Prevailing conditions refer to the current state of the environment or that individuals or entities must observe and adapt to in order to survive.
CLIMBING ABOARD
Entering my second year with the firm felt like coming up for air after being rag dolled underwater by rough surf. Eight months of banging out data entry for fifty-five hour a week and another four months rotting on the vine without the opportunity to work at all had made it painfully clear that I needed to establish a niche for myself within the firm. I needed consistent engagement with projects that didn’t deplete my humanity (wishful thinking for a consultant, but I was still an optimist at this point). With that objective in mind, I puffed up my industry credentials and got staffed on another healthcare project, this time a system implementation and clung to the role like the side of a ship.
Once I earned a modest reputation for competence within my niche, the project tides began to turn. I no longer felt like I was fighting for a job within my job. Healthcare became my industry and systems implementations (SI) became my area of expertise. Sure, the work I was doing was boring, tedious, and unfulfilling, but that was a problem for another day. For now, I could breathe. SI projects burned far less hot than the six-week sprints common in pure strategy work with longer timelines and fewer surprises. The hours were still beefy and travel remained a grind, but my days were more predictable: there were fewer fire drills, emergencies, and all-nighters, just a long, slow trudge. Gratitude is not what I felt rather the cessation of a grave concern. A man adrift will climb aboard any vessel.
LIFE AT SEA
The work itself had become more tolerable, but the road was still no picnic. Admittedly, there is an element of glamour to work travel, especially in the beginning. Before joining the firm, I could count the number of times I had flown on a plane or stayed in a hotel or dined at a posh restaurant on one hand. Now, I was striding through airports in tailored suits, sleeping in upscale hotels in big cities, and supping on haute cuisine. Every sight, every taste, every experience was new to me. As a wide-eyed kid from Maine who grew up with spotty access to Maslow’s lower hierarchies, this was an overwhelming buffet of abundance. Previously, I had only managed to peer in on wealth from the cold side of the window; now, looking out from the inside, I could see the world in every direction.
Unfortunately, the glamour of work travel suffers diminishing marginal returns. Life on the road grows increasingly mundane until the glitz is gone altogether. Flying out every Monday was brutal, but the Sundays at home were worse. The anticipation of the week ahead crept in like a thief to steal my afternoon and metastasize into dread by evening. Sleep remained a vague possibility, but, rested or otherwise, I would rise in darkness to catch a cab to the airport.
Exiting my apartment initiated work mode. If I could sit, my laptop was out. It was never to early (or late) to fire that rectangular bitch up and get down. I worked in the cab to the airport. I worked at the gate. I worked on the flight. I worked in the cab from the airport to the client site. This routine became rote. I would sleep walk through airports. The need for food became an annoyance. Luxury hotel rooms were nothing more than homogenous blurs I disregarded before collapsing into bleach-white sheets too tired to draw back the curtains and admire the view.
SAILING SOLO
Management consulting is an isolating profession. You travel alone, eat alone, exist in hotel rooms alone. This lifestyle came in stark contrast to the constant camaraderie I enjoyed in college. In the fraternity, meals were taken together as a rule. If you were hungry, all you had to do was yell the name of the dining hall and six guys would materialize. There was always a door open if you were in the mood for a chat or a beer or even an impromptu wrestling match right there in the hallway. The option to not be alone was always available. Now, my closest friends were scattered to the winds, transformed into voices on the phone that I heard less and less as our separate journeys slowly made us strangers to each other once more.
My college girlfriend also cut me loose. We visited a few times early on, but were in different places literally and figuratively. I was fully focused on my career while she still had another year left at school, which was a quantum leap in mindset that we could not reconcile. I was not supportive. When she voiced problems to me, I measured them against my own, and resented her for a perceived lack of resilience. Petty disputes became constant. In retrospect, creating trivial drama was likely her way of prompting a resolution to the strange limbo we were in, and, eventually, it did. It was an offhand remark about my choice of hand towels that ended things. Funny how things go. Despite the fundamental incompatibility revealed by the strain of distance, I felt her absence acutely in my growing isolation.
