Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  Three, I suppose, means I’m doing an adequate job. Not great, certainly, and not even good. But not bad, and not awful. I imagine it’s like getting a C on a test. It’s an average score. Nothing special, but I’m okay.

  Trotsky looks up as if he wants me to respond. I shrug. What can I say? I think I’ve been doing a killer job as a podcast secretary. We’ve already interviewed some great guests. The podcast website looks terrific. We’ve been accepted by the iTunes Store. We’re actually ahead of schedule. But I’m not here to argue. I’m just here to find out what this assclown has to say. If he’s giving me a three, so be it.

  Next up is HEART, the acronym that Dharmesh created in his culture code. The letters stand for humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, and transparent. Trotsky explains the acronym to me with a straight face, as if HEART is something that two grown men, two normal adult human beings, should take seriously and be able to discuss.

  In HEART, Trotsky gives me a two. That one hurts. I am not completely lacking a HEART—I’m not the Tin Woodman from The Wizard of Oz—but at the same time, at least according to Trotsky, I don’t have much of a HEART. There’s one in there, somewhere, but it’s very small.

  Trotsky does not explain how he computed this score, but I wish he would. I’d like him to unpack the acronym and explain what score he gave me for each of the five categories, and then how he added those up and divided by five to arrive at the final score of two. Was it exactly two? Was it two-point-something? Is there a chance he could round the overall score up to three? In which of the five do I need the most improvement? Am I not remarkable? Or transparent? I may not be humble by nature, but certainly I’ve demonstrated a willingness to be humbled by accepting a job as a podcast secretary after working in Hollywood on an Emmy-nominated TV show. I think I’ve been effective with the podcast, and I’ve certainly had to be adaptable.

  But anyway, I’m a two. I’m below average. As with my first score, I don’t argue with Trotsky or try to haggle or negotiate. I just listen.

  The third category is VORP, the scoring system that Halligan borrowed from Major League Baseball. VORP stands for value over replacement player. VORP is a cruel, heartless metric, and it’s weird to set it right alongside HEART. It’s like putting a photo of Gordon Gekko next to a photo of the Dalai Lama. VORP is the opposite of HEART. It’s the anti-HEART. It’s HEART-less.

  In this category I figure I will get a one, or a zero, or even a negative number, if that’s possible. I’m being paid a lot of money to do a job that a summer intern could do, a job that originally was created as a part-time assignment for Cranium’s administrative assistant. Scheduling people for a podcast and fetching glasses of water for Cranium and his guests in the studio are not challenging tasks. My salary is pretty high. It’s actually higher than Trotsky’s, because he was clever enough to take a small salary in exchange for getting more stock options. Anyway, I’m getting paid like a top executive, and I’m doing secretarial work. My VORP must be the lowest of any employee in the history of the company.

  But Trotsky is benevolent. In VORP, he gives me a two.

  He shuts his MacBook Air. He looks at me.

  “So,” he says, “what do you think?”

  I think that I want to burst out laughing. Who can take this rubbish seriously? HEART? Really? I feel like I’ve fallen into a scene from Office Space. How can it be that the two of us are sitting in this ridiculous orange broom closet and talking about such risible bullshit? There is no data behind these scores. Trotsky is just pulling numbers out of his ass.

  Maybe he thinks that my feelings will be hurt. But I’ve just spent four months in Hollywood working with some of the best writers in TV, and I’ve been asked to come back for next season. In a few hours I’m going get an offer letter to write for one of the best-known tech blogs in the world. Trotsky can give me a score of negative one zillion and I won’t care.

  “Well,” I say, “those scores all sound very fair.”

  I’d really like to leave now, but the scores are only the beginning. Trotsky has a few more tricks up his sleeve. I’m starting to feel as if I am being detained by the police and subjected to interrogation without legal representation. Shouldn’t I get one phone call? Or something?

  In his very solemn voice, the one he uses when he’s really going to say something mean, and when he wants me to know that he really feels sorry that he has to tell me something so terrible about my character, Trotsky says there is another part to the performance review. For every review, he is required to get feedback about an employee from his or her peers.

  Oh shit. Here it comes. I figure he’s going to open his laptop and read some quotes about me that are going to go straight through my rib cage and into my heart. Maybe they really did come from a peer, or maybe he will have just made them up. Either way, this is going to suck. I steel myself.

  “So I asked two people,” he says. “I asked two people who work with you to give me comments about you. I sent them email, and they didn’t respond. I emailed them again, and asked them a few times, but they never responded.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Do you think maybe they just forgot to do it?”

  He winces, and shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says.

  He waits. I wait. I’m not quite sure what to say.

  “So I got no feedback at all about you. What do you think that says about you?”

  This sounds like it could be a rhetorical question, but from the look on his face he seems to expect me to say something.

  “Well,” I say, “I guess it’s not good, right?” I slump a little bit in my chair. I let the information sink in. “I mean, if people say nothing, that’s almost worse than if they say something bad, right? I mean supposedly the worst thing that can happen to you in the workplace is that you get shunned by your peers, or ignored. So I guess it tells me that people here really do not like me, and they really don’t want me here. I mean, not a single person would say even a single nice thing? Really?”

