Since I’ve started working at the current company, I’ve been pretty happy with my colleagues for the most part. Of course, there are always selfish, dickish sales people and self-seeking individuals to look out for, but overall, I’d say it’s been a breath of fresh air, especially considering I came from a place that reeked of stereotypical office politics and backstabbing at its finest. But recently, I’ve noticed that some of the newest hires are not the brightest bulbs, and it’s not because they are not “getting it” right away; it’s more because when new information is presented to them, instead of confidently digesting the new information, they clearly freak out over the video chat and start panicking. Multiple times in the last few days talking with new people, it’s like I was working with deers with headlights, and the freak out sessions were painfully obvious even over Zoom. I can’t even imagine how frustrating this would have been if it were in person.

My general belief about people in customer facing roles is that at minimum, you need to be able to be pleasant, friendly, firm, and exude confidence even when you aren’t even sure what you are talking about. Confidence makes people trust you, and trust is really important with customers. If you are not confident and freak out over little things you don’t understand, customers aren’t stupid; they will pick up on it and call you out for it.

So I’m not sure if I’m just feeling a little impatient because I am slowly preparing to step away from my day to day duties to go out on maternity leave, or if I am just being a jerk in my thoughts. I am definitely patient and kind when I speak with these individuals, and to catch myself, I always smile and take a breath before I speak. I need to pause before I speak, otherwise I know I will end up saying something I will regret.

Yesterday afternoon, I met up with two colleagues from my last company. One of them is originally from New York but has spent the last five years living in San Francisco, so she was out here to see family and hang out. The second one is a New York native and someone I was quite close to while working at the last company. We were on a texting basis when working together about all the dirt at the last place, yet I knew that once we no longer worked together, we’d have little to nothing in common. The visiting ex-colleague reached out to organize a coffee meetup, so we got some drinks and brought them back to my rooftop and chatted for about an hour. It really wasn’t that long because one of them needed to head back to Queens for dinner, and well, the other reason was that we really don’t have much in common anymore. Sadly, it didn’t really feel that natural to be interacting with them, and it felt a little forced at times. It’s not that I think they are bad people, as I definitely do not think that at all. It’s more that we’re not really people who could ever be friends outside of work. Sometimes, that’s just the way it is with certain people. Once you take away the one thing you used to complain about and commiserate on together, it’s kind of over for you all. It’s always a bit of a gamble seeing former colleagues when they are no longer your colleagues because the one thing you had in common, work, is no longer a commonality anymore. I knew we didn’t have much in common in the way of hobbies or life interests in general, but at least we caught up on each other’s lives, respective work, and how that was all going. And with the pandemic’s end not really being in sight, we talked about how we coped with that and how our families managed, as well.

It was a good attempt, but oh well. You can’t always remain friends with former colleagues even if you were really close while working together. C’est la vie.

As long as I’m at the company where I am currently employed, I will never have to go into an office and work a traditional 9-5 or 9-6. I will never have to deal with pumping breast milk in a mother’s room or bathroom between meetings at work. I will never have to post on a Slack channel that I’ll be out for a baby’s appointment for whatever hours of the day. Given the pandemic and the general nature of working from home during this period, this is quite a privilege I have. I remember my mom marveling at the idea of a mother’s room at my last workplace: “we never had that when I was working!” So she never had the option to pump milk for Ed or me; we just had to have formula after she went back to work after eight weeks of maternity leave.

I recognize how lucky I am to work from home and have the flexible schedule I have. My boss, who has a 6-year-old daughter, shuts down her computer to pick her daughter up from daycare at 4pm on the dot every single day, and she doesn’t check email again until about 9pm in the evenings, likely after her daughter is already in bed. We have other colleagues who shut down at 3pm each day, and no one ever blinks an eye at it. It feels good to know that parents are accommodated well at my organization, at least as far as I can see.

I’m having a chat with our benefits team about my leave next week and am curious to see what they will say is required from a paperwork standpoint. In the U.S., regardless of what company you are employed at, this process is rarely fun or enjoyable.

You know how I said yesterday that there is a special place in hell for customers who don’t respect their partners’ time off and give them work to do even before they return from vacation? Well, there’s also a special place in hell when your sales partner decides to put an 8pm local time meeting on your calendar for the day you get back — a meeting that you have to lead, put together a deck for, and do the majority of the talking at. Granted, this customer is APAC based, so it’s not like any time is going to be ideal since we are on the east coast of the U.S., but this really, really sucked and was NOT good. Couldn’t I have at least gotten one day to settle back in after six days out, or is that too much to ask your colleagues?

