I'm Al, 35 years old, married with 5 fur-children, from north Denver, Colorado, and for most of my life I've been a M.O.D.E.L. citizen. That is until I found The Fastlane and Unscripted , and decided to change. I'd like to introduce myself by sharing my journey that led to my FTE that occurred last month.
Growing up in the 90's I was frequently told I was a natural at a lot of things. Baseball, marksmanship, math, playing the trombone to name a few. My true passion was building things with K'nex, a sort of off-branded Lego engineering system, and Estes model rockets with my Grandpa. I would build all kinds of toys and say to myself "When I grow up, I want to be a scientist like him." It didn't quite work that way.
I graduate high school, but lose all momentum and drive. I’m lazy. I want to go to college, but the effort was too much. My parents press me to enroll in some form of higher education, but the threat of change scares the crap out of me. I was a B-student, better than the A's and way smarter than the C's, so I thought I could just coast by playing videogames in the basement. Reluctantly succumbing to pressure, I enroll in community college with the goal to become a scientist of any discipline. I get a job/gig assembling radar antennas with my Grandpa in his basement to learn, but also to keep him entertained in retirement. Momentum builds up slowly, and by 2014 I'm accepted to a university and have a "real" job assembling radar components.
Life hits me hard in 2015. My high school sweetheart cheats on me with “someone that reminds her of an earlier version of me” just before the semester finals, and my dad leaves my mom for another woman. I'm devastated. I move out of the house, start drinking excessively, reinvent myself and mingle with the wrong crowd. Life is crap, but I pull myself together and through to graduate with a B.A. in Biochemistry (to quote Eminem- the skin on my teeth and a hair on my nuts I skated by) a year later. I get hired by a pharma company a few months after turning the tassel and I thought I had the life.
Then came the grueling hours, the standard operating procedures, the office culture, the false promises of raises, and climbing the corporate ladder only to have the rung above me extend out of reach through internal reorganizing. It pisses me off. The silver lining through the crap was meeting the love of my life. My company's laboratory sample manager was also a freelance hair stylist, and she introduced me to one of her clients who just so happened to be single, a fellow chemical analyst, and had a pair of Rockies baseball season tickets. I couldn't say no. And to all the haters laughing right now, I don't care. The Rockies will always be my favorite team.
I had been dating my girlfriend, now wife, in 2019 for 6 months when I experienced my first FTE by proxy. She gets fired from her position because she refused to sign a falsified document. It also happens on her birthday. But it’s no big deal! With her integrity intact, she moves in with me and gets a new chemical analyst position 2 weeks later around the corner for a little-big pharma plant called Corden Pharma. Her project? Validation testing for GLP-1 drugs for use as *cough* type II diabetes treatment *cough*. And then the pandemic hits. After lockdowns lift in March, she and the entire plant pivot to the other savior of humanity, the novel mRNA vaccine, or more specifically the delivery system Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient. Holy shit I never saw someone work that hard under that much pressure. With behind-the-curtain seating, from April till December, I watch my wife and her company work 60+ hour weeks, grinding non-stop to flawlessly draft, manufacturer, test and execute a massive vision. What normally takes a company 3+ years to just plan A-B, they did A-D in 6 months. Hence why it was called Operation Warp Speed. I remember thinking "Wow. Now that the hard stuff is over, my wife can stick a feather in her cap, breathe out and put a little tick on her resume saying she helped save the world!" But no one else saw it that way.
2 big FTE by proxy happened next, with the first one occurring in 2022. Corden fires my wife on a false pretext that she was stealing company time. The kicker was that the IT department could not confirm NOR deny her ID badge was used to enter any campus buildings during plant operating hours, but she buzzed through secure lab doors throughout the day. She said to check the security cameras! That's evidence! But they said nah, that’s too much effort and slammed her out. What kind of piss poor excuse is that? And to do it to a COVID analyst?! Did she mean nothing to you?! Did her efforts mean nothing to the world?! Yes, but nope. Just another cog in the machine. She was the first of the roughly 60-person COVID project team let go for equally trivial reasons. The real victors were the owners of the system. Worse for us, that didn't stop us from spending money, even though our household income was slashed more than half. Life goes on.
The second FTE by proxy occurred this June. She’s working as a remote contractor for a bigger pharma company, fighting to get on their payroll, but they let her go as the position wasn't and couldn’t be approved by the legal department. They tell her to "keep her head down, don't do anything stupid, and when we post your open position publicly in July, immediately apply and you'll get hired on by August. Maybe." That rejection letter on August 1st was half of the final straw.
