It’s been about an hour since I got fired from my first job on TaskRabbit. Yikes! I’m gonna write about it and see where this goes. What happened? How do I feel about it? What can I learn?
What happened? I recently moved to the Portland, OR Metro Area. In looking for work, I decided one avenue I’d try was TaskRabbit. I created a profile and offered my skills, one of them being IKEA furniture assembly.
A couple of weeks later, I got a message that there was an assembly task near me. I messaged to chat with the client. I hadn’t heard back, but the time to respond to the request was running out, so I took it. It was scheduled for 7 PM on a Monday night. Uggh. Not my best time of the day.
I contacted the client via the app to ask to talk about the job beforehand. She passed my number to her mom who later referred me back to the client. The client did not call me back before the appointment. I just went to the site.
The task was scheduled for 2 hours, and being new to TaskRabbit, I don’t know where that duration came from. The task was to assemble a daybed and a wardrobe. I arrived on time at the client’s house, let her know that it was my first time, and got to work. After the first hour, I had opened the daybed boxes, assembled the drawers, and was starting on the trundle portion of the daybed. I told the client that I clearly would not be done by 9 PM. I told her I was surprised by the 2 hour timeframe for one person to assemble a daybed and a wardrobe. It took me 10 minutes just to move around and open the first set of boxes. She said that she had paid for 6 hours through IKEA. Ah! That made sense. I was on my way to being done with the daybed in another hour, maybe even less. Based on our short talk, I had understood that we would schedule additional time for me to complete the work and that I would accept what IKEA had billed for the assembly, even if I went over 6 hours as a newbie.
I thought the process of assembly was going well for the first time, but there was a snag with the trundle. At 9 PM, as I was installing these proprietary lock nuts (I don’t know their technical name), I discovered that one was missing and another one would not set properly. It was time to stop. I told the client where I was at and that I would come back with a magnet to remove the nut and would call IKEA or go to IKEA to get another nut.
The next day, i.e. today, I was on the phone with IKEA and sent a text to the client to schedule another session. Midday, I felt surprised, sad, angry, and relieved to see in the TaskRabbit app that the client had cancelled the task. The message said, “Tasker lacks the minimum skills and tools needed for the task,” and this reason was pending review.
Arrgh! I feel angry about the lack of relationship, first with TaskRabbit, and second with the client, who never called me, before or after. As for TaskRabbit, it is a website and a couple of apps from my perspective, not humans. I did not have a human interaction with the company. They completed their review and accepted the reason without contacting me. Wow! What a great review! No need to hear both sides; no need to learn from the situation. Easy, breezy. Done.
From their perspective, I lack the minimum skills and tools needed for the task. I feel sad about that. I have an inner dialog that constantly tells me that I am incompetent. I feel sad that I was not able to meet this client’s needs. That doesn’t make me incompetent. I do not think that I lack the minimum skills and tools, but I do lack some skills and tools.
What do I lack? I lacked good judgment to accept the task without first talking with the client. If the client expected me to finish the job in 2 hours when it was going to take me 6, then I lacked the tools of good communication and relationship building to be able to negotiate a timeframe that would afford me the time to try the new experience at a fair rate and timeframe for her. I lacked a little magnet tool to be able to remove the nut to see what the problem was. (I bought one this morning.) Today, I also realized I lacked the ability to hold off on the conclusion that the nut was missing. Another possibility I thought of is that maybe I accidentally pressed a second nut down into a hole where there was already a nut. I was working on multiple identical pieces and had to make a trip to the fastener bag. I may have lost my place. I’ll never know. In considering this, I think that I also failed to follow my best judgment by taking a job at that time of day. I am more sharp earlier in the day. And finally, maybe I do lack speed. Based on a Google search for time to assemble a daybed, there is a range of time estimates from 2 to 5 hours. Perhaps my rate would have been above average. I lack a reference point.
I feel relieved that she cancelled on me. That’s interesting. I was feeling nervous about having to go back and finish. It’s so silly, the fear. I’m working on recognizing when my fear sensations are “unreal,” i.e. when they are not based on any legitimate threat. There is nothing to fear in this particular situation. I was afraid that I would make a mistake, even though from the information that I have, I assembled the furniture correctly and have no doubt that I am capable of assembling it correctly. I fear being blamed. That’s what it is. I fear the nut not being in the package but the client not believing me and blaming me. So, I feel relieved that I don’t have to feel those particular fears anymore. Hmmm… I feel sad now that I don’t get to finish the job to prove to myself that I can complete that task despite those fear sensations.
The larger fear that is looming in the background is the fear that I have about being able to meet my basic needs. Am I incompetent? What do I have or can I learn that has value in commerce? Who am I? Who am I in the tribe?
Why write about this? In writing about it, I am attempting to face another fear: What will happen to me if the world knows that I was fired? What will happen if the entire world thinks that I am incompetent? … This is a fear of rejection. I’m afraid that all the other humans are going to abandon me. And, I’m afraid that I will go along and abandon myself too.
I’m also writing about this because I felt inspired after reading some words from Osho. In Courage – The Joy of Living Dangerously, he writes:
“If you go on exposing yourself, in the beginning it is going to be really very scary, but soon you will start gaining strength because once the truth is exposed it becomes stronger and the untruth dies. And with the truth becoming stronger you become rooted, you become centered. You start becoming an individual; the personality disappears and individuality appears.”
It seems helpful to expose myself. Having exposed myself and reading what I wrote, I see how readily my thinking mind supplies reasons for my feelings, how readily it makes interpretations, and how other equally valid interpretations exist.
In exposing myself, I gained a new feeling experience of truth compared to the story. The feeling of truth in this case seems to be uncertainty. It’s a feeling of mystery. I’ve exposed the story: I got fired. Did I get fired? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m noticing that I feel perplexed about what to conclude. So be it.