The Charitable Company Christmas Party and Varying Degrees of Unpopularity

 

Several years ago, I worked for a company and loved the work--at first. After I'd been hired, one of the people on my team (marketing) got 'let go' without any severance, but did get a good recommendation. Before he left, this man had told me the story of his hiring in the first place. He was known around the computer tech business as a cracker jack HTML guy. This company, I'll call it FFF, called him in a panic that their HTML guy had quit and they were in Big Trouble. He came in and saved the day. For two years, he saved the day. Then, with no notice, he had two weeks to work out a severance (huh???) and off he went.

I was too new in my position to do anything more than ask a few quiet questions about it and the answers were sparse. I didn't know what was what. Yet.

After a few months, a theme began to become clear to me. FFF was nothing but about money. Innocently, I discussed some issues and later realized these led to my downfall. They were:
  • I naively asked: Can we get a recycling bin to recycle the (huge amount of) waste paper? I offered to take the bin myself to the recycling bins near my house. They ignored my request, so I ended up bringing my own bags and spending off clock time stuffing their waste paper into the bags to take home. I probably looked like a nutter in their eyes. And to be honest, I judged them, too. I did.  
  • OWS: The company was filled with Conservative LDS members (remember, I'm in Utah County, UT, land of the Bush and Cheney fans and many still have shrines to the late great R candidate Mittens--sigh.) Occupy Wall Street was brought up one day around the office, and in retrospect probably derisively, and I said: "I take all the credit card come ons and write on the application OWS and send them back in their SASE." I thought I was so clever to talk about this because, in my thinking, this wasn't liberal thinking, right? The OWS campaign was for everyone, right? Answer: No.
  • The Best Company Awards: I was asked to write up some wonderful stuff to apply for the 100 Best Companies in Utah awards. On the application, it asked, what kind of charitable service do you do? I asked my boss, who I'd already told it was pretty crappy that we didn't even recycle and he hemmed and hawed that we hadn't really done much "in the last few years" and while he didn't ask me to lie about their lack of charitable service, he didn't want me to leave it blank, either. I'm like, you either help the community or you don't. 
  • The Christmas Party: A memo went to the whole company--should we cater the party? Should we have it at the owner's (big, obnoxious) mansion or somewhere less ostentatious? (Apparently, the year before some of the (peon) workers were offended that Mr. FFF had so much and they didn't.) My suggestion: Why don't we have it at his mansion (though it was referred to as house--hmmm) and have a potluck and take the money we were going to use on catering and adopt a family for Christmas?
My unpopular views made me, well, unpopular.

As I look at this now, I'm sure my let's-look-for-the-liberal-way-to-do-this attitude makes me unpopular all the time. If I were younger, it might matter. But now, it doesn't. I went to see a friend yesterday and he looked at my Bernie bumper sticker and said, "I wish I could put a sticker like that on my car. I don't dare--why do I feel so worried about what others think?" I didn't judge him. He's in a different space than I am, but he is a huge #Bernie fan.

At some point, we need to stand up for who we are, what we believe and be okay with it.

The end of my FFF tale is they hired a FT PR person and let me go, one week before I was going to go on band tour with my son. I asked my boss if I could just stay that one more week. I think you can guess the answer.

So here I am in Conservative Utah County with my purple hair and a determination to see #BernieSanders in the White House.




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