Chapter 3 . The Orange years (part 1)

 

How do you know when you are ready to jump ship in your professional life (or in your love life, because it applies there as well)? It’s not when the counter offer isn’t good enough. It’s when you don’t even want to HEAR the counter offer! This is what happened to me in January 2001. This part of the story starts a few months before that, though.

France Telecom, a big telco operator in France, decided to invest in a mobile phone network in Dom Rep. I believe that they sent the first technical team to survey the country in 1999. Some of my classmates, from an earlier promotion, had already finished college and started working for them around mid 2000, a few months before FT launched the service in DR under the name Orange. I was still going through my final year at college so I didn’t want to apply and change jobs while still juggling with the work load in college.  So I decided to wait before even considering leaving my job. In any case, why would I want to apply to work at France Telecom when everybody’s goal in my class was to work for Verizon Dominicana??? (Ah, the naïveté of the young mind…).

By the time I was reaching my last month in college, on a random Friday night, I asked my girlfriend at the time if she wanted to go out for dinner. Back in 2000, dining out to me was synonym of “hey, let’s go to Burger King”. As I was seriously trying to “make it rain” that night I completely swept my girlfriend off her feet and decided to take her somewhere else on that lovely night: I checked my wallet and we ended up at a very stylish gas station convenience store, where we each had, not one, but TWO hotdogs with melted cheese on them. Fancy, I know…

Anyway, that’s when and where I ran into one of my ex classmates from college. We might have taken 3 or 4 classes together. Not more than that. He had finished college the year before me. I think that he was filling up his tank and entered the convenience store to buy a bottle of water (it could have been a cold Presidente… can’t remember). He saw me, recognized me, barely remembered my name, and we started a short chat. The usual: “what are you doing?”, “how’s life after college?”, and then he says that he was working for France Telecom. I was 2 weeks shy from finishing college myself, so I asked “are they hiring?” He says: “not sure, but send me your CV to xxxxxxx@orange.com.do”. We said goodbye and the night continued to me as usual.

 

Life lesson #6: you’ve got to be lucky to be at the right place at the right time. You have read about why I was there. But why did HE end up at that specific gas station at that moment? Where was he coming from? Where was he going? Did he go into the convenience store because he was thirsty? Was it because somebody else asked him for a drink? Why did we decide to go a bit beyond the usual polite interaction of the acknowledgement of the acquaintances:  “How are you?” “Cool!”, “Good to see you”, “You too”, “Bye”? Still to this day I consider that random encounter at the gas station as a defining moment in my life. And there is nothing I could have done about it. I couldn’t have planned it. I couldn’t have prevented it. It is the randomness of life that makes life itself interesting.

 

Life lesson #7: be good to everyone. If you can’t be good to everybody, at least don’t be an asshole. I think about how different my life would be right now had I been such a jackass to that fella while we were in college that he had decided to give me a fake e-mail address that night. Or had he decided to see my e-mail and then send it directly to his recycle bin. I later got to know him better and I know that he did what any other decent human being would do. He wasn’t behaving like a super hero. He didn’t go to sleep that night thinking “I’m an awesome human being!”. Maybe it cost him no time or effort to forward my CV to his boss. Maybe it did. I don’t know. However, he doesn’t realize how that moment changed dramatically the rest of MY life. I will forever be grateful to him for behaving like a decent human being; for not behaving like an asshole…

 

The following week I sent him my CV. I was called for an interview the day after. I received an offer to work for a booming, young, rising company, in the same industry that I wanted to work in. And salary and marginal benefits represented more than twice what I was making at the time. The opportunity to grow was huge. THAT’s how you know that you are ready to jump ship. I left that meeting without a single doubt in my mind of what I was going to do. I HAD to join them. That determination, though, didn’t make it easy to resign my job that day.

 

Life lesson #8: Quitting a job is not easy if you are being treated right. But if you have to do it, you have to do it. It is a very stressing moment. When I walked in my boss’s office on January 30^th 2001, it was like a scene of a thriller movie. I asked if I could talk to him. He looked deeply into my eyes, paused for what it seemed to me like an eternity, and said: “Sure. Tell me”. I started talking and I had nothing but a shaky voice coming out of my mouth. He asked me to sit down. I continued talking, and within seconds my body was feeling more confident and relaxed. I thanked him for bringing me into his business and for all the opportunity the company had given me throughout the years. He asked me right away if I wanted a salary increase, asked me to give him a couple of days to present a counter offer. I was honest. I told him “you cannot match the offer I received. And even if you do, that is where I want to continue my professional life starting now. It is the best opportunity to grow that I have been presented with. It is what I studied for”. He understood. Said he was proud of me and that the entire team will miss its youngest member when I leave. *Cue the tears*. It was as if somebody had started playing a violin in the background. He asked me until when could I stay, so I ended up staying until the very last possible day. 2 weeks later the technical team was ready to move ahead without me, customers understood my position and the whole transition was nothing but a sweet one. Then I was ready join Orange.

