1. I worked for an MLM.
2. My boss was the biggest drama queen I had ever met (by the way, my boss was a straight male).
3. The switch to a new company.
Let me go into some vague detail.
1. MLMs suck. The business model for Network Marketing companies is ethically gray at best. I've heard them described as "Legal Pyramid Schemes" and that really is the truth. You get a couple of people involved at the beginning and those few people end up making a ton of money (emphasis on "ton") because they sit at the top of the pyramid. They go around preaching about how everyone can make as much money as they do but the simple truth is that if someone doesn't get involved with a successful MLM from the beginning, chances of making a very comfortable living are slim (making a living may still be possible but it won't be the same as the people at the top). What really bothers me is that the people at the top of the pyramid don't even have to do much once they've built a large enough downline; they just end up earning commissions off of the work of the people below them.
Then, when these individuals on top have gotten themselves being comfortable on top, many of them (certainly not all) become some serious megalomaniacs - running around the corporate office like they own the place, making demands, running projects, making up the rules as they go all so they can make more money. Side note here, corporate employees are not allowed to be distributors (or "consultants" or whatever the individual MLM calls the people who go out and sell stuff) in part because, and I'm sure this isn't the only reason but it is the only one I know for sure, the employees would have an unfair advantage over distributors who are not employees because the employee would be privy to information that other distributors would not be. So if we take the reverse, shouldn't distributor's not be allowed to be involved with the workings going on at corporate because that would give them an unfair advantage over distributors who maybe don't live near corporate or who don't have the financial means to travel to the corporate office whenever they have something to *****, I mean "complain", about?
Then there is the way the big wigs manipulate things. About a year and a half ago at the MLM I worked for we had a distributor set a record for rank advancement (the bigger your downline, the higher rank you are, basically he built a huge downline very fast). All the non-big wigs were like "Whoa, that's awesome! If he can do it so can I." Um, guess what. You can't. This particular distributor happens to be one of the big wigs at at least one other MLM (probably more) where he took years to create a world wide downline and then become a big wig. All he did at our MLM (and probably at others) is to convince his downline from the other MLMs to join this new, shiny MLM and voila, now he's a big wig at yet another MLM and those who don't know the real story are, once again, made to believe that it is possible to be uber-successful in the business.
And that's just a few things I have to say about the distributors, I haven't even gotten to how people are paid yet, so I will. I was in a meeting not too long ago, November maybe, where a big wig distributor was explaining the new commission structure he came up with (as well as a new program that he created and designed so that he'd be on top, but that's another story). He said that once you get to X rank, when you sign up a new distributor below you you now earn 105% commission on the sale. Say what? Where are we getting the extra 5% of the sale to give to the X ranked distributor? His response, in short, is that some distributor's fail putting more money into the business than they, or their upline, get out of it leaving extra funds to go to the big wigs. So here we have a bunch of distributors running around telling people that they can make millions like they do but really they need some distributors to fail in order to make the kind of money they do. How is this ok?
To sum up, the longer I worked for an MLM the more I understood how MLMs work and the more little pieces of my soul were stolen from me. But I did work there for over two years so I guess it is my own fault for allowing it to be a part of my life for so long. Let's move on to the second reason why work was so hard last year.
2. Drama queens are hard to work with. Drama Queen Boss first joined the department as a consultant, at first no one really knew why or what he was actually doing there but then we found out that it was a trial period before he became our next boss. We were all pretty neutral about him at first then he started making demands and acting like our boss before he was our boss and slamming the way we did things which made most of us not like him at all and some of us absolutely detested him. About this time we were told that his trail period wasn't going very well and that at the end of his contract he would no longer be at the company. Then at the end of his contract he become our boss. Um, there went any trust we had in the people who told us he'd be gone - but that's another issue I won't be discussing here.
Drama Queen Boss seemed to just love stirring things up. He'd tell us one thing then tell the executives something else then tell other departments something else which made trying to communicate outside the department a beast. Most of us saw right through this at first and learned to ignore a lot of what he said and did and learned not to feed into it.
