I was really sore this morning from yesterday’s workout, so I shut off my 6am alarm and decided to lie in bed and rest another hour. What I was not expecting was a call at around 6:45, when I got out of bed, from a customer who had recently signed a contract with us. I was not happy to see this, as I knew a call this early could only mean something really terrible had happened.

I was brushing my teeth and saw the missed call. Then, I saw the text from the same customer: “Check your email. We need an action plan ASAP.” Something about their technical configuration had gone wrong, so my morning basically got derailed. I couldn’t do my planned workout when I wanted and had to help troubleshoot and calm the storm. I came late to another customer call. It was definitely not a highlight of my week, but I think my team and I handled it pretty well. I think we were also able to adequately calm our customer down.

“You really managed her so well!” My boss’s boss told me, five calls and who knows how many emails and text messages later.

The truth is that after having worked full time for over 15 years now, with almost all of that time being spent in customer facing roles, I will say that there’s really no such thing as an emergency that could mean life or death, so while I may be tense, I rarely show my stress on my face with customers or colleagues. Our “emergencies” have urgency, but no one’s life is on the line. And I always keep that perspective every time chaos like this crops up.

In the three years I’ve been working at Udemy, I’ve referred about five people for roles. All have sadly been rejected. Two I personally knew and could vouch for, one was a friend’s friend, one was a former colleague’s former colleague, and one was a current customer’s acquaintance. My general thought about referrals is: I will only refer people that I can either vouch for, or if they are people I do not know, I can vouch for the person who is asking me to refer them. I think it should go without saying that if I don’t like you or think you’re terrible at your job, I will definitely not refer you.

So today, out of nowhere, I got a message from a former colleague at my last company. In the LinkedIn message, he says only this: Hi! Can you please refer me? And then he links the job posting for my company he’s interested in. No niceties. No asking how I am or feigning that he’s interested in my life since we worked at the same company. It’s not that I thought this guy wasn’t good at his job, but frankly, the memories I have of him are that… he’s a creep. He used to get really weird and flirtatious at all our company sales and success kickoff events with any woman he could get a little attention from. I still remember he used to always put his arms around my shoulders and waist when I’d get near him at events. And once, in a real attempt at going too far, he tried to put his hand under my shirt from behind while drunk. I didn’t make a big deal of it since I knew he was wasted, so I pushed him away and shrugged it off. But well, I still haven’t forgotten how gross he was, especially given that at that same time, his wife had recently just given birth to their first child.

So no, he’s not getting a referral from me. I have very little power in the industry I am in. So when I do have this little bit of say, I will use it when I think it’s right. Referrals are not a free-for-all just because you happen to know me and want an interview at the company I’m at. That’s not the way life works.

My team had a virtual offsite the last two days (budget cuts in a sad economic environment), and one of the “fun” activities we did was a food styling/photography contest. At first, I didn’t think much of the contest. I wasn’t even sure I was going to enter it because I couldn’t be bothered to cook and style something this past weekend, but then I remembered all the other food photos I had styled over the years, and I decided to go back to them and see which one I might enter. So I chose a photo I had spent quite a while on: apple cider donuts. It seemed like a good idea given we’re now in September, so it would be very appropriately seasonal. I spent a while figuring out how to style the photos before you even factor in how long it took me to make and fry all those donuts! I even added some props: I put the donuts on a warm brown cutting board, added a mug of hot apple cider, and made a festive background of autumn squash and apples. I figured: this has to win SOME award; it was shot really well in perfect light, not to mention I used an Adobe program to do some light editing. I posted it on my food handle on Instagram over three years ago, and people really liked my shots.

Well, there were three categories where you could be considered in this team contest: most stylish, tastiest, and most likely to be eaten on our team. I did not win a single category. In fact, I later got told, when I revealed that the apple cider donuts photo was mine, and YES, I MADE those freaking donuts, that more than half my entire team (we’re about 33 people) thought that my photo was a “fake”: they thought it was a card stock image that someone threw in as a joke to confuse people, and there was “no way that anyone on our team could take a photo that perfect.”

