6

CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’RE FIRED!

I’VE BEEN FIRED—MORE THAN ONCE. The first time was during the first Clinton Administration, when I was a Capitol Hill press secretary working for US Congressman Peter DeFazio from Oregon. I had left another press secretary job with US Congressman Peter Deutsch from South Florida after a year and a half to join DeFazio’s team. Making only $20,000 a year with Deutsch, the raise to $25,000 was incentive enough to switch Peters. I had college loans to pay, was completely on my own financially, and was living with my boyfriend who was paying our rent.

What I didn’t realize when I took the gig was that DeFazio was more Libertarian than Democrat and he insisted that every press release read “DeFazio Bashes Clinton on _______ fill-in-the-blank.” Having served as the college president of Students for Clinton a few years earlier at Northwestern University, this was a bad ideological fit for both of us. So at twenty-three years old, after six months on the job, I was fired. Embarrassed and shocked, I didn’t look for another gig on the Hill but waited tables at an Italian restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland. A few months later, I got married to the boyfriend, backpacked around Southeast Asia, and then moved to New York, where I landed my first job in television as an investigative assistant producer.

About fifteen years later, I got fired again: this time, from a tech start-up. Here, I was told it was a culture thing, which in tech parlance means that they just don’t like you very much. They kept me on for another six months as a consultant because while they may not have liked my personality, they liked my writing.

Kick ahead another few years, and I get fired a third time—this time from a digital media start-up. Here, I was told everyone liked me, at least most people did, but I was just too darned expensive. At my exit meeting, my manager, who was in preschool when I was in high school, said they could hire three people for my salary. She pointed to a senior-level twenty-seven-year-old who was successfully running multiple pieces of their multi-million-dollar business and earning a little more than half of what I made. That twenty-seven-year-old was an exceptionally talented guy—but the fact that they couldn’t find another place for me given how “smart, creative, and strategic” they believed I was reinforced the point. At a company of Millennials, I was too old and expensive for them to see a “fit” or try to find one. They also assured me that I wasn’t really getting fired, we were just separating—as if it were mutual and maybe one day, when they were ready, we would get back together again.

THE DISPOSABLE EMPLOYEE

In an April 2016 article in The New York Times, “Congratulations! You’re Fired,” Dan Lyons discusses the bizarre and cruel culture of the start-up HubSpot, where he worked for almost two years. He describes how the tech world’s ethos is infecting corporate cultures everywhere.¹

“When you got fired, it was called ‘graduation.’ We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, ‘Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers in her next big adventure,’” Lyons writes.²

Lyons describes this surreal ritual at HubSpot, where he landed after getting laid off from Newsweek after twenty-five years in journalism. Lyons wasn’t fired from HubSpot; he left voluntarily. In his book Disruption: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble he writes about the cultish frat vibe of HubSpot and the way it treats its employees as disposable widgets who can be replaced and discarded. Sadly, this approach may not be unique to Hub-Spot. It is becoming accepted—not just at tech companies, but across corporate America. In a modern workplace of all-you-can-eat organic snacks and Belgian beer gardens, it turns out that old-fashioned job loyalty is as retro as the company’s Xerox machine.

“They see Silicon Valley as a model of enlightenment and forward thinking, even though this ‘new’ way of working is actually the oldest game in the world: the exploitation of labor by capital,” Dan Lyons writes in The New York Times. “Unfortunately, working at a start-up all too often involves getting bossed around by undertrained (or untrained) managers and fired on a whim. Bias based on age, race and gender is rampant, as is sexual harassment.”³

TOUR OF DUTY

Because the tech culture is influencing the old guard in how they treat and relate to their employees, the social contract is getting even more flimsy. People can be fired, laid off, separated—you name the euphemism. The bottom line: There is zero job security anymore.

Workers in tech companies are “serving a tour of duty” that might last a year or two, writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in his book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age. Companies dispose of people when someone better or cheaper comes along. The goal, Hoffman writes, is to strategically leverage your tour of duty so it aligns to the goals of the company and betters yourself as well.⁴ Get what you need, do some good work, and prepare to move on. The honeymoon won’t last. This is either depressing or empowering, depending on your age and probably your reliance on a steady income.