Concurrently, I'm working not as a chemist at this point, but as a customer service rep back with my first “real” company. They now specialize in total atmospheric thermodynamic profiling instruments instead of just one. My work with Grandpa got me in the door building RADAR antennas, and it paid better than a chemist, weirdly, but hey, money is money. The job degradation starts slowly once again, only this time it’s far more visible. First the company credit card is intermittently declined, then maxed out while on business trips. I have to shell out my own money to pay for expenses. I and my fellow colleagues then notice money going out of our paychecks for HSAs and retirement, but there is no evidence of that money being deposited into the accounts. And then payroll routinely comes 1, sometimes 2 weeks late. Excuses mount, circular "I'll fix it in 2 weeks" from the CEO. On August 1st, I learn that a class action lawsuit is being filed against my company's CEO for $16 million (and growing) due to debt and product owed to customers. The other half of the straw lands. I realize I am helplessly trapped on a "Titanic" ponzi scheme. I curse the CEO, curse the world around me, curse my life. F*ck all of this. I feel I deserve more than this. My family deserves more. I sulk in misery, wake up late, arrive at my desk late just to mindlessly watch YouTube, leave early, consume more alcohol, go to sleep, repeat.
But then, I come across Fastlane. I read it front to back, 3 times, in 12 days. I've never read anything like it, or as dense, in such a time frame. I find it resonating with me, and I've been redlining my lifestyle for the last 36 days and it feels awesome. I'm on a razors edge, balancing debt, the house, our family's livelihood, because of the choices I made, not because the universe is vindictive against me. I choose to work towards acknowledging or improving the 3 F's every day. I start my day earlier and end them later, spending more time learning and doing. I'm learning how to budget, and I built one myself first. I'm learning about different avenues to manage debt. I'm learning things about customer service, even though I hate it and the company might go under, because the benefits of practicing it outweigh the regret of doing nothing. Instead of praying the company pulls through so that I have a paycheck, I'm giving my time out of passion to help it pull through any way I can so it can provide more data to more people across the globe, knowing full well it could fold any moment or explode and leave me in the dust. I'm learning to be open to opportunity, and find it everywhere. I'm learning how to spot moronic and intelligent risks, and now I'm walking a pencil line instead of a razor. Things are difficult now, and the paths ahead are full of challenges, but I choose to believe I can conquer them all.
Thank you for reading my journey. I hope it provides a smidge of insight what to do and not to. I'm excited to stick around to give for a change, to learn even more, and to be a true scientist by solving problems.
Regards,
Al
Growing up in the 90's I was frequently told I was a natural at a lot of things. Baseball, marksmanship, math, playing the trombone to name a few. My true passion was building things with K'nex, a sort of off-branded Lego engineering system, and Estes model rockets with my Grandpa. I would build all kinds of toys and say to myself "When I grow up, I want to be a scientist like him." It didn't quite work that way.
I graduate high school, but lose all momentum and drive. I’m lazy. I want to go to college, but the effort was too much. My parents press me to enroll in some form of higher education, but the threat of change scares the crap out of me. I was a B-student, better than the A's and way smarter than the C's, so I thought I could just coast by playing videogames in the basement. Reluctantly succumbing to pressure, I enroll in community college with the goal to become a scientist of any discipline. I get a job/gig assembling radar antennas with my Grandpa in his basement to learn, but also to keep him entertained in retirement. Momentum builds up slowly, and by 2014 I'm accepted to a university and have a "real" job assembling radar components.
Life hits me hard in 2015. My high school sweetheart cheats on me with “someone that reminds her of an earlier version of me” just before the semester finals, and my dad leaves my mom for another woman. I'm devastated. I move out of the house, start drinking excessively, reinvent myself and mingle with the wrong crowd. Life is crap, but I pull myself together and through to graduate with a B.A. in Biochemistry (to quote Eminem- the skin on my teeth and a hair on my nuts I skated by) a year later. I get hired by a pharma company a few months after turning the tassel and I thought I had the life.
Then came the grueling hours, the standard operating procedures, the office culture, the false promises of raises, and climbing the corporate ladder only to have the rung above me extend out of reach through internal reorganizing. It pisses me off. The silver lining through the crap was meeting the love of my life. My company's laboratory sample manager was also a freelance hair stylist, and she introduced me to one of her clients who just so happened to be single, a fellow chemical analyst, and had a pair of Rockies baseball season tickets. I couldn't say no. And to all the haters laughing right now, I don't care. The Rockies will always be my favorite team.
