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.