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The Fear is the Product They’re Selling Internally
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I noticed the problem on day two. The company prides itself on answering its own phones, but if a call is missed or everyone’s busy, it routes straight to an AI assistant, and we have to call the customer back and start over. Nobody could explain why they didn’t just use a hold system instead.
Two days in, there was an all hands meeting. The owner stood up and bragged that they answer every incoming call, like it was a competitive advantage. My eyes almost bugged out. I wanted to scream: answering the phones is the worst thing you do. Instead I held my face still. It was the thing they were proudest of, and the thing that worked the least.
Then he asked me to stand up and introduce myself. I did. He asked what I thought of the company so far. He’d been talking a lot that day about some self help personality he follows, some philosophy he’d picked up secondhand and was now running the company by.
I told him the company seemed more progressive than I expected.
He corrected me on the spot. Not because the word was wrong. He had his own list of preferred words. Nobody had taught me any of it yet. He corrected me before he ever trained me. I was new, and I was already wrong.
I watched him run that same move in almost every meeting. He’d ask an open ended question, the kind with a hundred reasonable answers. But he wasn’t actually open to a hundred answers. He had one specific answer sitting in his head, something only he knew, and he was just waiting to see who’d land on it. The second somebody missed it, he was on them.
I grew up in a cult. I watched the leader run that exact move for years before I ever sat in that meeting. Ask a question that sounds open. Wait. Correct whoever answers wrong, in front of everyone, so the whole room learns the lesson even if they weren’t the one called on. I’d escaped that machine once already. Now I was watching a grown man run the same program in a sales office, and the irony wasn’t lost on me.
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I told the manager later, after a few more meetings like that one, that you can’t keep telling everybody they’re wrong constantly. It kills motivation. Nobody can build anything standing on ground that keeps moving under them.
But that wasn’t the villain part. That was just the warning.
There was a guy who sat near me. Younger. He listened in on my calls and told me what I did wrong. He wasn’t my manager, but he acted like one. Sometimes he was right. Sometimes he gave me information that was flat wrong, bad enough that my manager had to correct him in front of people. I got angry enough to almost walk out. They didn’t want me to go, which still strikes me as ironic, how hard they fought to keep me when they were the ones making it unbearable.
I started noticing how closely the manager watched him. Talking to her bosses about him. He was already on a final warning, one mistake from being let go. Then one day he just stood up and said he couldn’t do this today, he wasn’t quitting, he was just going home. And he left.
They didn’t fire him. They fought to keep him.
A week later, he resigned anyway.
I moved into his seat. The moment he was gone, the attention moved to me. Calls I’d handled fine a month before were suddenly problems. The company always needs somebody to focus on.
It wasn’t just him and me. The field techs lived it too. If one of them made a mistake out in the field, it turned into a hunt. Who did it. What did they do. Who do we tell. There was always a problem floating around looking for a person to land on, like a bullet looking for somebody to hit.
Eventually I understood why. It wasn’t about any one person doing something right or wrong. The fear wasn’t a side effect. It was the management strategy itself. You don’t need a happy team if a scared one hits the numbers just as well.
They needed someone to be afraid of what happened to the last person.
That’s the whole operation in one sentence.
When they told me to be back in the office the next day, no transition time, my wife was out of the country for two weeks and I couldn’t leave six animals alone for ten hours a day, including a thirteen year old dog who’s needed me as her routine for over a decade. I said no. I didn’t negotiate it down. I didn’t apologize for asking. I told them the truth and let it stand.
They let me go immediately.
I won’t tell you that felt like winning. I’m the only income in this house right now, and that follows me into every room. But I think about what saying yes would have cost. I’d have bought myself a few more weeks before the spotlight found me again, because it always does in a place built like that. There’s always another number to hit and somebody has to be the reason it didn’t happen.
I said no to being theirs this time.
Have you worked somewhere that operated like this? Did you see the pattern before it found you, or only after you became the example? And once you saw it clearly, what did you do? Stay and keep your head down, or get out the way I did?
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