I had been dating my girlfriend, now wife, in 2019 for 6 months when I experienced my first FTE by proxy. She gets fired from her position because she refused to sign a falsified document. It also happens on her birthday. But it’s no big deal! With her integrity intact, she moves in with me and gets a new chemical analyst position 2 weeks later around the corner for a little-big pharma plant called Corden Pharma. Her project? Validation testing for GLP-1 drugs for use as *cough* type II diabetes treatment *cough*. And then the pandemic hits. After lockdowns lift in March, she and the entire plant pivot to the other savior of humanity, the novel mRNA vaccine, or more specifically the delivery system Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient. Holy shit I never saw someone work that hard under that much pressure. With behind-the-curtain seating, from April till December, I watch my wife and her company work 60+ hour weeks, grinding non-stop to flawlessly draft, manufacturer, test and execute a massive vision. What normally takes a company 3+ years to just plan A-B, they did A-D in 6 months. Hence why it was called Operation Warp Speed. I remember thinking "Wow. Now that the hard stuff is over, my wife can stick a feather in her cap, breathe out and put a little tick on her resume saying she helped save the world!" But no one else saw it that way.
2 big FTE by proxy happened next, with the first one occurring in 2022. Corden fires my wife on a false pretext that she was stealing company time. The kicker was that the IT department could not confirm NOR deny her ID badge was used to enter any campus buildings during plant operating hours, but she buzzed through secure lab doors throughout the day. She said to check the security cameras! That's evidence! But they said nah, that’s too much effort and slammed her out. What kind of piss poor excuse is that? And to do it to a COVID analyst?! Did she mean nothing to you?! Did her efforts mean nothing to the world?! Yes, but nope. Just another cog in the machine. She was the first of the roughly 60-person COVID project team let go for equally trivial reasons. The real victors were the owners of the system. Worse for us, that didn't stop us from spending money, even though our household income was slashed more than half. Life goes on.
The second FTE by proxy occurred this June. She’s working as a remote contractor for a bigger pharma company, fighting to get on their payroll, but they let her go as the position wasn't and couldn’t be approved by the legal department. They tell her to "keep her head down, don't do anything stupid, and when we post your open position publicly in July, immediately apply and you'll get hired on by August. Maybe." That rejection letter on August 1st was half of the final straw.
Concurrently, I'm working not as a chemist at this point, but as a customer service rep back with my first “real” company. They now specialize in total atmospheric thermodynamic profiling instruments instead of just one. My work with Grandpa got me in the door building RADAR antennas, and it paid better than a chemist, weirdly, but hey, money is money. The job degradation starts slowly once again, only this time it’s far more visible. First the company credit card is intermittently declined, then maxed out while on business trips. I have to shell out my own money to pay for expenses. I and my fellow colleagues then notice money going out of our paychecks for HSAs and retirement, but there is no evidence of that money being deposited into the accounts. And then payroll routinely comes 1, sometimes 2 weeks late. Excuses mount, circular "I'll fix it in 2 weeks" from the CEO. On August 1st, I learn that a class action lawsuit is being filed against my company's CEO for $16 million (and growing) due to debt and product owed to customers. The other half of the straw lands. I realize I am helplessly trapped on a "Titanic" ponzi scheme. I curse the CEO, curse the world around me, curse my life. F*ck all of this. I feel I deserve more than this. My family deserves more. I sulk in misery, wake up late, arrive at my desk late just to mindlessly watch YouTube, leave early, consume more alcohol, go to sleep, repeat.
But then, I come across Fastlane. I read it front to back, 3 times, in 12 days. I've never read anything like it, or as dense, in such a time frame. I find it resonating with me, and I've been redlining my lifestyle for the last 36 days and it feels awesome. I'm on a razors edge, balancing debt, the house, our family's livelihood, because of the choices I made, not because the universe is vindictive against me. I choose to work towards acknowledging or improving the 3 F's every day. I start my day earlier and end them later, spending more time learning and doing. I'm learning how to budget, and I built one myself first. I'm learning about different avenues to manage debt. I'm learning things about customer service, even though I hate it and the company might go under, because the benefits of practicing it outweigh the regret of doing nothing. Instead of praying the company pulls through so that I have a paycheck, I'm giving my time out of passion to help it pull through any way I can so it can provide more data to more people across the globe, knowing full well it could fold any moment or explode and leave me in the dust. I'm learning to be open to opportunity, and find it everywhere. I'm learning how to spot moronic and intelligent risks, and now I'm walking a pencil line instead of a razor. Things are difficult now, and the paths ahead are full of challenges, but I choose to believe I can conquer them all.
Thank you for reading my journey. I hope it provides a smidge of insight what to do and not to. I'm excited to stick around to give for a change, to learn even more, and to be a true scientist by solving problems.
Regards,
Al
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