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So, I get this email from this beautiful, smiling face that starts out with, “I finally found my own kind–what a relief,” later ending with, “I’d like to name one of my recipes after you–do you like passion fruit?” To which, of course, I responded enthusiastically, because not only do I love anything that has to do with passion, but frankly, how often do you get recipes named after you? I mean, really?
That beautiful smiling face belongs to Heather Mamatey, founder of My Healthy Eating Secrets, a site dedicated to making a healthy eating style fun and accessible, helping people heal their lives through better food choices.
As a budding entrepreneur, Heather knew that the typical 9-5 lifestyle wasn’t her cup of tea, so in July of 2010, she struck it out on her own, determined to make things work her way. To her, it was either that, or “risk her soul imploding.”
Today, her Fear, Exposed segment humorously discusses her journey from employee to entrepreneur, and all of the little lessons she’s learned along the way, as well as what it truly means to be a “good employee.”
Give her a big, warm welcome. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the special TMF Passionista Ice Cream recipe. As a matter of fact, let’s do something fun; whip up a batch of your own at home (it’s ridiculously simple, like making a smoothie), take a picture of yourself with your creation, and send it to me at ash [at] the middlefingerproject [dot] org to be entered for a chance to win a free subscription to my 97 in ’11 program, where you’ll get the inside scoop on all of the behind the scenes workings of the life of a blogger and digital entrepreneur intent on hitting the $97,000 income mark this year. You’ve got until Monday the 25th, at which point I’ll feature all photos in a post, with your name and a link to your site (please provide this in your email.) Bonus points for anyone who comes up with a creative sign to include in your photo, too! (We like silly and sarcastic around here, you know.)
And now, welcome Miss Heather!
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Worker Bee Lesson #1: It’s Not a Polyester Uniform That Makes You a Loser, It’s a Failure to Look Busy…
Failure in the job market came to me at a young age. I was 16 years old and it was my first job. I was a cashier at McDonald’s. I didn’t even have to fill out an application to land this job. My friend’s parents owned the restaurant. I was interviewed as a formality and told to report for my first shift. This was 1991 in Augusta, Georgia and my starting salary was $3.80 per hour.
Listen, everybody has to start somewhere.
Over the coming weeks, I dutifully donned my polyester McDonald’s uniform, cap and all, and reported to work for all my shifts. I learned how to run the cash register, scoop the fries, communicate with the customers and the drive-thru workers. Most importantly, I was initiated into that all-important task which was universal to all jobs everywhere – finding things to do when there was nothing to do. Looking busy during downtime, I learned quick enough, was important to the store manager. I remember lots of sweeping and mopping, going over and over the same strip of floor space where the cashiers lived, killing time, watching the clock…
After a couple of months, the store manager wanted to meet with me. Have a little chat about my work performance. Her name was Donna. She had frizzy red hair and glasses and she was trying to be nice. She couldn’t fire me because I was a friend of the owners’ daughter. I realized, sitting there across from her, that our “little chat” was actually her giving me warning. My work performance, she said, wasn’t up to McDonald’s standards.
Ouch. That was embarrassing.
I was a straight-A honor student who thrived in a classroom but who, apparently, once placed in a work environment, with a boss and a job to do, I no longer moved to the front of the pack. Even with a stunningly unchallenging job description, such as McDonald’s cashier, I didn’t cut the mustard. So much so that the manager felt compelled to pull me aside and warn me to get my ass in gear.
I don’t remember specifics. The gist was that I was too slow. I wasn’t moving fast enough, wasn’t keeping pace with the flow of the restaurant. I needed to pick it up.
I worked at McDonald’s for about six months, until the following summer when I received an out-of-the-blue callback from a clothing store at the mall where I had applied months earlier. They wanted me to come in for an interview. I got the job. My new title: Floor Assistant.
Worker Bee Lesson #2: Move Your Ass Because It Makes You Appear Busy
The store, I remember, was called Ormond. They carried all varieties of women’s apparel. It was a large space and my job was to work the floor – greeting customers, replenishing the supplies of clothes, monitoring the dressing room. It was tedious, tedious work. Time passed crushingly slowly at that job. I recall hours spent folding and refolding displays of jeans and shirts, just to have something to do. Like McDonald’s, the Ormond manager felt it was of tantamount importance to look busy.
My career as a Floor Assistant lasted about eight months. Seven months into it, a repeat of my McDonald’s embarrassment played out when once again I was pulled aside by the manager, Julie, and given warning about my work performance. Julie and Donna spoke from the same managerial handbook, apparently, as again I was told that I wasn’t up to store standards. The mortification of hearing the exact same phraseology from another managerial type was not lost on me. I was dutifully mortified. I was a disappointment to her and now I knew.
I was given the opportunity to prove myself. Once again the same reasons were trotted out to explain my ineptitude: too slow, daydreams too much, not keeping up with the fast pace of the store. Poor Julie even got up from our meeting to give me a demonstration of what she wanted: she grabbed the nearest rack of clothes and began furiously wheeling the cart towards the front of the store, motioning for me to follow her. I did, breaking into a jog to keep up.
