Richie Frieman - REPLY ALL...and Other Ways to Tank Your Career: A Guide to Workplace Etiquette

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To my beautiful wife,

JAMIE,

Im so lucky.

To my awesome kids,

MADDY and COLE,

you have no idea how amazing

you have made my life.

Please remember this when youre teenagers and trying to avoid me like the plague.

Contents

Hello world, Im here! World? Hello? Your diploma is a piece of paper, not a magic wand.

Why your first day on the job could be your most importantand your last.

The Office Gossip, Cubicle Invaders, and a boatload of other characters youll want to avoid.

Meet your new social circlewhether you like it or not.

Hey, watch who youre poking (and liking)!

Its party time! Whos next on the keg stand? and other ways to bomb your reputation.

Planes, trains, and automobiles are the fastest way down the corporate ladder.

Love is in the air and in the copy room, in the cafeteria, in the gym. Do you know what youre getting yourself into?

The ass you kick on the way up is the ass you kiss on the way downand many other unwritten rules from top industry professionals.

Introduction

Allow me to paint a picture of my first year out of college (or as every cheesy commencement speaker calls it the real world). It starts with an eager young man clutching his diploma and excitedly diving into what is promised to be an up and coming job opportunity.

After only one month, his story takes a leap off the side of a cliff like Thelma and Louise driving into oblivion. He finds himself in a web of deceit and manipulation because his boss has the morals of a Third World dictator. The boy with the promising, enviable job winds up spending his days lying to clients, paying fees for his boss bounced paychecks, and generally wallowing in the lowest circles of Hell until he has a nervous breakdown at twenty-three.

Oh come on, grow a pair, it couldnt really be that bad, you say.

Allow me to illustrate. I call this my Top 5 (but trust me, there are at least 5,000) Holy Fn Crap, You Must Be Kidding Me! moments from my first job after college:

9/11/2001. I worked in Washington, D.C., and our office overlooked a main thoroughfare. On that awful day the street was filled with gridlocked cars and panicked people running and screamingit was pandemonium. As my boss and I looked out at the chaos from our office window, he handed me a stack of business cards and ordered me to go hand them out to everyone stuck in traffic since it was a great opportunity for business. (Mind you, the company was a graphics design and printing firm.) When I declined, he told me to Stop being such a bitch.

Paydays can be tricky. In our small office of six (including our evil dictator), there was routinely only enough money for five people to be paid come paydayincluding Stalin himself. This was an unspoken but well-known fact. So the first five to get to the bank before it closed on Friday were the lucky ones. The latecomer had to wait until Monday when our boss could funnel money into the account from wherever else he was hiding it. He would often hand us our checks at 6:00 P.M. on Fridays, after the banks closed, or in sealed envelopes so we could not see they were unsigned, which apparently the banks have a big problem with.

Ticket to ride. After bouncing employees checks on a fairly regular basis, my boss told me one dayquite proudlythat he was buying his wife a Mercedes SUV. This was after he made me drive him around in my beat-up piece of junk for nine hours and pay for gas.

Burning the midnight oil. One day a massive job came in and my boss couldnt resist the money. So he had a coworker and me work from 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 A.M. thats twenty-two hours straight. After that shift, he benevolently said that I could go home, get some rest, and come back in around noon the same day.

The tax man. After I quit the job, my boss failed to deliver my W2 tax form on time because he was too busy fixing his books with his crooked accountant, which forced me to file late. And when the W2 finally arrived, it was incorrect.

Why am I telling you all this?

These examples of my first foray into the real world are not meant to scare you. Okay, maybe a little. The reason why Im sharing these horror stories is so you know that Ive been in your shoes. Sure, I hope you dont have as dodgy a start as I did in your career, but I guarantee that most of us will have (or have had) to wade through troubled waters to achieve professional success, no matter how you define it. Plus, how could I understand and resolve improper business behavior if I never experienced itat massive levelsfor the majority of my career?

Like so many other graduates, I thought that my career would take a traditional, linear path. I figured Id go to college, get a degree, land a job, and stick with that field until Social Security kicked in. I mean, lets face it, this is real life, not the movies. Im not going to sit down at Starbucks next to some random person who just so happens to be a CEO who says, Son, I can just tell you have potential. How would you like a job? Also, like many other young people, I thought the world was waiting for my ideas and when I got that degree, the gates of good fortune would fly open. (Cue the Rocky theme.)

Thats not how it went. And trust me, its not how it will ever go.

The days of a simple path from college to retirement do not exist anymore. Nowadays its pretty normal for people to transition to different professions at least a few times in their working life. This requires you to hustle, to make yourself as marketable as possible. Think of a shark. A shark requires constant motion to survive. If it stops moving, it dies. Thats how you have to bebending, learning, adaptingand if you dont operate that way, the other predators in the ocean will have you for breakfast.

Speaking of predators, lets go back to that hellhole in D.C. Since I didnt know any better, I could have easily stayed at that crappy job with my tyrant of a boss and allowed my ass to get handed to me for the next thirty years. I could have. But I didnt.

Am I grateful for that terrible walk through Satans playground after college? Hell no! Come on, people, have you been following at all? That was torture! I prayed for that benevolent CEO to come my way out of the blue. But again, we all know that isnt how it works.

I still remember the day I quit that job. I thought for sure it was going to come to blows. After all, my boss was a spoiled egomaniac, who didnt see anything wrong with the day-to-day operations (rob, cheat, lie, repeat). A person with that mentality looks at people disagreeing with himlet alone quittingas the highest form of disrespect, so I expected him to lash out. I chose to tell him at lunchtime as I figured hed be happier on a full stomach. We walked outside and I said, Look, I dont think this is working for me and Im giving my two weeks notice now. I balled my fists in my pockets, waiting for him to charge me or take a swing. To my utter surprise (and slight disappointment), his only response was a simple Okay. Then he walked away and that was the last time we spoke. Turns out, he was as much of a wimp as he was a liar. The day I left, I got a handshake and a cheesy grin good-bye. That was it. A bridge was burned, but I made it out unscathed.