“We’re a team, not a family” is the corporate mantra that emerged from Netflix in 2009.⁵ This Netflix code has apparently been adopted by other companies, including HubSpot: They invest in you when it’s working and dump you when it’s not. Lyons also describes a data-driven metric called value over replacement player (VORP) that the company uses for evaluating employees. It’s cold metrics for sizing up an employee’s worth. It came from baseball, where owners set prices on different players. Clearly, this is no family. And sadly, this type of employer/employee relationship, Lyons writes, is becoming the new normal.

In chapter 4, Shelley Zalis talked about how she ran her company OTX like a family. Her business was rooted in a very female notion of caring and sharing. There was discipline and everyone was expected to carry their weight and respect one another, but unlike the data-driven Netflix model, Shelley was looking to create a long-term relationship with her employees. She built an environment where she not only would want to work but also that worked for her employees and their families.

“I had a real authentic company. It was a family, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We didn’t hide the truth; we shared truths and then we worked our way through them,” Shelley says.

With Shelley as the CEO, OTX thrived. But this model is not the culture celebrated in a start-up world where words like “lean” and “efficiency” are most admired. One of the issues is that companies want absolute loyalty—but there’s no reciprocity. At the media start-up, I spent months hiring an entire team only to be fired the week my team started. That, sadly, is the new relationship. We are in an age where industries are contracting and evolving, and qualified people are being laid off, forced out, or simply fired.

The paradigm of the workforce is shifting. It’s like we are all on corporate Tinder swiping right, maybe getting laid, and then moving on to look for something better. There’s no long-term marriage, just a series of flings—and if you’re lucky, an occasional short-term relationship. If this is the new normal, how do we protect ourselves? What can we do to succeed?

BE READY TO REINVENT YOURSELF AGAIN AND AGAIN

Deb Copaken texts me that she’s running a few minutes late. The express A train has gone local and it’s taking forever to travel the 150 blocks or so uptown to her stop in Inwood, at the upper tip of Manhattan’s West Side. She’s making the pilgrimage from a guitar shop downtown, where she was getting guitars restrung for her kids: Jacob, twenty, Sasha, eighteen, and Leo, eight. Deb plays the guitar too, though she has never taken a lesson. She taught herself the chords by watching YouTube, and now she can hack her way through just about any song and on occasion performs in New York, singing and strumming.

Perhaps Deb’s approach to music is a metaphor for her creative, bold, and fierce DIY spirit. Deb is fearless and frank, smart, provocative, and unabashed. Her petite frame is almost at odds with her piercing blue eyes, which make her seem bigger and stronger. Deb says she is the “master of making shit work.” She is undeniably a woman who makes things happen for herself often, and often against the odds. Deb has reinvented herself multiple times because she’s wanted to and because she’s had to. This is why for weeks I have been stalking Deb, trying to secure an interview time amidst her overstuffed schedule. And it’s why on a Sunday night, the last day of the school winter break, I’m sitting with Deb in her cozy kitchen. She is offering me tea and dried apricots while she makes Annie’s Mac and Cheese for her youngest child Leo. Her older two are away in college.

Earlier today, she had dropped off her daughter at the airport. Sasha was heading back to Northwestern University, where she’s a freshman. As we talk, Deb gets a call from Sasha to say that she landed safely in Chicago and is wondering if her birth control arrived at her dorm. Deb assures Sasha that it should have been delivered and to check the mail room. She describes the six-month odyssey of getting birth control coverage for her eighteen-year-old daughter. It’s fitting that we are talking about the obstacles women face in both securing birth control and getting insurance coverage. After all, sexism, sex, and health insurance are topics Deb frequently dissects in her writing. But Deb may be best known for her 2000 New York Times best seller Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War. It wasn’t a book about sex, but rather a memoir about her experience as a Paris-based war photographer fresh out of Harvard, covering conflicts in Afghanistan, Haiti, Russia, and Zimbabwe in the late 1980s.

Shutterbabe was an intimate look at Deb’s adventures, capturing history and war through the camera lens in a pre-Internet, pre-cell phone, pre-ISIS world. Her memoir details her hustle, grit, and spicy sex life during this time. The book also grapples with the sexism she faced and the realities of being a young menstruating woman near the front lines. In one of Shutterbabe’s opening scenes, Deb gets her period in the back of a truck as she’s embedded with the Mujahideen—the freedom fighters in Afghanistan. The tampon stash she’s toting in her backpack gets soaked and explodes. She’s left bleeding on the side of the road, with only makeshift sanitary supplies.