“Here,” she said, panting, yanking clothes off the rack, “this is how fast you should be moving at all times… Do you think you can do this?”
Eager to demonstrate that I wasn’t a complete loser, I nodded an emphatic yes. I meant it, too. I really wanted to prove to this woman that I could be the model Ormond employee she wanted me to be. I was 17 years old and I did not want to have to go home and tell my parents that I was out of a job.
Worker Bee Lesson #3: You Can Let ‘Em See You Sweat, But Never, Never Let ‘Em See You Standing Still…
It didn’t occur to me at the time that all of this hurry-up-and-stand-around managerial philosophy didn’t make a whole lot of sense: there were legitimate hours, entire shifts, whole spans of workdays when the staff struggled to remain occupied – wiping down clean countertops, refolding the same display of jeans for the fiftieth time, anything to avoid the ultimate sin of standing still and letting your boredom show.
What was the point, I ask now, twenty years later, of all that frantic bustle-bustle? I’m telling you, the woman literally broke into a run through the store that day. I knew from my seven months of time there, that there might be one or two other clothes racks waiting to be emptied onto the store shelves, but that once this was done, it would be hours of nothing.
Apparently I had been taking the wrong approach – I had preferred to stretch the tasks out as long as possible, avoiding with dread the look-busy abyss that lay in wait for me. Apparently, moving at a fast pace, regardless of the task at hand, was part of the job description. The appearance of busyness trumped the logic of busyness. Clearly there was an entire worker philosophy that I just wasn’t understanding.
And I wasn’t destined to understand it, not during my time at Ormand, anyway. Unlike Donna, Julie wasn’t prohibited by the store’s owners from canning me. A month after she issued her first warning to me, I was given my walking papers.
Worker Bee Lesson #4: Even Your Own Mother Will Wonder If You Are A Loser…
What a deadbeat, I thought that day, mentally lashing myself and trudging home to tell my stunned parents what had happened. What a loser. What’s wrong with me, anyway?
I could see the wheels of confusion starting to turn in my parents’ minds. They weren’t getting it, either. The first seeds of doubt about me were being planted. Being a good worker is an extremely important virtue in our society – my parents were trying to instill this in me at a young age by turning me out to hunt for a job when I was only 15 years old. I didn’t actually find a job until I was 16, but surely by the time I was 17 and I’d been in the workforce for over a year, I should have started to get it. Right?
There were honest moments of bewilderment and paranoia when I suspected that my fellow workers had all been issued a how-to-hold-a-job handbook that for some reason was being withheld from me and me alone. In quick succession, over the next two years until I left for college, I was fired from a hostess job at an Italian restaurant, a Hallmark store, a daycare center, another women’s apparel boutique at the mall, and a school supply store.
Worker Bee Lesson #5: What’s that Stench? Is it Me?
Now, the Italian restaurant was understandable. I faked sick in order to get sent home on Valentine’s Day so that I could have dinner with my adorable new boyfriend. Apparently they weren’t fooled. The assistant manager called the next day and coldly informed me I shouldn’t bother coming back to work there.
But the Hallmark store, the daycare center, the clothing boutique, and the school supply store? It was always the same mysterious process of somehow a manager or owner figuring out I wasn’t worker bee material and then sending me on my way. It’s like I emitted some odor only detectable to supervisors. I was never insubordinate. Never gave anyone attitude. I had been raised in a strict Southern home and had manners drilled into me. I was unfailingly polite.
Thus, my various bosses always felt bad when delivering the axe – you could see it in their faces, their guilty expressions while patting me on the shoulder, thanking me for the hours of work I’d put into their business but it just wasn’t working out. You just knew they went home that night feeling like jerks for firing that sweet high school kid.
I can write now and state that by the time I was 23 years old and in my last year of college, I had the spectacular achievement of being fired from at least thirteen jobs. Seven years in the workforce and thirteen hit-the-road-kids. That’s an average of almost two jobs per year. Trust me, this is not a badge I have worn with honor. In fact, sitting down to write this article is the first time I have come clean about how bad it really was, both to myself and to others. Even my fiancé didn’t know all this.
Some jobs lasted longer than others. A couple involved a monumental screw-up on my part that resulted in my being fired, but the vast majority were more of the same pattern I established at Ormond and McDonald’s. Just simply not being a good worker. Not having that exceptional motivation that bosses want to see in their workers. And, as always, never really grasping and embracing the concept of looking busy.
Once I moved away from home to attend college, I did have the one consolation of not being forced to share with my parents each time I was let go from yet another job. I carefully kept this information from them to the best of my ability.
I was ashamed. Not being a good worker is absolutely something shameful in our country.
I understood this well enough to keep quiet. I racked up good grades, doing extremely well in most of my classes, earning the respect of my professors, while simultaneously proving myself to be a disaster in the workforce.