On February 19^th 2001, my first day at Orange, I showed up wearing dress pants and a long sleeve dress shirt. The sharpest I had looked in a long while. The department director said: “welcome, it is time for you to meet your boss now”, I looked behind me and there was this tall slim guy, wearing boots, short cargo pants, a sleeve-less black T-shirt of some heavy metal band, tattoos on both arms, piercings on bottom lip, eyebrows and ears. I kept looking for my boss… nobody else came walking behind him… that was it! This dude was not impressed by my reaction when I first met him. I was shocked that he was allowed to go to work like that, to say the least. Life lesson #9: appearance is not that important if you work in the tech team of a telecommunications company. This “boss”, from Slovakia, became one of my friends. Shared same taste in music and to this date we still chat every now and then. He is a very smart guy, very hard working engineer, with an incredible work routine. On my very first day at work I was just punched in the face by the multi-cultural environment. Nobody was wearing suits, ties, etc. Everybody was sporting t-shirts and jeans. Among them, I looked like a Jehovah’s Witness, ready to preach the word of the Lord. Anyway, back to my boss: obviously one of us was not dressed accordingly to what was about to happen…

 

10 minutes later I was on the rooftop of the building, wearing a safety harness on my body, long sleeve shirt on the floor. I was under the sun and sweating, learning from my new boss how to safely climb an antenna pole. That one was easy. We were only 16 meters away from the ground. The next day: on the rooftop of an 11 story high building, hanging from a pole at about 45 meters away from the ground. Life lesson #10: no matter how high you are, if you have good skills and safety system you will not fall. Climbing towers became my bread and butter for a year. I drove around Dom Rep and visited places that I had never seen before.

 

It was also while working there when I traveled outside of Dominican Republic for the first time in my life. I went to Milan, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Miami, etc. I’d never had the opportunity, before Orange Dominicana, to visit those places. For some people this might be trivial, but please allow me to say it again: I was 23 years old and I had NEVER left Dom Rep before joining this company, yet within 40 days of being part of starting my contract there I was already on a plane crossing the Atlantic. I would be lying if I said that it was an unimportant event in my life: I didn’t sleep for a single second. I was on a red-eye flight, a 9 hours flight, and I didn’t sleep at all. I was too excited. Only a few weeks earlier I was eating a hotdog at a gas station in Santo Domingo, but there I was: having a meal with my colleagues at a chic restaurant in Milan; watching people riding their bikes while wearing their Armani suits to the office; watching how everybody walking down the road looked like coming out of a movie set; learning how to curse in Italian by shouting out loud in a crowded bar. To me those were really eye opening experiences. I tried my best to look and behave cool about it, but everyone could tell that I was enjoying the opportunity. Say what you want, man, but to me that was cool!

 

It was also my introduction to 24/7 work: I had to be reachable on my cell phone around the clock. Maybe that’s how my current insomnia started! It was a bittersweet experience. Here you are, learning tons of stuff, making a decent amount of money, driving around the country, meeting new places, etc. On the other hand, there were days when it was insufferable: you had to cut short your trip to the beach with friends because “site 327 is down and we don’t know what’s wrong”. Or “node RRA-1 is blinking red on the remote management system. Yes, I know it is 3:07 am, but please leave your bed and come ASAP, even if it will take you 30 mins. Thanks for coming. Oh, sorry! It was not red. It is actually pink. What? Pink means nothing? Oh, my bad. Sorry, man! I didn’t know. I thought I saw it red”. Happy times!

 

I learnt a lot that first year from everybody around the office. The best part of it all was that Orange was sort of an extension of the university campus: most of the engineers were former classmates. Imagine yourself in your twenties, working in the same office with another 50 to 60 twenty year old people, most of them coming from the same college you attended, and the number kept growing every week. Hilarity ensued! And most of the “real bosses” were equally as cool, still in their late twenties / early thirties, most of them coming to Dom Rep on short terms assignments and ended up staying for years. It is safe to say that within a couple of months we were all buddies: drinking buddies, going to the beach buddies, Europe trip buddies, going to the mountains buddies, birthday party buddies, etc. Truthfully, I am surprised on how professional we were when it came to actually completing a job. It was a multicultural and tolerant environment, where both stress and hilarity were mixed to perfection.

This easygoing environment and comradery, after a while, made it somehow difficult after a year when my role in the company changed. Promotions came quickly within the company, which is a typical situation you can see in any young business with the profile of France Telecom/Orange Dominicana. More responsibility, greater visibility, more stress. I decided to start my MBA in late 2001. Around that same time I received a promotion and became a manager of a department different from the one I was part of at the time. I must admit that I was not ready for that. I liked to be organized and I had a very structured way to deal with problems, and get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible… for myself. But that didn’t mean that I was ready to manage people or that particular team. I went from being their “pal” to being their “boss”. It is not easy the first time.

 

I had to learn as quickly as I could. I learnt the hard way how difficult it is to start managing a team that has been formed before you joined it. If you are not aware of how difficult this could be for a “newbie”, please read The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, and you will understand why it was uphill for me. It took me months to be able to make things work among ourselves; to be able to trust each other. But it ended up being a great experience. It is now part of the toolkit that I use every now and then when dealing with stakeholders at work.

I would say that it took us about 6 months into that new role for us to be OK again, and after that the entire team was “working together” without many issues. And we went back to behave as friends as opposed to just colleagues. And we watched together how the company evolved. How the teams were changing. How the whole organization was changing. New leadership were arriving; people leaving the country to advance in their studies; the never ending farewell parties; more promotions, etc. Overall it was a rather nice work environment.

And then there is the other side of the coin: when you are working really hard for years, shoulder to shoulder, with your team mates, your friends, totally unaware of the importance of life, and suddenly death makes its ever unforeseen appearance…

To be continued…