Shutterbabe was both lauded and excoriated by the media, Deb reminds me. She shows me a review of the book that ran in Talk magazine that still horrifies her. In a few snarky sentences, the article, written by a female reporter, manages to reduce Deb to a self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, bored mom whose writing ability is questionable. And even worse, the biting description slut-shames Deb and implies that a date rape on the eve of her college graduation was something that maybe, possibly she brought on herself. At the end of Shutterbabe, Deb writes about choosing motherhood over hopscotching around the world covering wartorn nations. This turn in her story causes another reviewer, this time a man, to proclaim Deb a feminist sellout. Slut and sellout—she can’t seem to win. The reviews stung then, and even in their half-life, continue to sting.

“When the reviews for Shutterbabe came out, it was the first time that I was in a fetal ball on my bed thinking that the world is mean to women who are trying to succeed,” Deb says. “It’s particularly mean to mothers who try to succeed and particularly mean to women in nontraditional roles who are trying to succeed.”

But Shutterbabe is Deb’s baby, even though she never liked the title. She is proud of the memoir and the positive and empowering impact it’s had on her female readers, who still write to her frequently. Deb says that she wanted to call the memoir News-whore. The term is used in news circles—not about sex, but about journalists’ near vulture-like obsession with getting the story. Playing on the double entendre, Deb also wanted to reclaim the word “whore” in a way that, years later, Lena Dunham would successfully do with Girls on HBO. But Deb’s publisher pushed back and Shutterbabe stuck. All these years later, the “babe” still makes Deb cringe.

Living Out Loud, Loudly

In many ways, the book still defines Deb, but she truly defies any definition. Memoir writing is just one of her accomplishments. When I ask Deb how she describes herself these days, she goes into the living room and grabs a business card and then looks at her Facebook profile on her iPhone. Depending on the audience or the gig she’s trying to land, she’s a combination of an artist, an author, a storyteller, a photographer, a screenwriter, and a performer. Deb lives out loud and lives loudly. She doesn’t fit neatly into any box, as so many of us don’t. And that’s partly why I am here. In fact, I would not have known about all the ups, downs, pivots, and somersaults Deb has experienced, except for the fact that she has broadcast them. She has no fear of speaking up, even if it’s not the polite thing to do—especially if it’s not the polite thing to do. In 2013, Deb wrote a piece for The Nation about sexism in the literary world that her friends warned could blow up her writing career forever.⁶ She took the chance. Deb says that because of this nuclear piece, she most likely will never get another book deal for a novel or memoir from a traditional publisher. She believes that she has offended the publishing establishment and has burned too many bridges. But she has no regrets.

I knew Deb from her post-war, pre-Shutterbabe days when she was an associate producer at Dateline NBC. Even then, she had a big reputation: former war photographer and current badass. She was also married and a mom to two small children. In August 1997, when Princess Diana was killed in a paparazzi chase, Deb was on a six-month unpaid maternity leave with her newborn daughter. She got a call from the executive producer of Dateline to fly to London because he knew that she knew the photographers who were arrested. Deb was still nursing every few hours. Her daughter was not weaned, but she got on the plane, forgetting her breast pump. She was squeezing her boobs across the Atlantic to extract her milk. Not long after the Diana story, Deb decided that the news life was too unpredictable and not compatible with raising small children. She had friends who were making hefty advances on their book deals, and she had always envisioned a novel or memoir about her experience as a war photographer. So she gave it a shot. Within a few months, Deb sold Random House a proposal for what became Shutterbabe, for twice her Dateline salary.

Over the past decade or so, I’ve tangentially followed Deb’s career. I’ve seen her appearances on the Today show when she was promoting new books or discussing articles she wrote about parenting. I’ve read about Deb in several New York Times columns showcasing her life, from her eclectic social circles to her then-pioneering move to Harlem. I’ve read articles that she’s written for other publications. And then seemingly out of nowhere, in November 2014, Deb’s post from the women’s website Cafe.com, “How I Got Rejected from a Job at The Container Store,” appeared on my Facebook newsfeed. The piece was raw and poignant and completely unexpected. It left me and others flummoxed. How did this happen to Deb Copaken? In social media language, the messages went something like: OMG, WTF, seriously?

It’s All Personal

The piece was about Deb’s failed attempt to get a job as a greeter at The Container Store over the holidays. Having just been fired from her position as an editor at a health and wellness website, recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and needing health insurance for herself and her kids, Deb was understandably desperate. It all began with what looked like a spam email from The Container Store advertising holiday employment with benefits. The benefits piece especially intrigued Deb. She applied for the holiday greeter gig, was rejected, and as many writers do when they have personally powerful fodder, she shared her story with the world.

