In my mid-twenties I was the office manager at an insurance adjustment firm, which is a title that meant almost nothing. What I actually did was accounts receivable and accounts payable, and errands, and whatever anyone needed, and on some days taking care of the dog. Ten dollars an hour. The owner smoked cigars at his desk all day, which is its own story.
About eight or nine months in, I was standing at the coffee machine when he walked up and asked me when I’d last gotten a raise.
I hadn’t. I told him so, and I got quietly excited about it.
He said I should give myself ten cents an hour on the next check.
Here’s something about me: I like math. I do arithmetic in my head for fun. So I had it before he finished the sentence. A dime an hour is a dollar every ten hours. Four dollars a week. Sixteen dollars a month.
I said thank you.
I want to be careful, because this is where the story wants a villain and I don’t have one.
That man let me work through cancer treatment. Let me come in for half days and never took a dollar out of my check for it. He was eccentric and he was generous, and the two had nothing to do with each other.
He wasn’t underpaying me out of malice. He was paying what he thought the job was worth, and he was probably right about the job. The gap wasn’t between what he offered and what was fair. It was between what the job was worth and what I believed I was worth, and I had those two things welded together without ever deciding to.
By then I’d been carrying a complaint for about two years.
The church thing had ended. I’d spent almost a year on odd jobs before the insurance office. And I had a story that explained all of it, which I could deliver on request and frequently did.
The university, for handing me a degree that turned out to be worth nothing. The economy. The hiring managers who wouldn’t give me a chance — a whole category of faceless people, conveniently unreachable, reliably at fault.
My wife heard every version of it. She was two or three years into being married to me.
And I lived the way people live when they hold a story like that. The dread started Sunday afternoon, somewhere in the middle of the day, well before it needed to. Evenings and weekends were the real life. The other five days were the toll.
The dime is what broke it, and not for the reason you’d think.
The cigar smoke should have done it. Getting cussed out by clients, occasionally by coworkers, should have done it. The sheer flatness of the work should have done it. None of that shook me, because all of it fit the story. Every miserable thing that happened was more evidence for the case I was already making.
Ten cents didn’t fit. Ten cents was a number, and I couldn’t argue with a number. Somebody had assessed what I was contributing and priced it, and the price was a dime.
The complaint had no answer for that. The university didn’t set that number. Neither did the economy. It was a measurement of what I was actually doing, in that building, that year — and the only person who could change it was me.
That’s what it cost. Not the pay, the excuse. The day the story stopped working was the day I couldn’t hand the problem to anyone else, and I’ve never found a way to describe how much heavier that is at first.
So I went to work on it, badly at first and then less badly.
I got my insurance adjuster’s license while I was there. I found a mentor — a real one, someone I could describe the actual situation to, out loud, including the parts where I suspected I was the problem. He started showing me a version of myself I hadn’t been able to see. I read business books I only half understood, mostly to get familiar with a language nobody had ever taught me. Zig Ziglar was in the car.
And I had time, because a job that uses a tenth of you leaves the other nine-tenths sitting there. What had been dead space turned into something closer to an incubator. I learned accounts payable and receivable properly. I learned how insurance actually works, which I still use — I know how to protect my family because of that job, and I’m not being cute about that.
It also became very clear that nobody was standing between me and any of it. I had a library card. The internet existed. There was no gate and no keeper.
I stayed two more years after that. Three and a half total.
I left making about thirteen dollars an hour. Three dollars more than I started, which sounds like nothing and was nothing.
What actually got me out was a friend at another company who knew I was looking and asked for my resume. That’s the whole mechanism. Someone asked, at random, on a day I happened to be ready — and the readiness was the only part of it I controlled.
I aced that interview. I was professional and prepared, and I could speak the language, and none of that was true of the man who’d been standing at the coffee machine doing math in his head. That job turned into data management, which turned into the last twenty years.
I look back at that stretch now and I’m proud of him. That’s not a thing I say often about my younger self.
He never got the scapegoat back. I’ve never wanted it.
David Willis 