This is what happens when you are good at something: you end up getting penalized for how good you are, and it gets used against you. I guess it’s the world we live in, so what else is new?

I cannot speak for other countries since I’ve only ever worked or lived in the United States, but I can say, without hesitation, that four-day work weeks after a Monday holiday are always brutal. I think about days like President’s Day, Memorial Day, and Labor Day, all federal holidays that land on a Monday, and historically how my work weeks have felt when I return on Tuesday. And I can say: I never feel great after. I feel like one day has just been taken away from me to be productive and just get shit done, and now, I need to scramble to make up for the day of productivity that was taken away. Not only that, but everyone else feels that way: everyone’s scrambling to get what they would have finished on Monday done, and what’s worse: When you have Type A people you are working with, whether it’s internal or external, whether they realize it or not, they’re taking out all their work-related angst… on you. What I thought would be a pretty uneventful week now has meetings up the yin yang and things that will likely bubble over by week’s end. The joys of being part of the rat race…

April Fool’s Day jokes are one of those things that some companies really embrace, and others just tolerate. For the last 2.5 years, I’ve been working at a company that truly embraces them. Some departments/teams literally start thinking about NEXT year’s April Fool’s Day joke as soon as this year’s April Fool’s Day has passed.

Last year when I came back from maternity leave in May, I was sifting through all the work emails I had missed while I was out for 20 weeks. And I I was trying to flag all the “mandatory trainings” I had missed (I do work at an online learning company, after all, so we do have to eat our own ice cream, too). After my company went public in 2021, we had to do a lot of new required trainings as employees of a publicly traded company. It was a necessary evil we all had to do. So when I saw this email in my inbox from our legal team that said we had to do a 96-hour long training as a newly public company, I completely balked. WHAT – 96 hours, and I still have to catch up on all my ACTUAL day to day work?!! I even complained to Chris about it over text when I was reading the email. And then, minutes later, it suddenly dawned on me the date/time stamp of the email: It was April 1, 2022. I just got angry and made a big fuss about an April Fool’s joke that got me.

UGHHHHHHHHHHH. I blamed that on mommy brain.

This year, I knew I was not going to be taken so easily. April Fool’s Day fell on a Saturday this year, but as soon as I saw the email in my inbox, I KNEW it was going to be a prank. Once again, the email came from our head of legal, and the email was to convey the message that all employees’ feedback have been gathered. We want to be one company and operate on one time, so they proposed everyone, regardless of where you were in the world, had to be online for the exact same set of hours for each quarter of this calendar year. This quarter, we’d start with India time, so everyone had to be online for standard India-time work hours from 8-5pm.

Ummmmm. No. There was absolutely NO WAY I fell for that. I already thought it was a prank before I opened the email, and when I saw the idea of everyone being on “one time zone” regardless of what location you were in, I smirked to myself. I also thought about all the parents of young babies and toddlers gettting infuriated about this, not realizing it was a prank.

I did see a lot of the replies in Slack, though, and I laughed out loud at the number of people who actually fell for this and did believe this was real. 😀

This year marks 15 years of being in the workforce full-time. In that time, I have seen and experienced quite a bit. I’ve had experiences with people who gave me great advice, people I’ve looked up to, people I’ve admired for their tenacity and how they’ve climbed the ladder. I made many friends along the way, and one of them even became my husband. I’ve also had experiences with people who define “uncooperative,” and contribute to poor, toxic, and downright nasty workplace culture. It’s been a mix of both good and bad, and I’ve learned quite a bit about the “real world” of work in the U.S.