It began:

“Last year, during a ten-month period, the following happened in this exact order: I got separated from my husband of two decades, who, having lost his job to the recession, moved across the country to start a business, leaving me as sole provider and parent to our two children still at home; I abandoned the novel I was working on and found a job with benefits as an Executive Editor at a health and wellness website; I took a boarder into the room newly abandoned by my college freshman to help pay my rent, which the new owners had hiked up an extra $900 a month because they could; I was diagnosed with stage 0 breast cancer; I watched my company, which was preparing to go public, fire dozens of qualified people within my first month of work, after which I was informed that my job, too, was on the chopping block; I survived the cancer but was fired from my job. Then, unable to afford my rent any longer, I moved my remaining family into smaller digs.”⁷

The piece went on to describe the details of Deb losing her health insurance and the COBRA nightmare that ensured. And then she drove the point home—a point that made headlines, stirred controversy, and had the TV networks calling.

“Because seriously, if an Emmy-award-winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed.”

The story went viral. Many saw themselves in it. With an economy in flux, no one is safe; we are all vulnerable. The story was also radioactive. Some called Deb whiny and entitled. If she really wants a job at The Container Store, she should scrub her Harvard pedigree from the resume, others suggested. And why should an Emmy-award-winning producer be expected to get a retail job at The Container Store anyway?⁸

Amidst the snark and schadenfreude, many others related to the piece and had compassion for a newly separated mom of three struggling to keep it all together, managing a health crisis, and paying her bills. The piece resonated with me too, deeply. I’ve lost my job, been fired from jobs, and searched for more jobs than I can count. I’ve responded to jobs online and applied for many positions that I was overqualified for. Hustling for work and stressing about money is never far from my mind either.

Deb’s piece wasn’t simple clickbait; it was intended to spark and drive conversation. She was speaking her truth, her reality. And Deb’s reality was that while she had just landed a new position as a writer at Cafe.com, the website that posted The Container Store piece, Deb’s job was only paying her $34,000 a year as a full-time writer. That salary for New York City was unconscionably low, even by low-paying blog-writing standards. But Deb accepted the position because she had MRIs, breast cancer follow-up appointments, and doctor visits for her kids. Her plan was to take this gig and supplement the salary with other freelance work.

“I thought I could do eight hundred other jobs. It was about getting my foot in the door. It was about getting the health insurance,” Deb says.

The piece proved strategic. It hit the second week into her job at Cafe.com and immediately Deb got a raise. “I think they realized they were going to lose me if they didn’t give me a decent salary and that it was going to be really bad press for them if anyone asked me what I earned and I said $34,000,” Deb says. “Later I found out a guy exactly in my position was earning $200,000 a year. He was an editor and a writer like me. So immediately I got a raise to $80,000, which was still pathetic. I kept saying, ‘I can’t make it on this salary. I can’t make it.’”

But Deb is the definition of hustle. She’s not whining; she’s working her ass off.

The Master of Making Shit Work

“Last year, I would wake up at four in the morning and write my books or my screenplays, and then I would do an eight- or nine-hour day at work, and then I would come home and feed the kids and get my daughter’s college applications done, and then it’s nine at night and I’m doing other stuff like editing photos that I shot,” Deb says. “Sometimes I would sneak out of work to do extra jobs. I literally snuck out of work during lunch and said that I was going on a two-hour lunch. But I did a photo shoot for a friend that I edited that night. And for my vacation, I got a gig for Good magazine to go to Paris. That way I could take my child on vacation someplace cool and get paid $5,000 to do that. I’m the master of making shit work.”

Within a year of The Container Store piece running, Deb was fired. Her boss told her that they were taking a different tack at Cafe.com, which was renamed Mid.com, before they bought and merged with Scary Mommy, a site with a different tone and audience. He also said that they couldn’t afford her, even though she was still making well under $100,000 a year.

“You’re expensive, my boss told me,” Deb says. Her boss was apparently self-funding the venture, using family money. When the company started looking for investors, her salary, though still small by New York standards, was large by online writing standards, and it stood out amidst other salaries on the balance sheets.

I tell Deb that something similar had recently happened to me at a company populated by Millennials whose salary was a third of mine because, well, they had a third of my experience.