My support systems, developed over four years, were gone. I lost my social standing, my identity, my found family, and my first serious relationship all within six months of leaving college, and conditions showed no signs of improving given the nature and demands of my job. This was a precarious position. My reality was an echo chamber of drones and double talk and dissonance. I was left with only a job I loathed to cling to like driftwood and the growing fear of what would happen if my arms gave out. As ever, my greatest reassurance was talking to my dad on the phone, but, when we hung up, there I was again; in a hotel room, an airport, my apartment; watching the red taillights of his truck disappear.
BAROMETRIC PRESSURE
Intense pressure is endemic to corporate client service. Everything is urgent. Every outcome demands consideration. Will this project be successful? Will this meeting I have to lead go well? Is this next single action correct or will it somehow get me fired? Every move rippled across the web of our careers. Even small tasks like sending emails was an agonizing process. I would run through an ingrained internal checklist multiple times before whispering “ah, fuck it” and clicking send. Of course, I still had a delay-send function applied as a fail-safe to catch the oh-so-tragic “shit, shit, shit” mistakes that reveal themselves one millisecond after sending.
This obsessive attention to detail might seem hyperbolic, but I assure you it was not. There was an urban legend everyone had heard about a senior consultant fresh out of b-school who accidently blasted an email out to a group of VPs with an attached excel file that detailed each of their compensation packages. Supposedly, the SC was dropped from the project immediately and later let go. Obviously, that’s a worst case scenario, but even minor offenses like neglecting to copy a partner, forgetting an attachment, or, god forbid, perpetrating a grammatical error, would leave your cheeks burning with embarrassment. Mistakes on any level eroded credibility.
Unfortunately for us mortals, it requires a tremendous amount of mental energy to approach perfection in a single instance let alone sustain perfection indefinitely. Advancing from 95% confidence to 99% confidence is a massive leap and achieving the theoretical 100% I’ll-bet-my-fucking-life-not-a-single-bullet-point-is-misaligned certainty requires orders of magnitude more attention to detail. Making a mistake with the internal team was one thing, but a mistake with the client might be career altering. The bar for everything was high, but to deliver work products on schedule, you couldn’t sit and agonize forever, you had to keep plowing ahead. I calibrated my error tolerance based on the level of potential embarrassment and/or reputational damage a mistake might cause, like a triage nurse an understaffed ER, puzzled by the fact that there was nothing nearly as valuable as a life at stake.
ALL HANDS ON DECK
Long hours, constant travel, and intense pressure are all hallmarks of management consulting, but the culture itself runs much deeper. It is a feeling that fills rooms. The thread my young eyes saw connecting the firm was a fervent compulsion toward busyness. The more frantic, tired, and strung out you appeared, the better. Even if people weren’t busy, they would pretend to be on a deadline or otherwise hard at work. This jittery, performative ethos polluted not only the office but private moments as well. Rush, rush, rush. Everything was urgent. If you were breathing easy, you weren’t working hard enough. People felt the need to be constantly available, constantly online, constantly at their laptop. That MS Teams icon better stay green, bitch. The appearance of productivity was self-policing.
Stillness, reflection, and introspection is anathema to this sort of belief system, and I made sure to steal as many restorative moments for myself as I could. Transit provided the most reliable opportunities for dissociation. The unmeasured in-between times like walking through an airport, headphones-in, blasting some sort of boastful rap song; or staring trance-like out an airplane window; or simply taking a few full, deep breaths where I could. These small escapes became sacred. I suppose this was a bootleg version of a mindfulness practice before the term fully entered the zeitgeist, but really I was just bailing out a leaky boat with a teacup.
Admitting out loud how hostile the prevailing conditions actually were was enough to put a bowling ball in your belly. So, why did we persist, most of us without question? Almost everyone around me was a winner on paper and in practice: whip smart with robust motors who took responsibility and delivered. However, I’ve always been fascinated by the little lower layers beneath the surface, and it wasn’t hard to suss out deeper truths about our peer group if you had a desire to look.
