It was the year 2000! So many schlock sci fi stories start that way, most involve brutality, radiation and nuclear war. Mutations and a scrappy band of survivors determined to make a new future for humanity in the rubble of The Mistakes of the Past. This is what hundreds of direct-to-video schlock movies had taught me to expect of that year, and I had a giddy faith that my Y2K Survival Guide, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, wouldn’t fail to deliver us into an apocalypse. I still have the VHS. 😀

Meanwhile, I.R.L.

My reality was a little different. In the wake of the non-emergency, the future in web was looking bright and shiny, I had just landed my first job. I was 21 and had managed to BS my way into my first regular work in web design, joining many of my friends in a newborn class of professionals that was defining its culture daily. The absolute coolest things in the internet were episode-length animations and arcade games built in Flash. Radiskull & Devildoll forever. Web 1.0 had its own odd charms.

I found myself in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago, nestled between downtown proper and the growing-deeper-by-the-day pockets of the near-North neighborhoods. I worked at a traditional print-based B2BR firm that was desperate to get firmly situated in this “internet” business. They were located next to Excalibur, one of the neighborhood’s more notorious nightspots (now RIP).

Many mornings, I saw vomit being hosed off the sidewalk after a “good night” for the club. To each their own for a successful business model.

Setting the Scene

It was on the 6th of 7 floors in an early-20th brick that had a distinct low-key character, anonymous next to its rowdy neighbor. The company was not large, only two other regular employees (general manager & accountant) and the two partners. Three others rented office space, there were two business ladies who were around regularly, and the third was a mysterious character who only turned up once or twice in the time I was there.

My desk was smack dab between the partners, completely exposed in the space, but I got a nice view from the window. The two partners were, essentially, the same man in the same industry a generation apart, two men almost indistinguishable except for 25 years, and would regularly carry on conversations by screaming at each other from their desks. The more senior OG understood the need for transition to the internet but suffered from a 30+ career in mediums that had death sentences placed over them by the same innovation. The very Junior Partner (JP) was drawn in by the glitz and glam of the burgeoning interwebs, but had zero ideas about how to apply the new marketing platform to innovate his existing messaging or campaigns.

There was enough mutual affection in the beginning; There were several existing projects requiring maintenance and upgrade, I learned many early tricks from the previous “web designers” the company had subcontracted to. There were a wealth of stock photography books and CD-ROMs lying around (gold in the days before Google image search), and I got a crash course in new odd things like brand and identity, typography and layout. They seemed to appreciate my enthusiasm and inventiveness. Between what they taught me about the rules of collateral, and what I was able to add to their existing pile of code goodies, we came to a good house recipe for a client website.

A couple of things did irk me — I thought it was a little weird that they wouldn’t let me wear headphones while I worked. It seemed a little fascist until I came to understand that part of my job was answering the phone. Yep, webguy/receptionist. And as I had worked previously as a telemarketer and none of my buddies had to answer phones at their shmancy web jobs, I felt a little bratty about it. I insisted on music or radio while I worked so the compromise was that I could keep teeny speakers on my desk that I would keep low and turn down when taking a call.

Supporting Cast

Things have a tendency to balance out, and I made a friend in Matt, the general manager for the office. Mid 20’s, he’d been with the company for a couple of years and understood how the partners functioned and disfunctioned. He had a small kingdom all his own behind a divider, and had a mountain range of books, binders and manuals around him. I’m convinced 80% of it was handled digital, but he kept it all around him as a way to passively remind the bosses of all he did. Also, he hated the way I answered the phone and let me off the hook for it. He was a fabulous black closeted queen from an *extremely* Jehovah’s Witness corner of the South Side of Chicago, and is still one of my all time favorite humans for the snarky shit he’d give me.

Then there was Sara, the accountant. She was in her 40s, had a family, but only came in a couple of times a month. We shared the open space when she was in, but she got to rock headphones (!) and didn’t have to answer the damn phone (!!!) but was cool as hell and didn’t give a shit what I listened to. She’d talk like she hated hip hop, DEFINITELY did not dig the Analog Brothers, but I’m pretty sure that she became an Outkast fan. I did not get to know her that well but I did bump into her at a Cure show at the Vic Theater, we had a more casual, hi-five hello kind of ease in the office after that.

Our other “guests” mostly kept to themselves with their doors closed, two mousy little businesswomen who would go out for lunches, escape together at the end of the day under the cover of happy hour.

