One of the best bosses I ever had was fired from Stubhub, six months after the new CMO was brought in. He suddenly found himself working for a cape wearing fashionista, who wanted to take the marketing budget and peanut butter spread it out evenly throughout the year. He was pretty shocked and was devastated when he got the news. Nothing like this had never happened to him. He called me to tell me about it, which made me feel really good. I get excited in times of crisis.

Every job I’ve had in the Silicon Valley, I’ve been asked to leave. Call it my passion, or my craziness, or my female over forty (now- but what about then?) but I get attitude, dedicated-ness- loyalty.  I get this look in my eye, and they get this look in theirs and I start to realize that it’s time to go. I know what it feels like to quit, to be laid off and to be fired. They all suck.

My Dad was telling me yesterday about his on and off part time gig.  He’s been retired for years now, but he stays busy with all kinds of things.  For more than 10 years now, during baseball season, he’s been working as an Usher for the Jacksonville Suns AAA Baseball team. Recently, the team was sold to new ownership and now that there are new owners, they wanted to do a full fire and rehire staffing exercise. Dad said he didn’t know if they were going to have him back! When he explained, he said he was telling the guy he’d been coming to do this for 12-13 seasons now and he really enjoyed it. When the manager asked him what the complaints and the issues are from the fans, dad let into him. This place is filthy! It’s never cleaned right! The food sucks! The only thing worth eating here is the Bratwurst. Luckily the new owner agreed with him and those were the first two things that had been undertaken since the new ownership took over. Dad was invited to come back and usher again this season. I laughed my ass off because that is the joke.

At any job, there are things that are just wrong about the organization but it’s not your job to fix it nor is it your job to complain. If you want to keep your job you’ll ignore those things and carry on. But that takes a toll. It makes the job just a punch in, punch out type of job where you can only care as much as your boss cares. The only place where I’ve worked that was different was Facebook.  And, I was only there for 4 days as a contractor, so I can’t really say I worked there. (especially because they never paid me, either) But the corporate culture at Facebook says: nothing at FB is someone else’s problem.  So how do they ever get anything done?

How much should you care? What is healthy, what is a leadership role vs a worker bee role? Shouldn’t we all care?  Tell me how it is at your workplace in the comment section.