Sometime in early August, I was working for this consulting company and it had been going pretty well. I was mostly doing content and emails and LinkedIn for them, and while we weren’t per se closing deals, we had activity and engagement and interest, and that was cool. I wasn’t really that good at my job, but I was OK, and that felt worthwhile. I’m not really into the A-Player narrative.
We had just gotten a new boss, and he was a micro-manager type guy. He once told us in a meeting, “I am so eagle-eyed, I will scare you.” We regularly put out flyers and brochures with at least one typo. Go figure. In early August, he shit-canned me after a day where he kept switching communication mediums on me: text, phone, email, Teams, etc. He was hunting me, in essence. I think it came to a head at 3pm.
I was so done with white-collar in that moment, I even wrote about it.
I ended up going and bartending at four different places for the back half of 2023. It was OK. I hated closing bars at 2:30am, because I was 42 at the time and it reminded me of being 25 and working until 3am at ESPN, but eh. A job is a job, you know?
At the time I was bartending, I had also done IVF twice with my wife, and it failed both times. I was very attuned to the machinations that happen when kids and pregnancies enter the friendship ecosystem. People claim that “nothing changes,” but in reality almost everything changes, and everyone knows it, but they want to cling to some semblance of how things were, even though they will never be that way again. And when you’re the “left out” one, i.e. the one for whom it never seems to happen, it’s emotionally taxing at times. You can defeat this emotional taxation, but it requires effort.
So, when I was bartending and I wasn’t slammed, I would try to talk to the people at the bar. It’s service industry, right? So I’d “serve” them, but not in a trad-wife way, naw mean? I frequently had couples escaping their kids for 2–3 hours. This exact exchange happened about 10–12 times:
Me: “So two daughters, eh? Nice. What grades?”
Husband: “Ellie’s in third this year.”
Wife: “Todd, she’s in kindergarten.”
Weirdly, in this same span of time, this exchanged happened to me at church as well.
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