When I left “the agency” nearly four years ago, I was offered – and accepted – guidance from a few of those who had gone before me. At some point, I was told, I would no longer label not responding to an e-mail in five minutes or less “non-responsive.” I would realize – and it would probably be painful – that nothing I had worked on in seven years was remotely “urgent.” And it would become clear to me that people who were clients and people who were co-workers (called “teammates”) were, most likely, not friends of mine. All of these predictions have turned out to be wide waterways I’ve encountered and crossed over the last few years, and for that I am grateful.
I’m currently sponsoring one person. I like her a lot. I think she’s intelligent and has a number of good ideas. That said, her recovery is more challenging than mine for two reasons. The first is that she didn’t leave “the agency” entirely on her own accord, so there’s lots of residual weirdness there. The second is that she climbed much higher up on the ladder and she did so, as is usually the case, by diving deeper into the mirage. So it’s more difficult for her to get out, and while I think her progress has been admirable, we got together recently and it did not go well.
The fifth step in recovery is to admit the exact nature of our wrongs, and here’s mine: Our get-together didn’t go well because I was pissed off before the waiter had a chance to put the coffee mug on the table. That’s because there was a link posted on Facebook by several of my “friends” called “America’s Most Stressful Jobs 2011,” which led to one of those infuriating top 10 slide shows on CNBC. If you loathe those as much as I do, just to piss yourself off a bit more, the next time you find yourself clicking through one of them, take note of how each slide has a different ad. The marketing team calls that “monetization.”
The people who had posted the link on Facebook are PR people, who love nothing more than to bellow about how busy they are, the pressure they’re under, the stress of it all. So I was prepared, sort of. What I was not prepared for was that with the exception of being a commercial airline pilot, “PR Executive” is the most stressful job in the land. I’m sure CNBC is aware that one of the few things PR people love more than talking about themselves is when other people talk about them, so the reposting “metrics” and the “click throughs” on this particular slide show must have been phenomenal, all of which probably “drives ad revenue.”
Whatever it is our PR friends are getting so stressed out over at work every day must be pretty important to society (or, as the PR folks would say, “mission critical”) because the PR executives are making, on average, $101,850 per year. To me, that figure makes the amount of rhetoric we’ve heard lately about how much “public” employees earn even more astounding. But there’s a reason we’re more up to speed on the average salary for a public school teacher than we are with the six-figure takings doled out at PR agencies across the land. While the teacher is teaching, the PR executive is exerting influence over what’s covered and what’s not. It’s her job, and it’s stressful.
At any rate, the slide show struck a nerve with the PR people (as it was clearly meant to do) who posted and reposted and reposted over and over again, each time adding a comment of their own, followed by a chorus of comments from their “friends.” Here, just for fun, and just to explain why I was so cranky when I sat down with my sponsee, are but a few: “Yep – that sounds about right!” said one, to which I wondered, the salary or the text? “I thought I was just imagining the stress!” commented another proudly. One PR person whose unoriginality is noteworthy, which takes some doing, wrote “Welcome to my world [SMILEY FACE]” And yet another: “Now everyone will understand why I don’t sleep! SIGH!”
I bitched a little about the whole thing (“Grrrrrrrr!!!”) and said, as I’ve said a thousand times, that the PR people need to work for a year at the McDonald’s on West Burnside and live according to the wage. Then, if they’re still able to speak, they can complain about the stress. Then my sponsee said, “Well, yeah, but it is stressful.”
While I’m proud of myself for not chiming in on Facebook, I am not proud of what I did to punish my sponsee for that one comment: I flunked her on step four, which had required that she take “an inventory” of herself by writing out situations and scenarios and, furthermore, acknowledging her role in each. She did an admirable job, with one glaring exception: the lingo. She kept calling jobs and positions “opportunities.” And she could not get through a sentence without referencing either her “level” or her opponent’s “level,” as in: She was a couple of years older than me, but I was at a higher level. In her narrative, people didn’t share things with her, or tell her stories. They “provided feedback.” And worst of all, I think, my sponsee never calls anyone, or e-mails anyone. Instead, she “reaches out.”
So because I was crabby to begin with, I “dinged” her because I find her lingo offensive. As a sponsor, I know I have a moral responsibility to not sink down to that level, but I couldn’t help myself. And even though it felt good, momentarily at least, my joy is yet another bit of evidence that my recovery is far from complete.