In the end, this group I was working with was very fun and pleasant, so it was a good meeting at the end of the day (literally), but I still wasn’t pleased to take a call so late on my first day back. It’s no wonder people in other countries take longer periods off… it’s because they want to avoid work as much as possible for as long as possible in a single go.

During pretty much every vacation since my first Europe trip in the summer of 2011, I always check email while I am out of the office, even if it’s just for one day. I learned my lesson that trip: I was out 2.5 weeks, and I was inundated with emails and inane requests when I returned. I didn’t feel fully settled back into work until two months later, which was the worst feeling ever. I respond to things that I think are easy or urgent, but for the most part, I let my backup respond for me. Or, in some cases, when customers are being jerks, they don’t contact my backup and just wait for me to respond when I get back. And I really, really hate this.

I’m not sure why customers do this. When I let them know I will be out, and I tell them who my backup is, some of them just really do not get it and think, oh, it’s okay! Yvonne will respond when she returns, so she can still help us! What this ends up creating is a huge back log of requests (that came from ONE specific customer, mind you) that ended up taking several hours on this Labor Day holiday for me to take care of. I knew if I didn’t work on these requests today that I’d have to work late to catch up tomorrow, and I hate working late. I’m beyond that point in my career that I have zero motivation to work beyond 5 or 6pm on a regular workday unless I’ve actually chosen to procrastinate on something.

It’s been said that there is a special place in hell for women who do not support other women. Well, there is also a special place in hell for customers who do not respect their partners’ time off and give them work to do even BEFORE they return to the office.

My manager and I had a level-set conversation last week when we talked about how I can build my network more widely. I thought about this and realized how hard that is, not just during a pandemic when everyone is 100 percent remote, but also as a full-time, remote employee even after the pandemic has come to an end. How do you really “network” with people who are outside of the everyday people you work and collaborate with on customer work or internal projects? It’s awkward to just send a calendar invite to someone you have no established relationship with and expect them to show up simply because you asked. It’s also difficult to do this given we’re now at the one-year mark with the pandemic, and so everyone is experiencing massive Zoom / video chat fatigue. I generally don’t even like networking in person, but it’s much easier to meet or run into people in the office kitchen or at the water fountain than forcing a Zoom invite on them.

So that make me curious. My manager said she’s strongly considering me for a promotion come my one year mark, but how does that work if “building my network/my brand” is a part of this?

I’m pretty certain that customers just know when you are busy. They know when you have company all-hands or all-day company kickoffs… because that’s when they intuitively know you are overwhelmed and exhausted, and thus they then reach out to you, insisting they need help with x or y task, or that they absolutely MUST get on the phone or a video conference with you because they totally need your help….. even if said customer had totally ignored you or failed to respond to your emails from weeks or even months prior. Last week and this week have been especially exhausting because of our annual company kickoff, and because, well, I had to reschedule customer meetings around these huge time blocks. And then, the ad hoc requests started coming in far more than they normally would!

I just feel exhausted. I’ve even had dreams about work. And then it suddenly dawned on me… I haven’t had a real vacation in over a year, since we were in Australia and Indonesia. I’ve really only taken one day off here or there this whole year, other than the days off I’ve been given for Wellness Days or national holidays. I’ve had no REAL break from work to really unplug and relax. I really need to do something more intentional and take time off…. but we can’t really safely go anywhere. What am I going to do with myself other than sit around my house, exercise, meditate, cook, make videos, read….? I’ve already read four books and we’re not even halfway through February this year!!

For most of my career, I’ve been in a customer facing role, meaning that I interact with customers who use my company’s software as my actual day job. There are lots of upsides to being in a customer facing role in a non-pandemic era: you get to travel for work (and hence, can really load up on status via miles and hotel points), your role at work is taken seriously because you are essentially the voice of the customer; if you work on high-profile customers, for the most part, you’re probably in a relatively secure position. But the downsides? Customers sometimes can see you as not being human, meaning that they will not necessarily respect boundaries of off-hours to call you on your cell with something they consider urgent (the last time I checked, we didn’t work in the ER). They may not care that you have other customers and other meetings; they may expect that you respond to every email they send you literally as soon as they send it, and then react angrily when there’s a “delay” in your response (as in, in 4 hours or even, GASP, the next day!). They may not care that you had to take the day off because you got sick or had a family emergency and insist you get them a response anyway. They also may not care that you get a national holiday off since they may not have that day off.

The last example actually happened to me for the first time today, and I was really in shock. A customer asked to reschedule a meeting to a later time, and he asked if I was available on February 15th, which is actually President’s Day, meaning our office would be closed. I told him that our offices would be closed that day, but I’d be available to chat the following Tuesday. He had the balls to respond, asking if I could make an exception and meet with his team on that Monday. Well, that was easy to say no to; NO, I’m NOT making an exception for you or anyone work related on a NATIONAL HOLIDAY.

