Graduating from college and finding a job is a lot like hooking up in a bar while being hammered.  Rumor has it that there is at least one hot chick in there, though there seem to be a lot of average to rogue-ish looking girls that can play the bitch card because there is such a bad ratio of girls to guys.  These are the kind of girls that a dude celebrates when he’s in the mug down by the pinball machine only to relive his night in ghastly horror the next day as his friends show him pictures off of their camera phones while they are lying their asses off about their own failures and roadside hags.

That’s the best analogy for getting a job straight out of college.  That’s what it was like for me.  That was Centex Home Equity.

For everything that sucks, there is a reason.  Any one that tells you differently, sucks.  And for me, my job as a Marketing Manager Assistant at CHEC sucked because of a guy named Neal, my boss.  Before I get into my position and the magnitude of suckiness – let me first start with a few things.

Impunity.  I can tell this story about Centex Home Equity with absolute impunity.  Because they long longer exist.  Yes, they went boom on poor people with bad financial management under a bunch of sleaze bag loan officers and managers.  Walking down the originations side of the corporate offices was like the 20-year high school reunion and meeting back up with the jocks too dumb to get a real job or work in insurance.  It reeked of cronyism and deflated, bland testosterone evaporated into the reek of bad aftershave.

After the mortgage rates climbed from 1,000 year lows followed by the collapse of the housing market, the sub-prime loans securitized into financial packages for international investors self-destructed and harkoned like the Archangel Gabriel to the end of the financial world as we know it.  The good news is that I hear that the Sudan has been completely unaffected.  It’s still mud burgers year round.

As with all sector oblivion stories – the weak bail, the average get bought, and the strong get bailouts.  CHEC was sold by Centex to another company and that was that.  Now my four thousand unused Centex Home Equity business cards are useless.  Damn.

Clarification.  I am going to tell you that my job was the worst job in the world.  But let’s be clear – if you watch Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe and you see your job featured, chances are – your job sucks way worse than mine.  But here’s the thing – when you’re hired to shovel out shit blockages in the NYC sewers you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.  When you’re the Al Qaeda HR manager, you know what you’re getting into.  By definition, you have chosen this job … and thus can’t really complain about it, right?

The worst jobs (like mine) are the ones that fool you.  To follow the intro analogy, these are the girls that look good after six or seven beers, the flirtatious ones that stay in the deep shadows of the club as if afraid of strong light.  Only when you are sucked into their web, do you actually see the foul temptress for the hippo gutter slut that she is and then … of course … it’s too late.

Background.  I graduated from Oklahoma State University as an undergraduate with a major in Budweiser and a double minor in Goldeneye and Fraternity.  For as untouchable as I was in Goldeneye, I found that very few employers were suitably impressed.  Looking back on it, I’m sure that had I shown up to my job interview with a Super NES, I would have been more successful.  By the way, my college transcripts said that I was a history major … but I attended about as many history classes as you did.  And I still pulled a 3.4 GPA.

So I had to go into graduate school.  I chose a Masters of Telecommunications Science.  Technology and dot coms were exploding all over the country.  These degrees were being printed on solid gold.  OSU had the only TCOM graduate program in the country.  I could already see myself sailing on a yacht with T-Pain with badass Nubian mermaids on every deck.

You can see where this is headed.

The Dot Com bubble burst when I was a semester into the program.  There were no Nubian mermaids.  There were no yachts.  There were no jobs.  T-Pain didn’t want to hang out.  So I was stuck, wandering why the hell I was paying OSU so much in borrowed money to get a degree that was suddenly worth its weight on Confederate Dollars.

Nepotism Works.  Despite my own excessive enjoyments of my undergraduate years, I did indeed have friends that had parentals that had pointed and guided them in the right direction.  As I was toiling away in the MSTM program at OSU, these bronzed business gods were climbing the ladder, building the empire.  So it stands to reason then that I would ride their coattails for the first good opportunity to come along.  And I did.

Meet Johnnie, statistical marketing/database genius, tied for second on the Lucky best friend list.  Yep, Lee Majors is the other (sorry Mike).  He had just landed a job at this Dallas company, a financial services firm named Centex Home Equity.  And their Director of Online Marketing was looking for an assistant …

Hey!  I had programed websites while in college.  I knew HTML, CSS, a ghetto version of SQL.

Hey!  I was getting a degree in telecommunications stuff with a business emphasis.

I was perfect for this role … namely because it had a salary attached to the job description and I was really great at stretching a few lines of Cold Fusion into something that made me sound like a web guru.  So before the job was even posted on Monster or passed onto the recruiters, my homeboy got me a phone interview with a guy named Neal.  And of course, I kill interviews.  That’s what being in a Fraternity does for you.  That’s what being a bullshit artist does for you.  (Bowing)

The job was mine.

The Ball Licker.  Let’s be clear, I am not calling Neal a Ball Licker.  Instead, I am just repeating what someone else called him.  That is a story that I will get to in just a moment.  First, let me tell you more about this guy.  Firstly, he’s Puerto Rican and 75% black, but he was adopted by well-to-do Dutch parents and grew up in Holland.  If you’ve never heard a Dutch person speak (examples – Bas Rutten, Guus Hiddink, etc), then let me assure you that it is the worst accent in the world.  They seem to incorporate the worst traits of the French (arrogance, long-windedness) with the worst traits of the Germans (anal retentive, spiritually dead).  The accent makes me want to pierce my retinas with a heated syringe.  It’s that bad.