Worker Bee Lesson #6: When the Big Boss Finally Learns Your Name, That May Not Be A Good Thing…
Twelve years go by. It’s 2010. I’m 35 years old. For a year and a half I’ve worked in the development department of a large, prestigious nonprofit based in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s a cold, dreary March morning. I’m sitting at my desk when my supervisor approaches me and whispers into my ear, “Can I talk to you for a minute, please?” I instantly rise and follow her.
In a few moments she turns to me and tells me that we are going upstairs to meet with Dave. Cue the pounding heart and feeling of dread. This was bad. I was suddenly being called away from my desk to meet with the Big Boss, the one who only recently bothered to learn my name, the one who barely notices me and most of my coworkers? Uh oh.
We entered Dave’s office and my supervisor shut the door behind us. I looked around, noting that this was only the second time I had ever entered the man’s office. Being a fund-raising professional, and a powerful one at that, Dave has a smooth, oiled manner. He appears completely calm when he tells me that “we are going to have to have a hard conversation.” He then states that he and my supervisor have some serious concerns about my work. They called me into his office to let me know that I was being given a formal warning about it.
Now, given that I have been in this exact scenario so many dozens of times throughout my life, you would imagine that I would be the one who was calm. In truth, my heart was pounding out of my chest and I felt on the verge of tears. Here we go again. Apparently I had learned nothing in the past twenty years of being a worker. It was like I was 16 all over again, wearing an ugly striped polyester uniform and sitting across from frizzy-haired Donna at McDonald’s.
Something shifted in me that day in Dave’s office, and I could feel it. This was going to be the last time. I vowed to myself that I would never again sit across from some manager and hang my head in embarrassment whilst being told I wasn’t up to snuff. The jig was up. I was going to get to the bottom of this riddle once and for all.
Entrepreneur Lesson #1: A Chronic Failure To Fit Into The System May Actually Be A Good Thing…
I sat down today and I made a list. A list of all my failures at being an employee. After moving away from Georgia to Boston at the age of 23, I would go on to hold many more jobs. I would be fired from seven of them. This does not include the jobs for which I discovered I held an intense hatred and subsequently quit.
I have quit without notice at least three jobs over the course of my twenties, two of them professional jobs that I had to go through an entire complex hiring process to obtain. At these particular jobs, I was so spectacularly miserable that I couldn’t stomach the thought of spending one more day in the building. And so I didn’t. I left.
Twenty years in the workforce. Twenty years and I still haven’t figured it out. As I’ve aged into my thirties, I have worked alongside young, fresh-out-of-college girls and it’s amazing to regard them and observe how wonderfully they have already integrated into the corporate/workplace mindset. They’re 23 or 24 years old, and they already “get it,” and I’m 35 and I still haven’t figured out how to do it.
How to be a worker bee? How to work for someone else, how to inhabit, day after tedious day, a world with a boss and a rigid schedule and having to ask permission to take a day off, how to deal with the reality of someone else dictating your time. Of spending hours working on projects that mean very little to you. Or nothing at all.
I am going to step up here and say, with 100% dead honesty, that I don’t know. Am I the only one who doesn’t get it? Are there any others out there?
I can’t be a worker bee anymore. Let’s face it, people. If after twenty years I haven’t gotten it, I’m probably never going to. Being an employee is not in the cards for me, and maybe it’s not in the cards for you. And that’s okay. Once I faced up to the shame and stigma of admitting that I don’t understand how to be a wage slave, I actually feel pretty darn liberated. Like finally, I am free to be myself, in all my bizarro weirdness.
Epilogue: An Entrepreneur Is Born…
I left the job at the nonprofit in July of 2010 (ran out the doors on my last day with screaming peels of glee is more like it) and am starting my own website: www.my-healthy-eating-secrets.com. I share free advice and lots of great-tasting recipes to help make a healthy eating lifestyle really easy and fun for people. If you want to drastically improve your life by learning how to eat a supremely healthy diet without sacrificing flavor, I’m your girl.
Inspiring others to heal their lives through healthier food choices IS my passion in this life, but it’s always something I thought would be a hobby, through all my years of toil as a perplexed worker bee. I never saw how to turn that passion into an income. Until now.
The process of starting my own business has finally solved this 20-year riddle for me: I was never meant to be a worker bee. Trying to fit into that system, and to find happiness as a wage slave, was always going to end the same way: me getting bored, my mind wandering, supervisor noticing I’m unengaged and uninterested in the job, and showing me the door. This happened over and over and over again. I get it. Finally.
Understanding the problem and realizing that I’m not a freak of nature but rather an entrepreneurial and creative spirit, has been the sweetest relief. I’m not a square trying to jam into a circle anymore.
Leaving that steady paycheck and starting my website has been perhaps the craziest and riskiest thing I have ever done, but that’s the entrepreneurial spirit for you. I’m willing to risk it all for the chance of achieving the dream and getting out of the cubicle farm forever, just as our girl Ashley has done. How about you?
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