I told a colleague about this story after it happened, and she responded, “I see customers like that as children who ask if they can have cookies before dinner. They know the answer is no, but that doesn’t mean they won’t ask, anyway, to see if there is some slim chance they may actually get their way.”

Earlier this month, the head of our team threw a random invite on my calendar to sync 1:1. I wasn’t really sure what this was about because she didn’t give much context in her invite, but I figured it couldn’t have been bad news. I mean, I’ve only been working at this company for the last 3.5 months, so I couldn’t have already screwed up that royally yet, right?

When we met, she said she had a proposition for me. At the time, I was engrossed in reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, in which Lori invites a guy out to coffee with a proposition to use his sperm for artificial insemination to impregnate her. So this was the first thought that came to mind. I was pretty certain she was not planning to ask for a) my eggs or b) my future first born.

Instead, her request was simple: would I be willing to MC one day of our company’s annual sales and success kickoff the last week of January? I’d have a co-host, and it would be a great way to get my name out there and interact with colleagues from around the world. Leaders across teams had apparently dropped my name as a potential fit because… I guess there’s been talk that over Zoom, I have “great presence”?

When the leader of your team asks if you’d be willing to take on a task this big, you don’t really have an option. Your only option is to say “yes.” And so, I said yes, thinking that this may be a great way to build my internal brand (putting on my sales hat here), and especially since I’m a fully remote employee even after the pandemic, it would also be a way to literally get my face and name out there across our global offices.

We had a few planning sessions. My co-host and I went through a few rounds of drafted scripts. I ad libbed a lot and also added in a few friendly jokes about specific individuals who are easy targets on my team’s leadership. And today was the big day. It was a strange time to be doing it; I was feeling quite low because of this whole fertility journey and not feeling my best. But in reality, the world doesn’t stop for anyone. No matter who lives and dies, no matter what awful experiences you are going through, the rest of the world continues moving forward, and so that pushes you to do the same regardless of whether you want to. So I dialed up my energy and enthusiasm, painted a huge smile on my face, and ran through the half-day session. And it seemed like it was a success, as tons of positive feedback poured in through the application we were using, and my Slack blew up with messages.

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare once said. Sometimes, you just have to act like you’re happy and excited… even when you actually aren’t, and in reality, are feeling quite the opposite. And if you try hard enough, sometimes, you can actually fool yourself into that feeling.

I always marvel at how and why Americans and Canadians seem to think they speak proper English, or “English without an accent.” First of all, in case anyone needs a history lesson…. English, surprise surprise, comes from… ENGLAND. And second of all, American accented English still has an accent, as does Canadian accented English (let’s stay away from the regional accents for this conversation). We ALL have accents. It’s just that some may be easier or harder for you to understand given your own accent.

I was sitting on a Zoom 1:1 call with one of my Canadian colleagues, who I’ve gotten along with quite well. He’s a White male and is stereotypically Canadian in his accents (his “abouts” sound just as you’d imagine) and his politeness/friendliness. And out of nowhere, he started venting to me about how a new colleague on my team started, and he cannot believe my boss made the decision to assign her to one of his large accounts. “I mean, she’s new and she barely speaks English!” he complained to me. “Her written English is fine, but it’s so, so difficult to understand what she is saying during calls. Customers barely understand her. You know I’m a nice guy, but this is just ridiculous. You and Sabrina have been great at your jobs; you are so eloquent, you present so well. I need someone like you on this account.”

What he really means when he says “someone like you” is someone who speaks English with a Canadian/British/American accent. What he really means to say is that he doesn’t like the new colleague on my team, who was born and raised in Mexico up until she was 13 and who speaks English with a Mexican accent. What he means is that unless you speak Canadian/British/American accented English, your English is unacceptable and you “barely” even speak the English language. What he means to say is that he’s unaccepting of people who come from non-Western cultures who learn to speak English as a second language with the accent of whatever their first learned language was, and that if you speak with said accent that you no longer sound professional in front of enterprise customers who are spending a large sum of money with our company.

What I would like to know is: if HE were to speak another language, what accent would HE have, and how accepted would HE be by said country’s people? The complete lack of empathy for those who learn English as a second language infuriates me all the time, especially when I know English is the only language I am fully literate and fluent in. I really feel for those who learn English as second language because there is really nothing consistent or constant about it (no four tones like in Mandarin Chinese; not everything rhymes with a/i/u/e/o/n like in Japanese), and there are so many slangs and colloquialisms that even if you have studied English for 20+ years, you still won’t know it all.