Back in the early 90s - hard now to believe it was 25 years ago - I took yet another professional transfer, my third in ten years, for the large, multinational environmental engineering company for whom I was working. This time, I was transferring back to Atlanta, where it had all started.
We were giants then. Or at least we thought of ourselves as giants. I imagined myself a sort of one-percenter back then - certainly not in terms of salary or income, but in reputation and status. Our large, multinational company was never guilty of humility - hubris may well have been our trademark - and while many thought we were the top company in the field, El Numero Uno if you will, I believed then and still believe now that we were certainly in the top 10%, at least in terms of technical proficiency, reputation, and capability. You'd be ungenerous or even mean-spirited not to begrudge us a spot in the top 10%. So, to be working for who I worked for, I reasoned, I was already in the top 10%.
But I was a Principal in the company, a position granted to few and requiring peer review and certification based on technical ability, business acumen, and leadership skills. Fewer than 10% of the employees were made Principals, and the number was probably closer to 1%.
So, without much braggadocio, I was in the top 10% of a company which itself was in the top 10%, mathematically putting me in the top 1% vanguard in my field. Or so I imagined myself.
The firm was headquartered outside Atlanta, Outside the Perimeter or OTP if you will, so I rented an apartment and eventually bought a condo also OTP. Commuting was a breeze back then, as the apartment and later condo were close to the Perimeter for better access to city restaurants and nightlife and other urban amenities, and the office was further out, so I had a reverse commute, heading away from the city during morning rush hour when everyone else was driving in, and the opposite in the afternoon.
Picture me then: in his 40s, at full professional stride, energetic, confident, and considering himself in the Top 1% of his profession. A giant at the vanguard. On top of that, he even had the whole lifestyle thing beat, with his reverse commute and a pretty red-headed live-in girlfriend, a flight attendant who was away on travel as often as she was home with him. While others, those wage slaves and peons of the great unwashed masses, were living lives of quiet desperation (he imagined), stuck in an endless grind of commuting back and forth to unfulfilling jobs, worrying about mortgages and contemplating divorce, he was cruising around OTP, unimpeded, from his mile-high g.f. to his high-paying, prestigious position with not a worry in the world.
But pride goeth before fall, or so they say, and by the late 90s the company began falling apart. We grew too fast and too large and exceeded our capability for managing our self. We began losing money in first this sector and then that, and soon were hemorrhaging cash across the board. Management tried to double down on the losses by even larger acquisitions and bolder investments, each moving further and further from our core competencies, and the company never made it to the 21st Century. We were purchased and significantly downsized by 2000. I survived the massacre (I was still in the top 10% of the firm after all) but it wasn't the same. I left the company by 2003.
At first, the rebound wasn't too bad. I got a job at another large multinational, this one with even better salaries and benefits, if not quite as gaudy a reputation. Their office was close to the Perimeter, so I didn't have to live OTP myself anymore, and bought a house, my current home, ITP and still managed to reverse commute out to the new office.
Not crying in my milk, but that gig didn't last too long (three, 3 1/2 years) and it never got that good again. I began working for small companies, where my big ideas didn't fit in, and I worked for single-owner firms, whose sole purpose was to make the sole owner richer. The pretty little redhead was long gone by then (we didn't make it to the 21st Century either) and I even tried being a sole owner myself, starting my own firm and working from my ITP home, but the stress and the loneliness from working and living alone eventually got to me.
In 2014, I finally settled at my current job at the ripe old age of 60, well past my professional prime and with noticeably less enthusiasm and energy. I no longer command the respect that I once did and the new job is for yet another sole owner. Where once I considered myself a one-percenter, I now can't think of myself even in the top 50%, or anything much above 25%. It pays the bills but I find myself now just counting down the days until Social Security eligibility and retirement. That brash one-percenter once breezing around OTP is now in the same stop-and-go traffic with the hoi polloi, in a rut, living a life of soul-crushing repetition and banality, wage-slaving for the enrichment of an unappreciative boss.
I'm not asking for sympathy and I don't even feel sorry for myself - it's karma, baby, and what that one-percenter always knew he eventually had coming, anyway. I only bring it all up as deep background for what happened this morning, a psychological profile of the perpetrator of the case we'll call, for the sake of this story, Insane In The Membrane.
(To Be Continued)
No comments:
Post a Comment