A Trip to a Bagel Shop Made Me Decide To Quit My Job Forever and Become Self-Employed

I languished in indecision for years, but one particular experience at Einstein Bros. Bagels finally gave me the courage to strike out my own for good.

Many years ago, after losing my job at a venture-back software company that had a layoff when their investors pulled their funding, I found myself unemployed, trying to raise a family of four kids and a newly acquired mortgage.

I had been self-employed for a short period before the software gig (which ended up only lasting nine months), so I considered going back to working for myself full-time again but decided that the “smarter” choice would be to stay the workforce with the benefits that came with working at a more “civilized” company: health insurance, retirement funds, paid vacation, etc.

So I looked around for jobs, and, through a friend of a friend, learned about a job as a marketing manager at a web design firm only a few blocks away from where I’d worked before. I thought this would be a great fit, so after my friend introduced me to the company owner, I went in for an interview.

Things got weird very quickly.

During my interview with the owner of the company, he’d ask me a question and I would start responding, then he’d interrupt me halfway through my answer and ask me another question. I’d try to respond to the next question, and he’d say: “Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh,” while blinking extremely fast, and it was very clear that he wasn’t actually listening to anything I said.

He shot a barrage of questions my way, many of which were against labor laws for him to even ask in the first place:

• How many kids do you have? Are you planning on having any more kids?

• How’s your health? Do you have good health?

• Do you have any chronic illnesses? Are you going in for any major surgeries anytime soon?

• What kind of car do you drive? What year is it? Where is it parked? Show it to me.

He literally walked out to the parking lot with me and made me point to my car to show him which one it was.

By the time the interview was over, we’d barely talked about the job itself: it was mostly just about my personal life, my health, and my ability to come into the office and do the job.

It was so weird: I couldn’t believe how insulting it was. Here I was, a 25-year-old married man with four kids. He was treating me like an idiot teenage boy who’d never had a job before, asking me absurd questions and having to prove I could actually drive to work if I got the job.

By the time I got home, I told my wife about it, and she said I probably shouldn’t take the job because I looked completely demoralized.

I was. I was completely demoralized. What kind of jerk would he be as a boss if this was the way he treated people before they even worked for him? I wasn’t sure what to do. I waited to see what would happen next.

I got an email saying he’d like me to take a pre-employment personality test before we talked further. This was really weird. In one sense, it was good that he was still interested in me working for him. But in another sense, what on earth was a pre-employment personality test? What did my personality have to do with anything?

I told him I was very reluctant to do so, and even said I was afraid that it would be unfair to judge me based on some arbitrary mathematical score or test results that I couldn’t even understand or might not think was fair.

He promised he wouldn’t judge me solely on the test; he just wanted to see how my personality type would fit in with the company. I felt I had no choice, so I reluctantly agreed. I took the online test and then waited to hear back.

He got the results. He didn’t like them. He asked me to call the woman who administered the test, so I did.

She told me, “He doesn’t like the results. We’re wondering if maybe it was a bad result because you’re under a lot of stress or something. Are you under a lot of stress?”

Well, I was obviously under a lot of stress as I tried to comprehend the stupidity of this line of questioning!

They were acting like it was illogical for me to be “under a lot of stress” when I had just lost my job, was unemployed, was trying to raise a six-person family, and now, in my job search, was having to submit myself to bizarre personality tests while being told they didn’t like my results.

Was this a joke? Were they kidding?

OF COURSE, I WAS UNDER STRESS! What kind of a bone-headed question was that?

I was being put through the wringer, asked illegal questions, and now harassed and insulted by a company owner who was a big bully who was challenging me to a litany of stupid questions and telling me he didn’t like my personality.

He asked me to take the test again. I should have walked away, but for some stupid reason (men will do a lot of stupid and embarrassing things to support their families), I agreed to it.

He got the results the second time and asked me to come in and talk about them. The conversation we had was truly astonishing.

