My phone rings as I'm walking to HomeState to grab two burritos Blanco and a cappuccino from Blue Bottle. I walked past a gigantic Kaws statue, and a garage painted by Kenny Scharf and Aaron de la Cruz. I think to myself, "You're cheesy bro. Your life's a cliche right now. Life's good."
I answered the phone because it's a recruiter that has been calling about new opportunities. He says, "Have you heard of lululemon?". Trying not to chuckle, I reply "Yes." Up until that point I had only really seen the brand on women's buttocks but I knew they had something to do with Yoga.
"They're looking to expand into the United States and they're looking for someone to handle all of the groundwork" he replies excitedly.
As I think of my burritos with freshly made tortilla de harina and well rationed foamy coffee I tell him to sign me up and let's get some interviews going. After a few set of rounds of interviews with what we will call the "main characters" I was in. I thought I was the man for the job, and they did too.
Before I take you into the great depths of Al's mind it's important to note that this isn't the first time I caught them running game on me, but it is the first time where a sequence of events caused me to create a formal complaint about the situation.
You see, I can pinpoint the exact start of aggression by lululemon to the day I met the "gatekeeper" Tessa Borsoi. Only a visitor to the office, she acted with such grandeur and higher decree than Sun Choe.
Let's take a look into the organizational structure at this given time of several departments. As Method Man cleverly stated "When my mind start to clickin', And the strategy is mastered, the plot thicken."
My lack of character development is stunted by my ability to not let my biases interfere with my words, but establishing each of these individuals provides context as to what is to follow.
The infamous "Facilities" gang.
After formally raising the complaint, only a week would go by before my first time getting called to the principal’s office would occur. None of my actions or behavior had raised any concerns after more than a year working for lululemon, but somehow asking for an explanation as to why it was tolerable that a colleague of ours kept wasting our time while I struggled to keep up with office functions across both locations had pushed whatever threshold was existent.
By this point, I was very seasoned as to how Tessa and her squad magically made items disappear. My colleagues Matthew Lantin or DJ Paringit would establish a work order for me to perform around a certain area (usually involving a blind spot from a camera positioning), then Facilities would involve a vendor assisting in that particular work order to help make objects vanish, typically the cleaning one or their own receptionists.
It was fairly fool proof. Even though there wouldn’t be any direct evidence of me taking an item, as they rotated vendors and consequently people — the law of deduction would imply I was behind each theft.
For a billion dollar company to simply allow behavior like this to go unnoticed for months on end when the rings of retail theft get cracked down in matters of weeks seemed oddly suspicious. My meeting with Amber Lott would result in her siding with Peter Bzowski that I was in the wrong to be upset that a third appointment was missed by his scheduled vendor to perform one of these work orders for none other than the Chief Product Officer, or one of the second highest ranking members of the organization.
Ultimately it was clear that it was it wasn’t a “me versus them mentality, but rather a them versus me approach.”
I had managed to open a line of communication with Kelly Burkinshaw from my own employer, TEKSystems, regarding what was happening at a local level, but no one from the lululemon side was involved until Amber Lott took the bait and decided she wanted to call me out on my alleged behavior towards the Facilities department. At that point, PNC, or their People and Culture department had to get involved.
She was smart and branded it as a racial complaint rather than presenting it for what it was: a horror story involving a large group of their organization banded together to create a filtering system into their workplace. After admitting the importance of providing the work requested by executives - it only seemed foolish to come out in defense of the perpetrators to try to justify their actions.
My role with the Product team, Sun's team, was largely made redundant after who knows how many people got victimized or decided to play into their game. The printing fiasco at Main St. was one of the clearest attempts to begin making my role obsolete with the Brand team. Led by Nikki Neuburger and Deborah Hyun - they would facilitate my participation into their office functions to expose me into their respective offices time after time again.
I was seeing Nikki eye to eye, helping her address problems, and somehow she thought it was all a mistake that I stood next to her. It doesn't surprise me that people who have had everything served on a silver platter are incapable of distinguishing the character of individuals that don't match their skin tone, but what specially triggers me is that people like her had copped out the hood just a few years prior, and now they wanted to reshape its history like it never existed.
They like the culture, but not the people. There's a special term for people like that: culture vultures. Using street narratives to advance profitability to match their "Power of Three" objectives. As Kendrick Lamar said: Not like us.