For example, Drama Queen Boss tried to stir up some drama one day when the website went down. It turns out that the reason it went down was related to the database and was the result of a bug created by Drama Queen Boss's favored programmer. So Drama Queen Boss goes over the the support department (because they were dealing with customers calling and complaining that the site was down) and he told the leaders of the support department that it was his Least-Favored Developer's fault the site was down. Well, Least-Favored Developer is a web-developer and didn't even have access to the database so either Drama Queen Boss didn't know what Least-Favored Developer did (which is a real possibility) or he was intentionally stirring up drama. I'm guessing the latter since Drama Queen Boss knew that one of the leaders of the support department who was a part of the conversation (and the only reason we know the conversation even took place) was Least-Favored Developer's wife. Who in their right mind goes around telling untruths about his employees to said employees wife? Answer: Drama Queen Boss was not in his right mind.
That wasn't the only instance of Drama Queen Boss creating drama for the sake of drama. He would tell employees things about other employees that the employee told really didn't need to know. We think his intent was that told employee would go tell the dissed employee and drama would ensue. Luckily we are smarter than that and we'd either keep things to ourselves or when we heard what Drama Queen Boss said about us we'd roll our eyes and carry on. The least stressful times we had that year were when Drama Queen Boss was out of the office for about a month and a half for medical reasons. Sure, we had more work to do with him being gone but we had less drama and therefore a better work experience.
3. When our department was suddenly acquired by a new company Drama Queen Boss was not part of the acquisition and was laid off. That was a great moment for me and I was so excited to go to Company B. Unfortunately that excitement didn't last long. I don't know for sure by I think one of the original people in Company B was a Drama Queen Boss In The Making. He'd tell us things that sounded pretty official and that some of the developers didn't want to participate in. So those developers left, then more developers left, and eventually most of the developers were gone and the only reason I stayed through everything that went on in #1 and #2 above went with them (we had such a great team dynamic).
I tried to stay until the end of the project that was
Something similar happened on December 28th. The CEO texted me asking if I'd be available for a meeting. I responded with "When and where?" (How would I know if I was available if I didn't know when the meeting was taking place, right?) He responded by saying he was still figuring it out but we'd try from 10:30 at Said Location. So, at 10:30 I was at Said Location and no one else was. Given the short history I'd had with Company B this didn't surprise me much so I waited until 10:40 to text CEO and ask if something had changed. He called me back, surprised that I had shown up for a meeting at the time and place I was told to. Then he told me he was 10 minutes away from the office and we'd get the meeting going when he got in, then after the meeting we'd talk about the kind of roles I'd be playing at Company B. I just said "ok" and ended the conversation but so many things about it really pissed me off. Ten minutes after he wanted the meeting to start he was still 10 minutes away from even being in the office. He was surprised that I was punctual and dependable. And I'd already been with the company for 2 1/2 months and he just now wanted to start figuring out what my role was going to be. That's when I knew I was going to quit that day.
Let's fast forward to almost 2 hours later when CEO finally decided to make a physical appearance to let me know that some people he wanted in the meeting weren't in the office yet so we'll try to do it after lunch. This is when I said "If that meeting isn't happening now can we have our other meeting now?" He obliged and I quit. The meeting we had was very interesting and I learned a lot of things, like that one guy might be a Drama Queen Boss In The Making because CEO had been told things about reasons why other developers quit that simply weren't true. I also learned of all the roles CEO wanted me to play in Company B. My response to that was that at Company A we had two people doing most of those roles so there was no way I could do both at Company B plus everything Company B specific that he wanted me to eventually take on - which helped make me feel a lot better about quitting.
Long story short, I quit my job out of the blue. I went into the CEOs office, quit, packed up my things, and never went, or looked, back. And I feel great about it. Through most of November and December (as well as occasionally since Drama Queen Boss took over) I had stress related headaches almost every day, pain from some ulcers I'm sure I was breeding, as well as some other annoying, but luckily harmless (as said by my doctor), physical maladies that were stress related. I haven't had any of that since I quit and now I'm wondering why I didn't quit 15 months ago. Oh well. Hopefully I learned something.
Now I'm not working and it has been nice. I'm casually looking for new work but not necessarily in software or full time or permanent, just whatever comes my way that sounds interesting.
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