We All Know Resilience Is Important, But Managers Ain’t Got Time For That

The dumbest narrative about modern work is when we heap all these new, vague responsibilities on managers.

I used to work with this dude Matt E. at a company called Virtuoso. I sat in Texas. He sat in Seattle. I guess I had sounded “slow” on my interviews with this company, although I still got the job and took it, so for a while he was calling me “Stoner Ted” behind my back. (At the time I took this job, save for a wedding or two, I hadn’t smoked a joint in probably 15 years.) Matt E. was an absolutely classic middle manager: his entire schedule for a week was meetings and calls, he never actually created or iterated on anything, he had two kids who he clearly had more time to spend with yet would tell his wife “work is killing me this week,” and if you ever asked him a specific question about goals or priorities, he’d fumble for 129 seconds before half-answering. It was an awesome relationship.

He hated my boss, this lady Elaine, so eventually to bond with him and have new “alliances” i.e. Survivor, I would just kinda tell him the dumb shit Elaine was doing down in Texas. That worked for a while. Eventually Elaine grew to utterly despise me, and I got piped from that job. They claimed it was a stand-alone termination, but…