The other thing is that there is a reason that people have that phrase for “Going Dutch” where everyone pays for themselves.  It’s because these might be the cheapest people on the planet.

So here is Neal, self absorbed, racist against non-whites, Dutch, obsessed with titles and advancement, and without a shred of ability or common sense.  Yes, I said he was racist against non-whites even though he is black-Latino mix.  Need proof?  I did an advertisement for one of our online banners and I had a woman (who happened to be black) as the main focus, looking happy and confident in her finances, etc etc.  When I showed this to Neal, he pulled me aside and said very conspiratorial, “this is not the type of person that we want on our ads.  She’s … black!”

I guess I was supposed to feel excited that I had been let into the upper echelon of the White Man’s club with such a revelation, but all I could think was that I was looking at an Uncle Tom or Uncle Pedro or Uncle Van Der Saar or something.  Could this dumbass really be such a … dumbass?

The Report. Here’s what made this guy the worst boss in the world.  Retail marketing was spending something like $15 million a year in lead generation.  Online marketing was spending $300,000.  The cost per lead on the retail side was something like $18 per, while Online marketing was fetching about $65 per.  The retail team produced a monthly report of one to two pages, consisting of three charts on each, that was distributed to about four people outside the team.

So logic would dictate that the Online Marketing team with roughly 2% of the comparative budget would have a report consisting of a haiku on toilet paper thumb tacked on the breakroom bulletin board, right?  Wrong.  Neal produced a 65-page, full color report detailing every aspect of the website, critical pieces of data such as how many visits there were last month to the Privacy Policy page found in the small legalese at the footer of the home page.  Equally impressive was the distribution list … which included the top 50 people in the company.  If you’re counting, that’s 3000 pages of reports.

I’m not making this up.

Guess who’s job it was to create these reports?  Not in Power Point mind you.  That would have been too easy.  No, in a weird combination of Excel, Visio, and Photoshop.  The new Marketing Manager Assistant, aka the Punk-ass Bitch.

me.

lower case.

If one single red arrow was more than a pica off on the graph, the entire page had to be redone, reprinted, rebound, and more.  He was a Nazi when it came to presentation, though there was no data, no performance, nothing at all to present.  It literally took me 30 days to compile a single report.  A monthly report.  Yeah, that’s right again.  I spent the whole month working on my monthly report and not actually being allowed to do anything that might generation leads.

Neal’s time?  He was busy installing useless applets on every C-level persons computer for Coffee Time!  Or haggling with online vendors until their salesperson literally shot themselves on speaker phone.  I think Neal single-handedly wiped out half of the Dot Com start-ups in California.

Back to Ball Licker.  I mentioned that Neal was as anal retentive as a German scatologist, right?  All of our vendors hated him because of the insane demands, last minute changes, poor decisions, lack of client accountability, and late payments.  It just so happened that one of his vendors sent him back a response on one of his requests and included the internal email train from their company.  Neal read the email train.  I told you that he was anal retentive.

So it just so happens that the sales guy said to his engineer about Neal’s request, “make sure that you do it right, because that ball licker at Centex, Neal <I’m omitting his last name> will freak out if you don’t.”

Neal is Dutch, as I have said.  He called my homeboy Johnnie into his office and he asked, “Johnnie, is being called ball licker a bad thing?”

Johnnie: “Hell yes!  The guy is saying that you suck on testicles.”

So the name stuck in our department ever since that moment and I was its high priest.

The Reset Button.  Ok, so let me get to the point of this article.  Neal had a mini-fro … not a full blown one like the Afro Ninja, but a Latin version, thick and curly.  But Neal was bald on top, so he had this little white spot right on the crown of his head, surrounded by black hair.  Whenever he would call me into his office to point out the 76 mistakes I had made in the formatting on page 43 of the monthly report, I would stand behind him and listen to his Dutch voice drone on and on and on.  I don’t know how many hours of my life were wasted in such a fashion.

Inevitably, I would focus on the white spot staring at me from his scalp only sixteen inches away.  It called to me.  In my daydreams, I envisioned myself smacking it as hard as possible with my palm, stunning Neal momentarily from his ramble.  Maybe for just a moment, his eyes would roll back into his head as his mouth continued to move but no words came out.  I was sure that if I slapped him hard enough, his nervous system would reboot and he not even fully realize what had happened.

It was my Reset Button.

The Happy Ending.  Obviously a guy like my boss was doomed to fail and he did.  Several times in the same company before bombing out of the company completely.  I wandered to another IT company before settling on this blog, writing, and fatherhood.

Sometimes I visit Neal on Twitter.  He’s an independent, online, strategy consultant.  I’m happy to report that he hasn’t changed at all.  Reading his tweets, I can’t help but unconsciously reach for ALT+F4 … but it just wouldn’t be the same as Hitting his Reset Button.  I’m now looking for viruses that I can email.