"If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em" - Bugs Bunny

Topic: "The Worst Job I Ever Had"
by Drew Oetzel

In the late 90s I finally decided to quit my non-profit jobs and sell out. It was the dot-com boom and I decided I wanted a piece of it. I had many an interview at companies now long gone - some even iconic of the era. The now infamous Pets.com was looking for an Exchange administrator - sadly they didn’t call back after my interview. Finally though, I got a lead on an amazing well-paying job managing the web page of Banana Republic. It wasn’t a tech startup, but it truly was the cutting edge of e-commerce. I lied at the interview and said I loved shopping at Banana Republic and hoped they wouldn’t notice my interview clothes were more Target/Goodwill than BR. Lucky for me I got the job!

All three of the e-commerce pages offered by The Gap, Inc. were quite complex, even way back in the early days of the web. Everyday there were complicated updates that had to be pushed out to the web servers and databases that ran the web pages and my job was at the center of that. I worked with the web developers, the photographers, and the pricing and marketing people to make sure all the elements of the web page came together for the daily update of the site. It was an exciting and stressful job with deadlines and many different types of people to interact with. Everyone from the nerds who wrote the code, to well-dressed and perfectly coiffed fashion photographers and marketers who made the pictures and decided what would be featured and what would be put on sale.

During my first few weeks on the job I was trained in the painstaking and manual process of facilitating this daily update. My role had a hand in every step: as the update was first generated, then sent to QA (quality assurance), then on to staging and then eventually, I personally had the stressful job of updating the live web page itself. I remember once during those first few eventful weeks spending an afternoon trying to track down a picture of a pair of ladies wool socks that had gone missing from both staging and the main web page. No one had a picture of them anywhere! I jokingly suggested to the photography maven from Banana Republic that I thought I saw an identical pair on the Old Navy web page, and couldn’t I just grab the picture from there? She looked aghast and even when I assured her I was joking - she still seemed very disappointed in me. One of my counterparts, the manager of the Gap.com web page, finally found a copy of the picture left over on a server that had been reapportioned from BananaRepublic.com to his domain. That night I went home tired but happy knowing that I’d saved the day for all the ladies who wanted to pay too much for some grey wool socks on BananaRepublic.com!

Up to this point this was quite possibly my best job. It was fun and exciting - sure it was stressful at times, but there was always something going on. My desk phone was ringing and my email was pinging constantly from different departments checking in on their updates and the status of the daily push. During my third week on the job when I first started getting my stride I found out that BananaRepublic.com would be moving to the web page management software that OldNavy.com was already using. What I didn’t realize was this software was basically an automated me. It facilitated web page updates and allowed various teams throughout the company to work together seamlessly on web page updates and QA. Then once it was all ready it would automatically push the updates from staging to production - all the web page manager had to do was click on a button in the software that said “Deploy.” 

By week four this software was fully implemented and all the teams had started using it. My job started to slow down. At first it was a gradual slowdown but by the end of my second month on the job my daily tasks had dwindled to around 15-20 mins of work. I sat at my desk and waited for the phone to ring or email to ding but not much came through - the software kept track of everything and it NEVER lost any sock pictures! Once a day I got the go ahead and pushed the big deploy button and watched as the software did automatically what I used to do by hand. My counterpart on the Old Navy web page pulled me aside and said: “Isn’t this awesome? Our job is so much easier now!” I smiled and agreed with him - but didn’t really feel that way. I was bored and my ability to entertain myself with non-work things was quite limited. The office internet connection was blocked for all sites except the three main store sites. If you wanted normal outside access that had to be granted with special fiat from IT and even then it was carefully monitored based on the web proxy logs. I found myself shopping on Gap.com and OldNavy.com just to pass the time - refusing to shop at BananaRepublic.com since it seemed like the same crap as the other two just at twice the price! I still have a few tank tops from those sheer boredom purchases back in the day. 

By month three I was losing my mind. I had nothing to do but none of my bosses or coworkers seemed to care that I sat idly at my desk all day and then pushed a button around 4:15 PM every afternoon. I had a modicum of privacy in my cube so I read some paperbacks on the down-low and spent long long stretches in the men’s room reading the SF Chronicle front to back. I even took to reading the sports page since there was another guy in the office who also had nothing to do and had decided to spend his days wandering from cubicle to cubicle kibitzing about sports. The first few times he stopped by I just said: “I don’t really follow sportsball . . .” but now when he stopped by, thanks to my bathroom reading, I was able to chat about the sports controversies of the day. This alone could kill 20-30 minutes of what had become a grueling 7.5 hour daily slog. Turns out trying to look busy and worrying about being found out to be an overpaid slacker was twice as stressful and annoying as actually just working all day. 

Mid-month five I was reaching the end of my tether. The final straw came when my manager said in a meeting that we needed to staff up our team with at least two more team members. My immediate though was, I don’t know what these new chumps are gonna do, but they better not take any of my 15 mins of precious duties! I knew then that I had to quit. Where to go after this? The answer was right in front of me. I went to work for the company that made the web page automation software that had ruined this job: Interwoven.