How I became a rat
It was the next day when I realized something had changed.
My “Afternoon, Charlie,” was not met with the typical torty reply (Charlie was the most friendly of the bunch and usually had something witty to say back when I greeted him). Instead, he kept his eyes on the paper he was reading and simply grumbled a bit.
I didn’t think much of it, since it wasn’t uncommon for the guys to be grumpy at the start of the shift. I put my stuff — Pat Conroy book, water bottle, and leftover meatloaf sandwich — down in my designated area on the counter and went over to the time card to check in.
I’d been working at the hospital for two weeks, ever since coming home from my sophomore year at college. The job was thanks to a neighborhood friend of my mom who said he needed “a hard-working young person to work the 3 PM to 11 PM shift.”
Luckily for me, by that point in my life, I had precisely three discernible skills: “young” and “hard-working” were at the top of the list, with tennis-related stuff (coaching tennis and stringing rackets) being the third. And since my tennis coaching job had me at the courts coaching junior tennis camps from 8 AM to noon each weekday morning, the hospital shift fit nicely into my schedule.
(This period of time also aligns with my biggest claim to fame: coaching a 3-year-old Dakota Fanning in tennis. Don’t believe me? Here’s a photo that I mailed her five years back that she posted on Instagram 😎)
I remember going in for the job interview, sitting down with the boss, and him asking me a series of questions that I had no good answer to.
Boss: “Have you ever worked at a hospital?”
Me: “No.”
Boss: “Have you ever worked an industrial vacuum cleaner?”
Me: “Um, no, just the one at my house. It’s regular-sized, I guess.”
Boss: “We use latex gloves here. Do you have a latex allergy?”
Me: “Not that I know of…”
Boss: “You’re hired.”
I can only assume that no one else had applied for the job. I showed up the next afternoon, signed paperwork in hand, ready to get to work and earn the very reasonable $15/hour wage.
I learned quickly that this particular job, while scheduled for eight hours, actually took about three hours if you worked even moderately hard. My co-workers, all men and all at least twice my age, had apparently never told the boss that the job could be done so quickly. They encouraged me to “Slow down! What’s the rush, college boy?” on a consistent basis. But I was hired partly because of my “hard-working” skill set, so there was no slowing down on my part. The best I could offer them was to knock my work out, find a quiet place in the hospital to hide read, and not let the boss know how quickly the job could actually be done.
And that’s the way I worked for the first month, until I screwed everything up.
My big mistake
Truth be told, I was feeling good on the day I officially became a rat. I had an extra pep in my step and was ready to put in a solid three hours of work and get back to yet another reading of The Lords of Discipline, the book I’ve read more times than any other.
After punching in for the workday, I asked Leroy if it was time to get started. Leroy and I had been paired up since my first day, working as a two-man team to vacuum halls, wipe down bathrooms, collect trash, and generally disinfect every area of the hospital assigned to us.
The job was an example of extremes. In most cases, it was boring, basic work that anyone could do in their sleep. (That’s not an exaggeration; several times, I caught a co-worker leaning on a running vacuum, eyes closed, obviously asleep at the wheel.) And other, more exciting times, the job entailed cleaning up vomit on one side of the bed while a sick patient was throwing up off the other side of the bed. That is a real experience I had during my tenure.
There was only one problem with the job (other than, you know, the vomit-cleaning part.) When cleaning a patient’s room together, Leroy would tell me every single time how to do the job.
“Now, make sure you fold the blanket down on the sides and tuck the ends in so it lines up nicely,” he would say.
Yes, Leroy, I know. I know because you told me the same thing in the room we just did, and you’ve told me pretty much every time we’ve done a room together for the last month.
But I didn’t say that. Leroy was the wise veteran, and I was (apparently) the dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers young kid who needed constant oversight and reminders of the most basic jobs.
“Don’t forget to restock the toilet paper.”
“You got it, Leroy.”
“Be sure to run hot water in the shower for a few minutes while you wipe the sink, so it’s easier to clean when you get to it.”
“…no problem, Leroy.”
“Always look under the bed for any…”
“I FREAKING KNOW, LEROY! I KNOW TO LOOK UNDER THE BED BECAUSE YOU’VE TOLD ME 100 TIMES ABOUT THE DAY YOU FOUND SOMEONE’S WATCH UNDER A BED AND INEXPLICABLY HAD NO PROBLEM ALSO TELLING ME THAT YOU KEPT IT BECAUSE IF THEY COULDN’T TAKE CARE OF A NICE WATCH LIKE THAT THEY DIDN’T DESERVE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE AND YES, IF I FIND ANYTHING, YOU GET FIRST DIBS BECAUSE YOU’RE THE ‘SENIOR CLEANING ADMINISTRATOR’ IN THIS PARTNERSHIP WHICH I KNOW ISN’T A REAL THING BUT I’M FINE TO LET YOU BE THE ONE TO STEAL THE PATIENTS’ PERSONAL ITEMS, BECAUSE, YOU KNOW, I’M STILL YOUNG ENOUGH TO HAVE A CONSCIENCE.”
Ok, I didn’t say that last part, but I wanted to so many times. I kept it in, gave him a “You got it, Leroy,” and stayed focused on the task at hand.
A few times, when Leroy and my schedules didn’t align, I was assigned to work with other guys, and they all did it. So this wasn’t an issue isolated to Leroy. As best I could figure, either they had a young co-worker before that couldn’t possibly get these very simple jobs completed properly, or else I was giving off a mild Forrest Gump vibe. Who knew.
