: I observed the people around me, studied their behaviors, and used the knowledge to create a character that would allow me to blend in. Business-Man, Kristen and I now call him. An amalgam of the most successful people I worked with, Business-Man was smooth-talking (assuming he scripted his ideas before sharing them with people). He was gregarious, wonderfully charismatic around the office, and beloved by my customers. He could always get a meeting with high-level audiences, and he knew how to take business away from competitors. He received promotions and bigger customers every year. Business-Man, in case you hadn’t heard, was a pretty big deal. He was going places. His blinking Bluetooth headset, his signature “Hey there!” and his shiny new golf clubs were all the proof you’d ever need.

Business-Man was a fantastic character, and the process I employed to keep him alive—to keep my career alive and my family well funded—was something like Method acting. I became the role I was playing. No one enjoys spending time around Method actors when they’re on a job, and there’s a reason for that: Method actors aren’t themselves when they’re working, they’re characters. It’s annoying. I wasn’t Husband anymore. I wasn’t Kristen’s beloved Dave anymore. I was Business-Man.

On more than one occasion, Kristen had told me, “Your job is changing you. You’re not that guy, Dave. You’re totally unhappy and you’re bringing that home with you every day, and it’s making things harder for us.” She frequently urged me to quit, to find something else that would suit me better. I knew she was right, but I just couldn’t see myself walking away from the security of my job, as wrong for me as the job was. In an economy where companies are laying off employees by the thousands, how does one supplant a six-figure income?

“We can change our lifestyle if we have to,” Kristen told me. “I just want to have
you
back.”

I couldn’t see it her way. I knew that I wasn’t any fun to be around—the constant arguments at home were evidence enough. I suspected my job wasn’t the only cause of our problems, but I didn’t yet know about my Asperger’s. So I felt that if I couldn’t give Kristen and the kids the great husband and father I should have been, at least I could give them financial security. After all, I had the rest of my life to master the role of family man.

“I’ll just keep the job I have for now,” I told Kristen. For years.

My performance review had been going pretty well, as usual. Or so I thought. Clint was done talking about my bonus and commission and was now discussing something or other while he rubbed his shin with a pencil, eraser-side down.
Weird
.

“You’re not listening, are you?” he asked.

Crap
. “No.”

Clint laughed, but he didn’t stop with the pencil. “Focus, idiot,” he said. “I’m trying to tell you that you’re reaching a point in your career where it would make sense to start thinking about a management path.”

“Ah, yes.” I nodded, trying to envision the character I’d have to assume to pull off looking like a manager. Middle-Manager Guy, perhaps, his superpower being extraordinary weight gain around the waist, ass, and chin, or the ability to select suitable wines at fancy customer dinners. No—the ability to miss my kids’ soccer games without a thought.

Clint continued. “And if I’m going to groom you for management, then you need to start looking like someone who could lead a team or a department. Understand?”

I did understand. While I operated at a high level and blew away my objectives year after year, I was anything but a model employee. Most of my coworkers were at work by eight o’clock, but I didn’t show up until much, much later. (It didn’t matter that I often worked late into the evening, Clint just wanted me there earlier.) Little things distracted me—grave concern about the food selection for an upcoming lunch meeting, for example, or tight pants. If I couldn’t concentrate, many times I would get in my car and leave. Sometimes I returned to the office after driving around for a while and collecting myself, and other times I simply went home.

I certainly wouldn’t have been awarded Employee of the Month for my travel habits, either. Travel was a requirement for my job, and I couldn’t stand it. The preparation, the unusual surroundings, the hotels. And worst of all, the airports. I couldn’t think of anything worse than flying on a commercial airline. At airports I automatically presume that everyone inside the terminal has some disgusting infectious disease and is mentally unstable, and thanks to how my brain works, this notion becomes as real and solid as concrete. I don’t
suspect
I’m right, I
know
I’m right. As a consequence, I ratchet myself into a panic that starts a few days before my trip and doesn’t end until after my return flight has landed. (I tried taking Xanax once, but all that did was loosen me up enough to ask the person seated next to me if she was a terrorist.)

Over the years, I found ways to avoid flying—a point that Clint was now raising in my performance review: “As a manager, you’re going to have to get comfortable traveling by plane.”

The previous year, I had decided that I would no longer fly to any customer that I could drive to in eight hours or less. Using negotiation skills that Clint had personally taught me over the years, I lobbied to transfer the customers outside of my four-hundred-mile radius to colleagues in other regions, which meant I could spend more time at companies that weren’t so far away. I thought it was a great idea, but Clint objected, saying that I was an idiot and that he didn’t want me to spend business hours driving. I compromised, offering to limit my travel to late in the day. He rolled his eyes and finally agreed. I’d leave around four o’clock for my trips and sometimes wouldn’t arrive at my destination until after midnight, but at least I didn’t have to fly. Heck, I’d have taken a mule.

I wasn’t always able to get out of flying. I was scheduled to go to Louisville in a few weeks, an easy seven-hour drive, but Clint was joining me on the trip, and he insisted we fly together. This posed another problem: no car rental company on the planet will guarantee you a specific make and model of rental car. My preference is the Toyota Camry. I don’t drive one myself, but I know that of all the vehicles offered by rental companies, the Toyota Camry has the best reputation for reliability. So, Toyota Camry it is.

Before my performance review began, I had spent a few hours trying to get one of the car rental desks in Louisville’s Standiford airport to commit to holding a Toyota Camry for me:

“All we can guarantee is the car type—standard, midsize, or full,” the clerk said. “We cannot promise you a Toyota Camry.”

“But the trip is two weeks from now and that should give you time to hold one,” I said.

“I can’t do that, sir. I’m sorry.”

I adjusted my posture. “I don’t think I’m making my point clearly enough. I have to drive a Toyota Camry. I need to know if you can hold one for me.”

“Sir, again, we cannot promise to hold a Toyota Camry. Why not request one at the rental counter when you arrive?”

I tightened my grip on the handset. “How many Toyota Camrys do you have in your fleet at Standiford?”

“Our
fleet
? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“I mean, how many Toyota Camrys do you have available on any given day? Five Toyota Camrys? Ten?” The clerk sighed and I heard a flurry of keystrokes on his keyboard.

“Why do you need a Camry?”

I don’t know, asshole, why do you breathe air? Would you like it if breathing air was this difficult for you?
I didn’t want to be troublesome; he was only following policy, and frankly, I didn’t want to deal with my craziness any more than he did. But there we were. I looked up at my computer monitor, hoping that it might have a convincing answer flashing across it, something to conclude the argument in my favor. I was so frustrated that I wanted to cry.
This doesn’t need to be so hard.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I just prefer to drive a Toyota Camry. I know how they steer, I know where the mirror adjustment thing is, I just . . . I need a Toyota Camry.” My heart was beating heavily, and I repeated myself. “I need a Toyota Camry.”

“Sir, I do apologize. If you’d like me to go ahead and make a reservation we will do the best we can to—”

“Okay. Please, make the reservation. And note that I want a Toyota Camry, goddammit.”

I slammed the phone down and my ear tuned into the familiar, stomach-knotting chuckles of the sales guy sitting in the cubicle across from me. “You okay, Finchy?” he asked. He didn’t know that I had Asperger syndrome; he just thought I was a freak. He drove a Toyota Avalon—a Camry for rich people.
Fuck him.