Fifty-Nine: Consultancy Habits (03-04-2024)
My day job, generally, sucks. Such is true of any job that any person refers to as a “day job”, especially so when they have no “night job” (contemporarily, a “side hustle”). I struggled for a while to determine the best wording to use in informing others of my job, and as of late I’ve settled on a contextual set of options. “In construction” for the blue-collar types, clarifying with “consulting” if pressed; “in construction finance” for any financial types; simply “consulting" for any of the many, many small-to-medium business types in the regions we work in. The small consultant hustle is still outside the range of duties for my title, yet it occupies a significant portion of the discussion amongst members of the company. There is a constant looming worry of work drying up, or of employees turning over and piling additional work on the faithful (or optionless). For the old guard, the striving careerists in their middle age, this job is a shadow of its former glory, the post-recession consulting market is looked back on with rosy glasses. My boss and boss's boss used to travel internationally, now half their work travel- which is entirely domestic- is at budget Marriotts in suburban office parks. No glamor is left.
Recently, two of these grey hairs bemoaned the "lack of work ethic" or dedication or patience or whatever among "Gen Z", a vitriol-doused term for them. They whined in a glaringly old way that the young expect better pay, better work-life balance, and are unwilling to define their identity using their job. For the first two, these were nearly verbatim their words- there is a class of upper-manager that views their own sacrifices as a structural necessity, not a systemic exploitation. Their willingness to work long hours, to not see their children, or to accept unfit pay, to them, are integral parts of the corporate ladder, not intentional system-generate rites-of-passage to determine the people who will eat the most shit and accept the least in return. Watching anyone younger than them jump job for massive pay increases, especially between fields and disciplines, does not reflect a lack of dedication, though they say as much; the job jumper is to the aging loyalist a crafty corporate underling who made career choices they were unwilling to adopt the risk of.
I'm the youngest, least paid employee of this company. Least paid comes with a small caveat- their are underperformers (by the boss's own admission) who are overpaid. Without significant, locally unprecedented, and frequent raises, bonuses, and time off, this job will not retain me. This business is not long for this world if it cannot compete with larger firms, faster and younger firms, who all pay well and quickly adapt to the desires of young employees. The "President"(1) is too old to understand business these days. Firms this small, specialized, and mismanaged only survive so long (unbought) through luck and hubris. When he "retires" (assumes an annoyingly active advisory role), the clock starts ticking on total collapse.
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For the past week, I travelled to Boston to conduct some "on-site" work. I spent the entire week questioning the necessity of my presence, eating take-out lunches and tablecloth dinners, and basking in the worrisome wealth of the transplant-rampant city. I have a friend in Boston, who's leaving a Big 4 to work at a Name Brand Investment Bank in New York City. I know people working at Name Brands in Boston too. There's so much money, so much applauding and debating and apps that realtors use to track home prices and cocaine and chest puffing. It felt great to shoot pool against guys in watches with a friend who makes more than me and runs into his other friends who make more than me. That's not sarcasm. It feels good to peak into the occasionally elusive inner sanctum of the young and rapidly enrichening, and see just, frankly, other kids. I'm not going to work at a New York investment bank, and certainly not at a Big 4, though I'm sure I could if I really tried. I don't understand the lifestyle.
Boston is a rich city, with lots of chain restaurants with architecture, and lots of old buildings in old neighborhoods with new interiors and new residents. There's a lot of non-English and non-Spanish being spoken out on the jarringly clean streets. I walked Washington Street in Back Bay (2), past theatres and department stores, and wondered whether I was looking at a real place or a movie set, a facsimile of an older city propped up by tourism and the inertia of wealth. Rich people don't want their rich people stuff to go away, and they certainly do not want it to become poor people stuff. As such, the department storefront must remain preserved, the Old Boston Essence will remain, but the general economic conditions no longer match. There's a lot of white people in Boston, and they're mostly Biotech (retch) and Bio and Tech people.
So even while I meet with New Englander corporatists, eat at their cruddy Italian haunts (3), and wear the nice clothes at the nice hotel, I still know I'll return to my nickel-and-dime consultant office and use my cheap old monitor and outdated Excel license to do tedious work for embarrassing pay, expected by uninformed bosses to "stick it out" to "prove my value", who will one day be offended and shocked that another employee jumped job to work somewhere mostly unrelated and make 30% more.
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One day, I'll be able to kick my feet up at a home I own on a weekend, with no phone for job-goers to call me with. I am so desperate to abandon my cellphone and its requisite mania, that it has become a droning obsession whenever I leave the home. I envy any person I hear of who has the privilege of not owning or using a cellphone. The work requirements and expectations, the use in public establishments, the integration (intrusion) of the cellphone into every aspect of daily life precludes its abandonment. I sat in my Boston hotel room, awaiting the emergency all-clear from the fire department (4), and my mind was plagued by the ubiquity of my phone. It was such a strange and inexplicable moment to be transfixed by technology, and the general stressors of travel and hotel carpet VOC emissions led me to a brief disconnect from reality. I sat on the floor by the room's corner window and watched a motionless, inactive tower crane at the site I was there to audit. It's a nice hotel, a cool jobsite, a barren and corporatized offshoot of a cosmopolitan-ly artificial and completely unaffordable "city" (tech company campus), but the job is generally a march towards middle management, with its biggest perk more travel like this. More expensible pizzas and CAVA bowls. Maybe a trip to New York to expense some CAVA bowls and smell like hotel soap.
Disillusionment with work is as universal as taxes. Even the detestable old guard now, thanks to hyperinterconnectivity, feels some bit like their job is not so cool or fulfilling as it might have been, In some distant past, each job and successive job-year was compared against the last and the last of our peers'. How can I be proud of a year as a consulting associate when there's people my age making thrice my salary as product managers and clean-cut investment bankers?
It's untrue to say in those moments I ask myself questions of the future. I more so openly assert half-truths about what I could or would do. I could go back to school, to study English Literature or publishing and actually pursue the one thing I'm confident I am good at and would benefit from refining, or kill myself in law school to say I did. Or I could actually get an accredited degree and return to the disastrous grind I abandoned in pursuit of easy work. Or maybe I cash out altogether and hoof out on my own, find whatever miniscule niche I may have, monetize it, and try to be my own boss, like everyone dreams of. I think these thoughts are different from those of my Bostonian peers, who have a different striving attitude. A Private University degree has a powerful effect on aspiration, they want to be fund managers or professors or Harper's Bazaar writers. I think I'm a little closer to the Earth here.
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(1) The firm's founder and President is a very self-important figure. A company this small has no use for an owner who golfs so much and works so little.
(2) Boston has no business delineating as many neighborhoods as it does. The complete demographic redistribution of the city and its mass import of high-education professionals means there’s really just Chinatown, a couple of Little Italy apartments, and White Rich Boston.
(3) Boston has some of the worst Italian food in America. I lived in Italy for several months, there's no comparison. Even as Italian American food, it's bad. Grease and bad wine taste make not a good meal.
(4) It never came. Someone probably burned something in their suite microwave, or with an iron or hairdryer. I watched the trucks leave not long after.