That particular day, I had my One Month Check-In with the boss at 5 PM. I wasn’t nervous because a) I knew I was doing a bang-up job, and b) if he fired me, I’d happily go back to my favorite afternoon activity at that time in my life: sleeping on the couch.
At 4:55 PM, I told Leroy I had to meet with the boss and that I’d rejoin him when I was done. I could see he wasn’t thrilled about that, as he’d now have to do the crappier jobs (pun intended) that he usually assigned to me.
The meeting with the boss started off fairly typical — I was doing fine, the guys were nice, etc. — until he got to his final question.
“Is there anything else I need to know? Anything that you want to share?”
“Nope, everything is great, thanks,” I said.
“Are you sure? You can tell me, you know, and everything will stay between us. It’s just helpful if I know what’s going on,” he said. Gesturing his thumb toward the door to his office, which opened into the break room, he added, “Those other guys aren’t exactly big sharers.”
I thought for a minute, thinking maybe he was told something, but that didn’t make sense.
“Nothing I can think of,” I said, hoping that would end it.
It didn’t.
He looked at me, leaned forward, and said, “I want you to be able to trust me…are you sure there’s not one thing that’s bothering you? There must be something.”
At this point, like a prisoner who’s been tortured so long they’re willing to say anything to make it stop, I said, “Well, I guess there is one thing, but it’s really not a big deal. At times, the guys seem like they don’t really think I can do the job correctly, so they keep telling me over and over how to do the same thing.”
He laughed, sat back in his chair, and said, “Is that all? They’re probably just giving you a little bit of a hard time. I’m sure they’ll stop once you’ve been here a little longer.”
I agreed, and then he said I could get back to work. I quickly found Leroy, who looked like he hadn’t moved (or done any work) since I had left him, and got back to it.
The fateful day
Leroy and I prepared our supplies for the shift in silence, which again wasn’t enough to signal to me that anything was different. I had just filled up my disinfectant spray bottle and tucked a pair of plastic gloves in my back pocket when I noticed two of the guys glaring in my direction.
I looked away, grabbed a few hand towels, and stole another glance at the guys. They were still glaring. And I mean glaring, like they wanted to kill me.
Okay. That’s weird, I thought.
“Let’s go, college boy,” Leroy said, with a bit of an edge on college boy. He said it not with the playful, “you’re a young buck, but you’re still one of us,” way he used to say it. The tone was more: “So you think you’re better than us, don’t you?”
Also weird, yes, but these 40-something older men were a mystery to me anyway, so I just rolled with it and started my work.
Every interaction I had with Leroy and the other guys that day was met with an undercurrent of anger. If I even slightly brushed up against someone, I’d be met with a, “Hey, watch it!” If I asked a question, I wouldn’t even get a response.
Something was up, and I needed to find out. I could deal with a lot of things, but people not liking me has always been a hard thing for me to swallow.
At one point, we entered a room, and I said, “I’ll start with the bed.”
“Sure, and don’t worry, however you want to do it is perfect. I wouldn’t dare share any advice; it’s not like I’ve been doing this job for ten years,” Leroy said.
Ahhhh, so that’s it.
“Look, Leroy,” I said. “I don’t know what the boss told you, but he…”
Leroy raised his hand for me to stop talking. “I better stop talking to you, or else you’ll report me to the boss.”
Other than one or two-word responses to my questions, that was the last thing I remember Leroy ever saying to me for the next two months I worked at the hospital.
To all the guys, from that point forward, I was persona non grata at the office. Those guys hated me. I was the young, too-good-for-advice, friends-with-the-boss informant, and there was no way I was going to change that.
Two things hurt me the most from that experience. The first was that my team, these older men with whom I was in the trenches, did not think of me as a trustworthy team member. That crushed me. I pride myself on being loyal and trusted. One of my prized possessions, in fact, is a tennis ball from Raj that he gave me in college on which he wrote, “To Jeff, who does what he says.”
I still have that tennis ball; it means that much to me.
The other thing that hurt was that the boss betrayed me. By telling the guys what I had shared, he ruined any chance I had of fitting in.
I did my time, dreading every time I arrived at the office, got my final paycheck, and never went back.
The Point
I’ve taken that experience with me throughout my life. I haven’t really ever had a boss again to share anything with, having started my first company a year later with Raj in our dorm room. But I have been a boss, and any time a team member shared something with me about the rest of the team, I made absolutely sure I didn’t go out and spill the beans to their co-workers.
A lot of my work is predicated on having teams that work well together, and ideally, ones that have a common Purpose. And without trust, you can’t even start the process of working toward a greater Purpose.
And when you’re the one who has lost the trust of the team, I can tell you from experience, it can be near impossible to get it back.
I hope you’re happy.
A few more things…
I recorded a fun podcast with two “experts” in AI. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, maybe check it out (link below)
The number of five-star books I’ve read this year is kinda nuts and I’m excited to share them in an upcoming post. I should be over 50 books read this year, which I’m happy to be back to. (And I’m hoping you’ll share your book recommendations once I post mine.)
When you do order a book, I really hope you’ll buy through the Ripples Media store on Bookshop.org. More in the notes below on why I’m buying through Bookshop instead of Amazon these days.
Thanks, Ed! Hope you're doing well, also :)
Thanks for sharing this, Jeff. It really brings home the point about trust and team cohesion. I hope you and your family are well. Ed