I have written here before about disappointment and was fully prepared to write about disappointment once again.
A few days before promotion announcements were released, my office in Washington released a notice advising employees around the globe that promotion numbers would be down this year. This -- in and of itself -- didn't come as a surprise. There was no overt mention as to why promotions would be down, but you didn't have to read between the lines. Ever since the election, the leaves were in the tea. Hiring freeze, budget cuts, and down-sizing.
This year marked the fourth time I was up for promotion. Many in my cohort had already been promoted; some were now on to their next promotion.
It's difficult not to divorce feelings of self-worth from failure to be promoted. By definition, a promotion is extrinsic recognition of your value as an employee and the granting of additional responsibilities as a result. Promotion panels -- people I have never met in person -- decide whether or not I get a promotion by what I and my supervisors write in my performance evaluation. The difference between being promoted and not being promoted is how I capture my work on paper and not the work itself.
I'm not bitter. I'm really not. In an organization with a global scope, I have no better way to compare someone working in Ouagadougou to someone working in Guangzhou. It is -- as they say -- what it is.
But divorce feelings of self-worth from failure to be promoted is something I have had to do for each of the last three years when promotions are announced and my name is not on the list. Each time I was passed over for promotion, I had to not only come up with reasons why it wasn't my year, but also build myself back up, convince myself my value as a person, a husband, a father, and an employee wasn't linked to my promotablity.
This usually isn't hard to do. After a few hours of wallowing, I'm usually conscripted into some task that has nothing to do with work: make school lunches, give baths, listen to Elise or the kids complain about their day, get asked to help build a lego B-wing. The people who love me most, who lives I affect the most, don't care at all that I wasn't promoted. My value in their eyes hasn't changed at all. If anything, the way I deal with this disappointment will factor into their estimation of me as a husband and father more than how I deal with being promoted.
If I wasn't promoted, I would have to find a new job in a few years. I didn't tell Elise this, but I had already started to think about what we would do if I wasn't promoted. I didn't want to be blindsided. That had happened to me once, and I promised myself I wouldn't let it happen again. Not to me, not to Elise, and especially, not to my young family.
The story is well known by now. I was working in commercial real estate in South Florida when the global financial crisis hit in 2008. I went almost two years without a paycheck, cashing in all my savings, 401ks, turning in cars, everything. I tried to catch a falling knife and paid dearly for it. I wasn't going to do that again.
I was luckier than most. I got an amazing new job that has taken me to Washington, D.C., Brazil, India, and now the Middle East. I like this job. I think I am really good at this job. I didn't think I was a very good commercial real estate developer. If only because I didn't like the idea we had to cut down so many trees. (It's a lot more expensive to move a tree than just cut it down; The bigger the tree, the cheaper it is just to level it.)
A few days after the notice about promotion numbers was posted, I received an email from my career development officer back in D.C. He just got out of a meeting with HR who told him they were on schedule to release the promotion lists before Labor Day Weekend. Labor Day coincided with Eid Al-Adha in Jordan, so we would be treated to a five-day weekend, and we decided to make our first trip down to Petra.
We drove to Petra on Friday, September 1. After a long day hiking, we hung out by the pool, had a few beers and an early dinner, then went to bed with the kids, turning the lights off around 8:30 or 9:00.
The next morning was Friday night in D.C. Peter was smooshed up next to me in the queen-sized bed. I carefully extricated myself from beneath the covers, careful not to wake him and tip-toed across the thin, hotel-room carpet. I reached for my Blackberry, but before I could turn it on, my iPhone flashed with messages from Facebook:
"Paul - a million congrats on your promotion!"
Then,
"PAUL - Congrats man!"
I quickly set down the iPhone, trading it in for the work Blackberry, unlocked it. The promotion lists were out. I pulled up the notice, opened it, and quickly scrolled through the names in alphabetical order, skipping to the H's.
I had been promoted.
I took the Blackberry to Elise and showed her. She hugged me. I tried telling the kids, too, but they were already engrossed in a morning cartoon on the hotel TV.
A few nights later, Elise and I went out to Rainbow Street. Ostensibly, to celebrate, but we would have gone out whether I was promoted or not.
We started at a rooftop bar at the east end of Rainbow Street called Cantaloupe. It was dusk when we settled at out perch, ordering an Amstel (see previous posts about the merits of drinking bad beer overseas), a glass of white wine, and an appetizer of grilled haloumi cheese, similar to the queijo coalho we had in Brazil, and looking out over Amman as the sun setting behind us, illuminated the ancient Roman columns atop the Citadel soft hues of pink and orange. The city lights began to twinkle on, as did the neon stripes running up the many minarets, followed by the call to prayer.
When you are down in the city, immersed in the streets, the call comes to you, first faintly, as though far away. As running water moves, so does the call, until it finds you. When you are down in the city streets, you hear one call, the call coming from the local, neighborhood mosque. There is one voice, one song.
But sitting high above the city, there wasn't just one call. There, we could hear all the calls to prayer. First one iman, one prayer, then a second, and a third, floating up, hanging over the city like clouds of song, at first disparate, as though two of the same song, started one at a time, they are discordant at first until the moment they are synchronous, if only for a moment, before becoming discordant again, magnified by a third and fourth, then a hundred songs, all at once, carrying over the city, from minaret to minaret.
It lasted for several minutes, and Elise and I could not compete with it, nor did we really try.
After Cantaloupe, we had planned to have dinner at Sufra, but I had failed to make a reservation, so we dove into the nearest shawarma stand and ate like locals, pressed up against glass looking out onto the sidewalk cafe outside.
