Halftank Fuel from Mary Carns

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio The ninth time I got fired, I had just gotten back from getting my oil changed. I knew what the Zoom call was about the day before the invite. To me, it was obvious because it was, yet again, one of those 1-on-1 meetings with my direct supervisor with no agenda and a vague title. I opened my laptop, and my boss and I ended up talking for an hour. We talked about not just my fate, but the fate of the company in general. This company relied on assigning...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio It's not FOMO. It's FOLS. Everyone in the product business talks about FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out. The startup version, the Slack version, the "if I leave now I'll miss the IPO" version. It's the fear we name, the fear we joke about, the fear we put on conference panels. For me, FOMO is really about choosing the right ice cream flavor. I'd like to introduce you to a different acronym. One I started using years ago to describe what I was actually...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio My teeth kept the score I live with regret every time I go to the dentist, but not for the reasons you'd think. Picture this: I'm driving home on a sunny afternoon, taking the scenic route to avoid the interstate. Nothing dramatic is happening. Just another day at a particularly dysfunctional startup where sprint planning sessions regularly devolved into shouting matches and physical threats, in an office that had been renovated with all the cubicle...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio Most people picture a book editor as someone who double checks your Oxford commas and tells you your writing is beautiful. The reality is closer to someone handing you back a puzzle and saying: I think some of these pieces belong to a different box. As a writer, I need the latter. I started writing about workplace dysfunction as a series of Medium articles. That format has its own logic: you make one point, you land it, you're done. An article is a...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio What would you call a boss who takes calls from his realtor during Zoom calls, without muting himself, during pandemic-era Zoom calls when everyone is terrified of getting fired or worse? I could use a lot of curse words to describe him, but to describe him to people I now call him Mr. Beach House. Thinking about, then writing, a memoir meant that I carried around a cast of characters for years: the people, the companies, the situations. And when I...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio There's a moment that happens reliably on critique day. The student who has been confident all semester — the one with strong opinions, the one who always has something to say — goes quiet. Their work is on the wall. The room is looking at it. And they are suddenly, visibly, somewhere else entirely. I taught introductory graphic design for three semesters as an adjunct at George Mason University School of Art. Critique days were when I learned the...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio My editor's note was diplomatic, the way good editors are. It arrived first as a comment in the Google Doc — a small flag in the margin — and then again in a letter, which told me he'd thought about it carefully enough to write it down twice. The ending of my memoir, he said, was too dark. He wasn't wrong. I'd written thirteen chapters about nine layoffs across fifteen years, about being labeled a bad fit so many times I started to wonder if the label...