  That last line is my attempt to get some sympathy—a chance for him to say that, oh, things aren’t that bad, and he’s sure that some people here like me.

  Instead, he nods in agreement. “Hmm,” he says, with a sympathetic expression on his face, as if to say that he knows how hurtful this must be, and he’s really sorry that he has to be the one to tell me.

  “Who did you ask?” I say. “Which two people?”

  “I can’t say,” he says. “The reviews have to be confidential.” Then, after a pause, he says, “Well, one of them was Tracy.”

  Tracy is the vice president of brand and buzz, the woman who had Keytar Bear playing at her birthday party. She’s a tiny woman in her thirties, with jet-black hair. She sits three desks away from me, and I really like her. I consider her a friend. I cannot believe she would refuse to comment for my review.

  Somehow this gets to me. The low scores I can deal with. But this bit of information really stings. Until now I’ve been laughing up my sleeve at this charade. I was able to not take it personally. But now that’s changed. As much as I want this not to hurt, it does.

  I’m upset in part because of what Trotsky is saying to me—but more so because I’ve put myself in this position in the first place. What was I thinking when I took this job? Why have I subjected myself to this for so long? How have I ended up trapped in a room with this tattoed sadist, playing out this psychology experiment?

  Like an idiot, I start talking. I babble. I spill my guts. I tell Trotsky how disappointing this is, how nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and by this I mean the whole thing, the whole shitty year and a half at HubSpot. For twenty-five years my career went up and up. I went from one job to a better job. I got promotions, and raises. And I was happy! I loved my work. I made good friends—lifelong friends, people I still talk to all the time.

  “Maybe I’m not cut out to work in marketing,” I say. “That’s fine. But I’ve never worked in a place where I didn’t make friend
s. I’ve never been in a place where everyone makes it so clear that they don’t like me, or want me around. Some jobs you like better than others, but I’ve never felt lonely at work. That’s how I feel here.”

  I’ve gone through my entire life feeling that I am basically a likeable person, someone who can make friends and fit in. But here I have stumbled into a world where I am really and truly not wanted. Some of that may have to do with my personality, and some of it has to do with my age. Apparently I have crossed some invisible line, and I now live in the Land of the Old. That’s what’s hitting me here. That’s what this job has forced me to confront: I’m old. A few months ago I turned fifty-four. One hundred years ago that was the average life expectancy in the United States. At this age, I would be getting carted off to the cemetery.

  Instead, I’m here. What’s really depressing is that this is entirely my fault. If I’d managed my life better, I would be retired now. I would have stayed on the track to become a doctor, which was my original plan and the one my parents urged me to follow. Most of my high school friends became doctors. They’re retired now, or working part-time. They’re coasting. They’ve made their money, and they’re all set. Meanwhile I’m still working my ass off, still needing to earn a paycheck. I’ve reached a point in my life where I should not have to put up with being degraded like this, punched around by some buffoon like Trotsky. But here I am.

  “The whole thing is depressing,” I say.

  Trotsky smiles. I’ve given him an opening. He says he wants to tell me something about that comment I made about always making friends at work.

  “When I first took this job,” he says, “I knew I was going to be working with you. So I got in touch with someone who knows you, a person you worked with. I asked them what you’re like. You know what they said? They said, ‘Smart guy, but acerbic.’”

  He looks at me, expecting a response.

  “Everybody knows I’m acerbic,” I say. “It’s what I’m known for.”

  “I guess I’m not making this clear,” Trotsky says. “What I mean is, when you say that you always made friends at your past jobs, maybe that’s not really how it was.”

  “I always left on good terms. I have friends from Forbes, people I’ve known for fifteen years, and we’re still really good friends. Same at Newsweek.”

  “Well,” Trotsky says, “I’m sure that you liked them. But I’m suggesting that maybe your perception of those situations was not the same as the perception that other people had about you.”

  “So what are you saying? That people at those places didn’t like me either? That I’ve been walking around for years thinking that people are my friends, when really, behind my back, they all don’t like me?”

  He does a sort of shrug and smile, as if to say, I guess so.

  “Who did you talk to? Who told you I was acerbic?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Okay. Fine. But you know, telling me that story is a pretty sick move on your part. Because now I’m going to walk around all day wondering who that is. Who would say that to you? Who’s the person that I think is my friend but who actually talks shit about me behind my back? You know what I mean? That’s going to gnaw at me.”

  “I know,” he says, with a huge grin. “Consider that my gift to you.”

  I walk out to the lobby, feeling numb. We’re up on the fourth floor, overlooking the atrium. Down below, on the ground floor, twenty-something HubSpotters are sitting at tables, drinking coffee and having meetings. Suddenly there’s a burst of laughter—three people cracking up. Their laughter rises up through the atrium and rings off the skylights.

  I stand there, reeling. My heart is racing. My face, I’m sure, is flushed. All that stuff Trotsky just told me about the people who don’t like me—is any of that even true, or did he just make it up? Is there really some former colleague of mine from Forbes or Newsweek who goes around telling people I’m a jerk? Did Tracy really refuse to comment for my review? I have no idea what to make of any of this.