Psychologically speaking, I pegged most of my colleagues as anxious overachievers. It’s easy to spot your own. We were striving madly to keep an impossible number of plates spinning while constantly scrutinizing our own performance. Given an insurmountable workload, we were still willing to work until the job was done. None of us were quitters and would sacrifice deeply, foolishly before letting a single plate drop. Clearly, the firm had a type, and we all fit the bill.
Although my peers and I seemed positively predisposed to endure the demands of our profession, spending an interminable amount of time under constant pressure has consequences. Cracks formed in everyone and physiological symptoms began to seep through. Some faired better than others, but no one was fully immune. Sarah, for example, had the same “tummy ache” going-on twelve months. Some of the other women compared notes on who cried the most during a given week. Shit, the guys were probably crying too, it just wasn’t openly discussed.
A senior consultant I really respected indifferently remarked that a good day for her was one where she didn’t cry. I remember thinking “Jesus Christ, Amanda, you cry every day? That can’t be good.” Then I remembered I had thrown up before a big meeting earlier that week, so I didn’t really have a leg to stand on. Worst of all was Jay, our friend who literally degraded into a mottled grey walking corpse the previous year. The hard truth was that now we knew, and yet we continued to arrive early and stay late in a place that made us sick, day after day after day, and for what? Are double wages worth handling radioactive rubble? Apparently, yes.
DEADHEADING
Unfortunately, attempting to derive a sense of purpose from a career in management consulting is a fool’s errand. Collaborating on a meaningful client project is akin to witnessing a comet: people will tell you they’ve seen one, but it was always years ago, they might have imagined it, and the next one surely won’t happen in your lifetime. Projects were simply strategic imperatives too odious for companies to undertake themselves. There was no guarantee that the work we did would ever be implemented, and we would never see the impact anyway.
Nothing is tangible in consulting. Entire careers amount to keystrokes on a laptop. Consultants don’t make anything. I was just another agent of optimization within a sprawling entity in service of other sprawling entities that lumbered about hungry and blind like monolithic anteaters with snouts attuned solely to the scent of gain.
My inner conflict recalled a scene from Mad Men, a television show I worshipped at the time, wherein Don, a partner at an advertising firm, admonishes his subordinate, Peggy. Exasperated, Peggy laments to Don that her efforts at work go unrecognized and berates him as a stand-in for her own lack of fulfillment. Don explodes back, “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!” It felt like the line was as much for me as the actress on screen. Yes, the career I chose was unfulfilling, but that was also the reason it paid so well, and I needed to make my peace with that.
The fact that I ever believed a compelling sense of purpose might be found in such a world now seemed painfully naïve. Woe betide the consultant who yearns for inspiration beyond a bi-weekly check. I needed to accept reality. Yes, I was unfulfilled, but fulfillment from my work was a luxury I could not yet afford. What I did have was the opportunity to accumulate money more rapidly than 98% of people my age. It was time to shut up and grind until I had a better alternative.
MID-YEAR
After six more months with the firm, now eighteen in total, I could at least tell which way the wind was blowing though I certainly not yet a sailor. I got the nod on my mid-year review, a pass-fail formality that gave the firm an opportunity to begin the slow process of termination if the herd of personnel needed thinning. An “off-track” rating was almost certainly fatal as you would be assigned a PIP (performance improvement plan) and lead inexorably to slaughter.
Thankfully, my largely absentee counselor, a senior manager with one foot out the door, advocated for me as “on track” which was confirmed by firm leadership. Clearing this particular hurdle provided me significant relief. Barring an egregious fuck up or blatant absenteeism I knew I could not be culled before the all-important two-year milestone. I still had another six months to navigate, but I took solace in the fact that the firm now lacked the time to fuck me over early and claw back my signing bonus. It’s the little things in life that keep you going, right?
Onward. Always.
Half Good Hiker