“Corporate America is screwing its seasoned workers. And they are using the excuse of expense. I don’t know what the answer to all of this is,” Deb says.

The answer may be to have lots of jobs and keep multiple options open. Deb says in 2015 she had six major jobs. She had a full-time writing/editing job at Cafe.com. She was a freelance photographer and writer. She wrote the screenplay for Shutterbabe, after it had been in the hands of many others over many years. She also sold three books: The ABCs of Adulthood, The ABCs of Parenthood, and The ABCs of Love. And in a more corporate move, Deb also landed a position as the Vice President Deputy Editorial Director for Health at Edelman, a communications agency.

“In 2016, if you don’t do seven things, you don’t survive,” Deb says. “You have to learn how to be a hybrid. Whatever you’ve learned, whatever your skillset is, you have to learn another one . . . and maybe another,” Deb says. “All of us are capable of doing anything, except for things like brain surgery. You need to really study for that. But basic life skills and basic creative skills are attainable by anybody. And we are in an amazing age for that because we can learn it all on YouTube or Google it.”

To prove her point, Deb walks me into her living room where a large, beautiful canvas hangs above her sofa.

“I just painted this,” Deb tells me, smiling.

Inspired by a recent Frank Stella exhibition, Deb wanted to see how he created art with masking tape. So she went onto YouTube and saw that she needed to buy a particular gel. Then she realized that she didn’t need a frame if she painted the sides, so she made a point of remembering to paint the sides.

“I don’t think that innate intelligence is important. I think that for all of us, no matter the level of our intelligence, whatever our IQ, it’s just a matter of saying to yourself, ‘I am capable of doing anything, I just have to learn how,’” Deb says.

Like the rest of us, Deb can feel stuck and even bitter. But it doesn’t stop her from looking forward and figuring out what she needs to do to move ahead. A piece to this puzzle is staying relevant by showing your relevance. In a social media world, optics is everything. Putting yourself out there is essential these days. It’s not about ego as much as it is about seeking more opportunities and staying top of mind for others.

“As far as promoting myself, I get shit for it. It’s subtle. I’ll be at a dinner party and people will be like, oh yeah, you’re on that Facebook all of the time,” Deb says. “I’ll be like, that’s what I need to do to keep my career alive. You cannot not be on social media these days. You cannot not be a brand these days. You have to be your own mini-mogul because nobody will be it for you.”

Getting Younger

Two months after interviewing Deb, I see on Facebook that she’s taking a two-week leave from her job at Edelman to join the TV show Younger as a writer/consultant in Los Angeles. The show is about Liza, a forty-year-old divorced mom of a teenaged daughter who suddenly needs to get a job after her ex-husband leaves her financially ruined. Liza realizes that reentering the workforce at forty is crazy hard, so she decides that to get a job she’s going to fake being younger—much younger. Liza’s best friend gives her a makeover and she pretends to be twenty-six years old. Goodbye forty, hello twentysomething! Now faking youth, Liza bubbles with confidence and lands a job as an assistant to an editor at a publishing house. It’s the quintessential modern girl relaunch sitcom.

Funny enough, when I tell people about this book that I’m writing, several people suggest that I watch Younger. So the fact that Deb landed a writing gig with the show working with the acclaimed executive producer Darren Star feels like serendipity, or karma, or that it obviously is just meant to be. Except that we know from chapter 3 that it’s not just a happy accident Deb got this job. She had forces in place to help make this happen. She is at the helm of engineering her own serendipity.

Deb says that she and Darren Star have known each other since 2001, when he bought the rights to Shutterbabe for Dreamworks. They went on a trip to Paris together for research, became friends, and have remained friends ever since.

“We were having dinner recently, and he was asking me all sorts of questions about what a divorced middle-aged woman would think and do. I was telling him funny stories about dating younger men, and he just asked me to write for the show,” Deb says.

Deb is about creating, evolving, and figuring it out as she goes. This strategy not only fulfills a passion, it pays the bills. She understands the need to stay nimble and adapt to change. As she says, we are living at a time when we can learn just about everything we need from research on Google or YouTube. But we can also learn new skills from online classes, through workshops, at universities, or even leaning on mentors or others in our networks. Rather than feeling stuck or irrelevant, it’s empowering to know that we can keep evolving, well beyond what we may have initially trained to do. In fact, it’s important that we make this happen.

As we will continue to learn in the next chapter, staying relevant, being top of mind, and keeping your options open is critical to marrying timing with opportunity.