  I call a friend of mine in New York and tell her what just happened, how HubSpot grades people on HEART and that my HEART has been found lacking.

  “Are you serious? That’s hilarious!” she says.

  “Well,” I say, “it is and it isn’t.”

  I start telling her the rest, about how nobody would give me a peer review, and how supposedly everyone at my past jobs hates me, too—and then the door from the north wing of the building opens and there is my good friend Tracy, the peppy vice president of brand and buzz, striding across the lobby with a huge smile on her face.

  “Hey you!” she says, and waves, as if she’s super-duper happy to see me.

  “Hey!” I say, faking a smile.

  Maybe she figures I don’t know that she stabbed me in the back by refusing to comment for my peer review. Or maybe she does. Maybe she knew that Trotsky was going to tell me this, and she came out here specifically because she wanted to see the look on my face after I found that out. Could she really dislike me that much? Could she possibly be that nasty?

  Down in the atrium the kids are still laughing and whooping it up. They’re having a meeting! About marketing! This place is so cool! They’re having the time of their lives.

  I hurry to my desk and grab my jacket. I stuff my laptop into my backpack. My hands are shaking. Out in the lobby, I stare at the elevator doors, waiting for them to open. Finally they do, and I ride down to the ground floor and walk past the security guard, who gives me a lazy wave and says, “Good night.”

  Finally I’m outside, bundling my coat against the November air, hurrying to my car. It’s late afternoon, the daylight draining from the sky. When I get home I call the editorial director at Gawker and accept the job.

  Twenty-five

  Graduation Day

  The next morning I stop by Trotsky’s desk and tell him I need to talk to him in private. We find an empty conference closet. Ironically it’s the one with the beanbag chairs where we used to have our biweekly one-on-ones and shoot the shit about the morons we were working with.

  I tell Trotsky that I’ve been offered a new job, and that I’ve accepted it. It’s Thursday, November 20. I won’t start until January, but I am giving him six weeks of notice. Next week is Thanksgiving, and then there are three weeks when everyone will be working before the Christmas break.

  I’d like to remain at HubSpot through the end of December. That will give me time to get the new podcast up and running smoothly. I’ll manage a smooth handoff to whichever person will be running it after I leave.

  Trotsky acts surprised. “Why are you leaving?” he says.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I thought things were going well,” he says.

  “Well, that performance review yesterday didn’t go very well. I got pretty bad scores.”

  “I didn’t think the scores were so bad,” he says, and he really, sincerely seems to mean this.

  He asks me if I will reconsider. I tell him that in addition to the Valleywag job, my agent in Los Angeles has told me that I’m probably going to get hired back on Silicon Valley if the show gets renewed. So I would be leaving HubSpot anyway, and I may only be working at Valleywag for four or five months, until I go back to Los Angeles.

  Trotsky suggests I could just stay at HubSpot instead of going to Valleywag. The podcast job will be easy. It won’t take up much of my time. I can coast and collect a paycheck. He’s back to being my buddy. He says the whole idea for giving me the podcast was to set me up with a cushy, easy gig, as a way to help me out.

  This is a whole new level of crazy. Trotsky has spent the past three months making my life a living hell, putting me through the worst experience of my life. Now he’s acting as if he is not even aware of that. He thinks we’re pals.

  I tell him I appreciate the offer, but I’ve made up my mind.

  “Fair enough,” he says.

  He wishes me the best. We shake hands. I go back to my desk, get my stuff, an
d go home. I send an email to the HR department, telling them what I just told Trotsky, that I’m resigning effective December 31, 2014. The woman from HR writes back and copies someone else from HR who will “set you up with an exit interview.”

  Later in the day Trotsky emails me and asks if I could come in tomorrow, on Friday, so we can start processing the paperwork to make things official. I figure we will talk about the podcast transition plan, and maybe he will walk me through the things I need to do over the next few weeks like scheduling an exit interview with the HR department.

  But on Friday, when I get to the office, I skim through my HubSpot email inbox and see that on Thursday afternoon, a few hours after I gave my notice to Trotsky, Cranium sent an email to the entire marketing department, including me, informing everyone that today, Friday, will be my last day at HubSpot. This is news to me. Cranium never called me to tell me this. Neither did Trotsky. This email to the whole department has been sitting in my inbox since yesterday afternoon, but I haven’t been checking that account because I’ve busy dealing with people at Gawker.

  I’m stunned. Until this moment it’s been my understanding that I will continue working at HubSpot for another six weeks, until December 31. I can’t believe that this is how I am discovering when my last day will be, by reading an email that has been sent to the entire department.

  Worse, Cranium worded the memo in a way that sounds as if I’ve been fired:

  After a lot of conversations about career paths and what we are looking for out of our content team, as well as a lot of thinking about what he wants to do with his career and where his passions lie, Dan has decided to take his career back into the media industry. His new job is running the website Valleywag, part of Gawker Media. We wish Dan lots of luck in his new role! (And hope he doesn’t have any photos of the IPO party… haha.) His last day in the office will be tomorrow, so reach out to Dan if you want to connect with him in person.