This job offer had me torn. During the course of interviewing I had negotiated myself up pretty close to the salary I had formerly and landing the job would alleviate all my financial woes with rent, credit cards, car payments, insurance and various other bills.
But the guy who ran this company was a complete asshole.
Throughout all the callback interviews I tried to ignore the fact that he seemed like a total prick. Initially lowballing me with half what I said my salary was at my other job, citing “a learning curve” I’d have to overcome. Laughing while bragging that he never picked up after his dog and his neighbors hated him for it. I needed a job and I reasoned that I had already dealt with far worse than his obnoxious behavior and somehow survived. That I could survive this too-at least for a year-to replenish my savings account.
So I picked up the phone first thing after Labor Day weekend and called him to say I was officially accepting the offer and would return the letter signed before EOD. Which is when he told me that he’d stumbled across a last minute candidate for the job, “a highly experienced go-getter” that he’d be remiss to not at least sit down with for a conversation. I was told to wait a day and he’d get back to me and maybe have me come in one more time to the office. After initially being stunned and sitting on the floor staring at my phone, I found myself shaking with rage. There was no other candidate, I had already spent a month interviewing for this job and all this could possibly be was him trying to scare me into being willing to accept less money. There was no other explanation. Where could he have found this candidate? At some holiday weekend bbq? I picked up the phone and called him back.
I told him that he should take his time interviewing the other candidate because I was no longer interested in the job. That I couldn’t in good conscience accept a job at a company that was run so unprofessionally they’d issue a written offer of employment after a month of interviews and callback interviews just to then rescind it to accommodate checking out one more person. In between his flustered responses I very calmly said that if he was still so unsure about my suitability to work at his company after all this time then it was best for us to part ways. He tried calling me back later and then emailing again the following day saying he had made a mistake and perhaps I could come back in one more time for *another interview*. I said no.
“I think I’m going to regret losing you,” he sighed
I laughed to myself and said “yes, yes you are.”
After my adrenaline ran its course-and panic started to set in-I signed up for a casting website so I could submit for work on tv shows and films in New York. I thought it would be temporary but it’s been almost ten years in this wild weird industry and I always think back to the job offer that was, then wasn’t, then was, and how the way it played out changed everything for me. What if I had waited it out and taken the inevitable lower second offer he was planning on throwing at me? What if I had managed to get the money I wanted but had to work every day under that sanctimonious garbage pail knowing it had been so contentious to get there? I think about how I realized in that moment that I deserved so much more, that it was ok to acknowledge that he was treating me with complete disrespect and that the majority of my corporate experience before this had been with men who believed it was acceptable to wield their power over me like this. I didn’t even know it at the time that my gut was saying I’d finally had enough until it brought me to an entirely new life (and new creative struggles lol).
Since then I’ve forever been fascinated by those moments in everyone’s life. When you’re faced with a choice and then an entire timeline of events unfolds as a result of that decision. Actors turn down roles that become iconic or award winning in someone else’s hands. Almost everyone at some point has taken one job over another, or left one for a specific reason. I want to know what spurred that decision, why it serves as a benchmark and what advice people have been given along these sometimes messy roads we navigate to get to what we want.
Every other week I’ll be posting an interview here with someone about that moment in their life. Email me suggestions for who you want to hear from and I’ll do my best to make it happen! Subscribe for free, but if you choose to do a paid subscription you can email me for advice about a personal problem and I will respond privately, not as a column (unless you want me to!)
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