It’s taken a while to get to a company where I actually feel people are overall, all genuinely good and well-meaning, though, where everyone for the most part not only has the best intentions, but also assumes you also have the best intentions. That’s huge, especially in the competitive environment that is the technology industry. Sometimes, I catch myself in disbelief when I see how helpful people are at my current company. How is it when I post a request in the marketing or content or product Slack channels that someone not only immediately responds within two hours, but if they don’t know the full answer, they’ll cc someone else who may know, and THAT person not only has the answer, but also supplemental information that I could potentially find handy? People are proactive about joining meetings when and where they could add value. They are eager to hop on a Zoom or phone call to better explain (since so many things get lost easily over text on Slack or email). Sometimes, it really does feel like a utopia working where I do. Why are people so eager to help — all the damn time?! Maybe it’s because of the type of persona that an education tech company like mine tends to attract. People are less bloody and evil. Maybe they are less cut throat and just have bigger hearts. Who knows. All I know is — no where else I have ever worked has been this positive. It only took 15 years to get here. But exactly how positive and helpful people are here is also a reminder to me of all the past trauma I’ve faced and exactly how unhealthy and unproductive my previous work environments were.

I’m grateful to be working where I am, especially in this current economic climate, and at this time when many other tech companies are laying their employees off left and right. Though it is funny to say that this is the most positive work environment I’ve been in — and I’ve been 100 percent remote this entire time.

If you asked me before the pandemic and baby if I would ever consider a fully remote role, I would have given you a grossed out look and said I never would consider it. Why would I want to be alone all day? I’m a social person. I love seeing and talking to people all day long. I love having that comraderie and driving office culture. I love the free lunch (well, I used to have that), snacks (hehe), office supplies, and all the other little freebies and perks that go along with working at a tech company. But once the pandemic came, Pookster was born, and pumping breast milk became part of my life, my perspective on working from home and having that level of flexibility totally changed.

Now that pumping is over, I still feel conflicted about working in an office once again. It’s not that I have the opportunity to given my current company has no New York City office, but the thought at this moment really does not entice me at all: the commuting, the dressing/getting ready every morning, not having as much flexibility with my own non-work life. I don’t have anyone keeping tabs on me to see when I am coming in, going out for breaks, or leaving for the day. There are no spies watching or reporting back to some losers who care. There’s no office gossip. Going into an office every day feels very… ugh. I got this question a lot while at kickoff last week, and my general answer is… no, I don’t want to be in an office again. I’m happy with what I am doing now and the flexibility I have.

I generally am pretty open about my brother’s death. I openly share that he died ten years ago, and that he died from suicide. Well, I kind of have to be open if I am fundraising for an organization called the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and I say that I fundraise in memory and honor of my big brother. There’s really no way to get around that, is there?

I’ve been very fortunate and privileged in all these years fundraising. Family, friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, acquaintances, even totally random strangers who have never met me in real life have donated money to my fundraising drive because they’ve been touched by Ed’s story and my desire to share it. Many of the people who have donated have donated year after year, since year 1. They don’t have to do it, but they do. But part of the reason I know so many people donate is because of how much detail and information I share regarding how Ed died and how he suffered. And so with all that detail means that people do have a sense of what I went through, and they then feel like they can openly share their own struggles, whether it’s with themselves or their loved ones, with me. And while I feel privileged that they feel they can come to me to share their most personal, vulnerable stories… it’s honestly a lot of emotional labor and burden for me. I’m then associated with mental health and suicide prevention in their minds, and so I’m someone they they feel comfortable sharing with when no one else “gets it.” I “get it,” right, because I lost Ed through suicide. So I’ll “get it” with my colleagues.

So I sat there and listened to a few stories of struggles of friends, family members, and children over the last couple of days at SSKO. And while it was touching to be remembered and thought of, it was also… tiring. It was already tiring to be around 400 of my colleagues nonstop for two days since I work from home, but then to add this additional layer of emotional labor just left me feeling beat. I like it when people come up to me to share what new food they’ve tried or made because they were inspired by me; that gives me energy. Having these conversations around mental health and suicide attempts, while I hope they are helpful… they drain me. I want to help, it feels good to help. But it’s definitely exhausting. Everything has its price.