And so it went. Little corner deli where I grabbed lunch a couple of days a week. Used bookstore I popped into twice a month. The post office where I bought money orders for eBay in the days before PayPal. Often I’d eat lunch at my desk and look around the European design sites, this crappy fluid futurism aesthetic was everywhere. But there was real excitement in the world, insane video/CG projects were pushing the boundaries of photorealism. There was the feeling of a global movement involving art and technology, that a new generation of creatives was getting its legs underneath it. And the golden age of Napster, along with the office’s high speed connection.

By night, I was getting deeper and deeper into the world of independent hip hop in Chicago, so had a sense of self worth and “winning” outside of the gig. It didn’t matter that the job wasn’t too glam, I was still involved in this creative wave, I was a part of The Movement. What We were doing Was Very Important. There was a good routine to it, a symmetry, although at the time I hated that I could not be a full-time “music producer” (ie beatmaker who can just make tracks all day).

Then came the bumps, as bumps will always come.

Honeymoon Concluded

There was a MASSIVE conference coming up, several of our clients needed changes to their sites, two needed new sites, and one key client needed a site refit. This was the first serious multi work order of my career, and made for a very busy week. All of the requests were coming through the partners, there was no central organizing principle. Matt was managing Manual Mountain, no bandwidth for new tasks. I remember one particularly disgusting evening working late at the office, fueled on Doritos and Red Bull in a way that one can only be at the 2 decade mark, plowing through the change lists and blasting some demos.

End of the run, I get some horrible news from JP: Turns out he’d communicated the wrong selection from the key client for their site design and refit. So out of the three designs I had presented, I had built the wrong one. And the conference kicked off the next day. I needed to scrap the completed new build and start fresh with another design. This was before widespread CSS, certainly before I used it for anything structural, so “converting” a design meant chopping out a LOT of image assets, then using a lattice of interconnected tables to lay all of the pieces out in HTML. This lattice is then duplicated for each page you need, then you change out the content for each. Then style all content on the per-tag level, add <img> tags and line-break accordingly. Absolute caveman web tech and a total pain in the balls.

I was there all night, but it got done. I had to go to the White Hen Pantry in the neighborhood for caffeine at 3am, but it got done. We all reviewed the build in the AM, I got the green to push it live. I got a pat on the back and was sent home to sleep it off.

It was a turning point in my relationship with the company, and things weren’t the same after that. JP never acknowledged the sprint to a live build in the crunch, and when I reminded him that it was due to his error that the sprint was necessary, he made it clear I should be grateful just to have a job. He was still getting resumes and I could be replaced. WOW.

A certain dynamic of domination came into play with JP, and OG was content to let his younger counterpart drive the office as he saw fit. On the one hand, as the code mangler, I had strength to leverage as a valuable resource. I had a very punk rock FYM kind of attitude towards authority. On the other, JP had to be seen to crack the whip, it was important that he demonstrate that the house was greater than anyone working for it. To be seen as a tiny tyrant in an empire of six…

The Milk Spills

I started openly working on side projects at my desk. I started playing the music a little louder, and wasn’t shy about Kool Keith talking sex. I started taking a little longer to get tasks done and turned over for review. In short, I started feeling more and more like I needed to move in my own direction. The division between myself and the company deepened.

One day, the junior partner brings in several copies of Who Moved My Cheese?, which I refused to take seriously before he even put it in my hand. I was still very involved in DIY and indie culture, in a fiercely young way, and KORPI motivatispeak was just too much for me to take seriously. To be fair, I was only 21 years old and took very little seriously, I threw my copy away within twenty minutes of receiving it (Actually I was showing off to Matt, “Look how little I care about this bullshit son! In the trash son.”)

This was a little awkward, as about two weeks later, during a moment in a meeting where JP was more than slightly annoyed with me, he suggested that we all read our copies of Who Moved My Cheese? and discuss them the following week. Matt teased me that I would have to go out and buy a new copy, I promptly snuck his off his desk.

I read half of it that night, and it really didn’t do anything for me. Again, I was 21, and in a time in life when I’d rather be reading something radical or revolutionary. I’m sure it’s got some good points to it and that it’s helped some people, but I know I’ll never read it again. And I have a copy, on my shelf, a gift from a cousin who appreciates the role this absurd little book had in my life.

The next day, I went in and promptly dropped the pinched copy back off with Matt. That’s when he stopped being on my side… after that there were no lunches, no laughs. He was church people and I had borrowed without permission, stolen. He was disappointed.

