The Untamable

Don’t even think about hiring me. You’ll end up firing me without knowing what to do with me. Ask my managers. Well, some of them.

One did something none of the others dared to do. I’m saving him for last.

The rest solved the problem in their own way. These aren't all the managers I've had in my life.

Anyhow, two fired me on the spot. One sent me on vacation until my contract ran out, one pushed me off the project, and one sent me to the hospital.

That last one was the job I got in 2021. The one that fired me. And it wasn’t the work. It was the managers, who started popping up like mushrooms after the rain.

But first, the opening acts.

In my last year in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I had a highly respected Bengali manager. Very highly respected. Mostly by herself. I was a project manager, and we had money from Spain to carry out the final phase of a project rescuing children born in brothels. One of the goals was to build a home for them outside Dhaka, where it’s a thousand degrees in the shade and there’s no clean water or electricity.

The design looked a lot like a concrete block where the children would live crammed together like insects. Very efficient, I’ll give it that…