Page 28 - Sorry, We're Not Hiring Any Visionaries Today

SORRY, WE’RE NOT HIRING ANY VISIONARIES TODAY
In the beginning, it was good work. I was busy doing lots of different things. But then it started to get very slow, and one by one, people were being laid off, like a corporate game of “Survivor, and I thought, oh, this doesn’t look good.
I remember taking endless walks through the empty hallways because many of the office rooms were vacant. As you once said, it was kind of like going to a country club. I would just show up for work, do a minimal amount of work, and get paid very, very well, certainly much more than I’m making now.
Oracle being Oracle, they eventually laid us all off. That’s what Oracle does: they buy up smaller companies, then purge all the experienced talent.
I got several technical writing contract jobs but soon realized technical writ- ing had become too technical for me. The jobs I had involved documenting very complex systems and programming, which I’d done a bit of in the past, but couldn’t fully understand it. If I can’t understand something, I can’t document it.
I was in a career crisis because I knew I couldn’t do technical writing. I re- member again thinking, like I did years before, what is it I really want to do? I realized I thrived on organizing things and bringing structure and order to chaos. But how am I going to do that? So I thought: OK, I’m going to start from scratch. I linked up with a non-profit employment agency and was reassured by my employment counsellor that it was OK for me to take on a basic job as an administrative assistant or receptionist.
You’re probably thinking, “Why on earth would someone like me, with a col- lege degree and who has worked in the tech sector for many years, want to be a lowly admin assistant?” But I’m glad I did because it gave me a chance to breathe, and to build up my confidence. I needed to have a job where there was basically very little chance of me failing because I was completely over- qualified. I had been completely burned by these tech-writing contracts for which I wasn’t qualified.
There’s something I call “the Superman effect”. It’s an idea based on something
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