JP asked if I’d started reading the book, I replied that I read half of it and that I wouldn’t be reading the other half. It was bullshit common sense lozenges peppered through this bizarre extended Life-as-Maze allegory and I was terrified that if I read the rest of it, it would make me stupid. He said it was pretty unfair of me to disregard an entire half of a book, I replied that if it was that important and crucial to my job, I could read it at my desk during work hours. This lead to comments about how, considering that I was often a little late and on regular train commutes, I had plenty of time to read it.

This conversation-turned-argument had happened in the office open space, in full view. The two mousy ladies had their doors open and were not-watching intently, eyes fixed on their screens and foci fixed on the squirmish. Matt was peeking from around one of his wings of binders. The OG was in his office, leaned back in his chair, arms folded, staring at us with burning little eyes. JP and I got in each others’ faces, I wasn’t backing down. We stood squared off at each other through this tense little exchange, which ended with him breaking off and going back to his office.

I had been waiting for him to fire me and he hadn’t. Well shit, I was really hoping he’d fire me.

Without knowing what else to do, I start cleaning and clearing off my desk. Matt came over with a couple of requests, dropped them in the in-box. I informed him that I would get to them as soon as humanly possible, but first I needed to get the desktop sprayed down with windex and shiny. It was so important to get the stock catalogs lined and leveled neatly. The CD-ROMs were in disarray. It still remains the single most disrespectful, blatant waste of time I have ever pulled on the clock in clear view of the bosses. I was young, disenchanted, and really didn’t care about losing the job or keeping it.

Fall Out, Boy

I waited a day or two before I went back. Felt numb and drunk in the elevator on the way up. Working my set off office keys off of the keyring. I was very good in a heated confrontation, spur of the temper, not so good in a calculated, premeditated moment. The Curse of Youth. I went into the office, and it was all calm and normal. I went into JP’s office, set the keys down on his desk, and gave him verbal two weeks’ notice.

“I’m surprised you even came back in at all.”

Emergency team meeting: Cruzat is leaving! Discuss ramp out strategy. Coordinate final tasks. I get them to agree to a final redesign project for the company’s website, update their KorpiKibble to something more “year 2000”. Everything settling into an amicable office culture for the last two weeks, and it was the kind of relaxed detachment that I would later see again in short-term contract assignments.

In the end, there were no big scenes. I don’t even think JP was around the afternoon of my last day. Matt was cool with me, last stand at the water cooler. I want to say I cut out early and nobody cared.

After several years of wanting to get into “freelance”, this was the moment that I actually jumped into the pool — even though I did it the exact way that you DO NOT want to [keep your day job !!!] it was still a defining day in my life.

First day, first gig, building out the web structure for the design I’d just finished for the company’s new KorpiKibble. Nice clean update for all of their safe boring content, essentially the same safe vanilla they have in the tri-fold pamphlet. After that, all of my projects were music related for over two years (in other words, I would have starved without my day job). The next piece I did that was even remotely institutional was design for the campaign of a non-profit benefiting youth with AIDS in Chicago, itself a different spot on the map than my origin point in B2BR collateral.

Quite a bit happened in the year & change that I worked at that company, but here the takeaways as I see them… I’m curious to know how it sounds to you.

1. I was a total asshole. And not in a fun, rebellious, free-spirited punk rock sense. In a “you are keeping certain channels closed to you” sense. Don’t be the crazy wingnut, the standout. Don’t be so pompous and pleased with yourself that you can’t network or build with old business, or an industry that speaks a slightly different language. Don’t be a dick.
2. JP was also a total asshole. This does not excuse my dickishness, we’re all responsible for our own behavior and decisions, but he was making plenty of his own dick moves. Rather than really try to reach out and build with me, he puffed out his chest like an office alpha and promoted an aggressive confrontation culture. No bueno.
3. I became poisonous. There’s a honeymoon period, when you are new to a company, when you are learning the ropes and everyone is very lovey dovey. Beyond that, there’s the regular rigamarole of running shop, and a huge part of that is morale (things like birthdays, treating newcomers well, etc). Once you become poisonous, you have to leave. For yourself AND the team. Best for all involved that you distance yourself, put energy into other endeavors.
4. Don’t expect a round of applause for doing your job. While it would have been nice to get some real props or a “sorry bout that one kid”, it wasn’t so much of a big deal that it should have mattered or poisoned the relationship. I allowed it to affect me too much by caring too much. We all learn to not-love the final product in different ways. No matter how big a jerk someone may be, don’t let them matter to you later.
5. Always try to leave a long-term commit sneaking one last project through the door. 😀