“The Box,” as it was (un)lovingly called, seemed perfect from the outside looking in. It was one of those massive firms that somehow always landed on the “Best Places to Work, Insert Year Here” lists, despite the fact that employees rarely had anything nice to say about the day-to-day operations, management, or the general everything of it all. Heck, the place even had a Reddit where employees constantly bashed it.
Eryn Mathis was one of the people who reported to The Box every Monday through Friday. She spent her days craning her neck toward presentation slides and sitting through strategy meetings where her opinions were frequently requested and routinely ignored. Her boss, CeCe, hadn’t always been like that. Before her promotion, she’d been one of the good ones. She advocated for work-life balance and remembered that her team consisted of actual human beings. Then she got promoted. The running office conspiracy theory was that the promotion had come bundled with a shiny new lobotomy.
Now everything was an emergency. Keeping up meant dropping everything to execute whatever whiz-bang shower thought CeCe’s boss had dreamed up at the eleventh hour. Of course, it never made sense. It derailed the team, was always a clustermuck, and somehow CeCe made sure Eryn carried the brunt of the chaos. Lately, Eryn had been doing the work of three people. She was exhausted, angry, and running on little more than caffeine and spite. Every request for help was met with one of CeCe’s empty promises that things would get better after the next deadline.
Spoiler alert: they never did.
To no one’s surprise, Eryn’s proverbial cup eventually ran bone dry. Instead of refilling it with the can-do attitude she’d started with at The Box, she filled it with unmasked eye rolls and visible rage. During a launch meeting for a half-baked “Empowering Future Leaders” program, she finally said exactly what she thought. Live. On a recorded meeting. And, of course, in front of CeCe’s boss. Needless to say, the launch did not go as planned and by that afternoon, Eryn was carrying a cardboard box to her car and driving home from her first “real” job for the last time. Whether she was ready for it or not, she was about to get a fresh start.
First came internal loathing and the “what-if” self talk, then anger and then eventually acceptance. After all, Eryn had spent the better part of three years feeling sick to her stomach every Sunday night in anticipation of the week ahead. She knew that The Box might have been a great place to work for some, but it hadn’t been a great place for her.
Through all of this emotional growth and revelation Eryn was caught in what felt like an endless cycle of interviews, each one leaving her more deflated than the last. Not because the opportunities were terrible, but because she understood the language now. She knew that a “fast-paced environment” meant chaos. “Wearing many hats” meant being understaffed. “Growth opportunity” usually meant someone else had already quit. Halfway through one particularly painful interview, Eryn found herself listening to a hiring manager spend twenty straight minutes talking about herself. CeCe 2.0.
“I don’t want to start all over just to end up here again,” Eryn thought. As if the universe had decided she’d suffered enough, her phone buzzed inside her blazer pocket. Normally, she would’ve ignored it, but CeCe 2.0 was long-winded, and Eryn had officially stopped caring.
BIG NEWS!
You have a job here if you want it 😘
The message was from Adrian, Eryn’s work bestie who had escaped The Box seven months earlier for a startup and had spent most of that time trying to recruit Eryn. Apparently, she’d finally succeeded, and for the first time in the last three years, Eryn felt herself relax. She didn’t know what the job was yet, but she knew two things: Adrian worked there and that rent was due in two weeks. That was enough.
The next day, the two met for lunch, and by the time the check arrived, Eryn was on the phone accepting a position as Director of Communications. Impressive.
Even though an offer letter was waiting in her inbox before she got home, she knew full well this wasn’t her dream job, and it wasn’t even a daydream job. But it was a paycheck, and right now, that mattered more. Unfortunately, while the title sounded impressive, the salary was not and it came with one immediate problem.
Eryn’s downtown apartment had to go.
With only two weeks until the start of the month, Eryn was in full-on scramble mode, she managed to somehow find a friend of a friend of a friend’s recent college graduate who wanted to sublease her apartment and the timing worked for them. Hooray! The arrangement left her with a little cash in hand and she assumed finding a cheaper place would be easy but with less than a week left for her housing search, Eryn realized she was going to need to widen the search beyond the comforts of downtown.
With a new search filter added, there it was.
“Hmm. Walden? Let’s see what you’ve got for me,” she mumbled to herself.