• Him: “Your results show me that you don’t do well under stress.”

• Me: “Okay… what do you mean by that?”

• Him: “Well, it says here that you lose energy quickly when under stress.”

• Me: “Okay, but I’ve been self-employed before, so I’m pretty sure I can handle stress.”

• Him: “I just don’t know that you’ll fit into our culture here.”

• Me: (Long pause…) “What do you mean when you say ‘our culture?’ Is there something in particular you think I can’t do?”

• Him: “Well, we work really hard here.”

I was gobsmacked. Was he implying that he didn’t think I was capable of… working hard?

What?!

I thought of my wife and four kids and told myself, “Just do this, Ron… get the job… worry about the details later.”

Long story short, we got through the hiring process, and I took the job. I signed the job offer and got to work. My wife, once again, was not thrilled. She was grateful for the steady work but was embarrassed to see me so humiliated.

The job was even worse than the interview.

The company owner was also the building owner, but he had leased out a bunch of desks and seats to another company that shared the building. However, the second company had a very small workforce and was getting ready to move to another building.

So, for the first few months, I had to walk past the myriad empty desks and chairs that looked perfectly ready for us and instead sit in the hallway right in front of his office, where he could see me at all times and see what was on my screen at all times.

I felt like an 8-year-old child that he was babysitting.

I asked him: “I know you said the other company is renting these other desks and chairs, but they’re not using them. Can I just sit at one of them, and leave if any of them ever come in the office?”

He wouldn’t budge. He said they’d paid rent for them, so I couldn’t use them.

So there I sat, in my little desk of shame, and every employee who walked to and from the kitchen had to walk past me as I worked out in the open, awkwardly in the hallway, and right in front of his office window.

Other employees laughed and joked about how I had “the eye of Sauron” behind me, watching me at all times. They were only partially kidding.

The child-like grip the owner had on me was stifling, almost suffocating.

But I just kept telling myself: “Think of Rachel and the kids. This is not what I want, but this is the right choice for us. I’m doing this for us.”

A few weeks in, I was driving to work one day and noticed that there was an Einstein Bros. Bagels a few blocks away from the office and decided to stop in. I brought my laptop in with me, ordered a cup of Vanilla Hazelnut Coffee and a toasted and buttered Dutch Apple Bagel, and started on my work for the day and checking my email.

After about 10 minutes, I started getting panicked text messages on my phone. It was my manager.

“Where are you you?!” he asked.

I thought that was weird.

“I’m at a coffee shop. What’s up?” I responded.

He told me the company owner was “Totally freaking out that you aren’t here. Why aren’t you at your desk?” he demanded.

This was getting really confusing, I thought.

“I’m less than a mile away at a coffee shop. I’m online: if he has any questions, why doesn’t he just email me? I’m on my email right now,” I explained.

He still suggested I come into the office. I thought that was super weird, but I agreed. I got into my car, drove less than one-quarter of a mile to the office, and went inside.

The company owner was livid. He asked me to sit down in his office. He began talking:

• Him: “We have a problem, Ron. I need to be able to trust my employees.”

• Me: “Of course. I understand.”

• Him: “When my employees don’t show up to work in the morning, it makes me feel like I can’t trust them. Where were you?”

• Me: “I was at a coffee shop just up the street. I was working.”

• Him: “Well, I didn’t know that. I can’t know unless I can see you in your chair,” he said, pointing to the kiddie table I’d been sitting at right in front of his window since I started working there.

• Me: “Okay, well, I was online… I was checking my emails and working. You could have just emailed me or called me.”

He wasn’t having any of it. He launched into a shockingly condescending diatribe about his time in the Navy.

“Ron, let me tell you… I used to be a Naval Aviator. You know that, right?”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.”

“Do you know what my window of time was for landing a $30 million S-3 Viking on an aircraft carrier, day or night?”

“No, sir, I don’t know,” I said, unsure of where this was going.

“Ten seconds. I had a ten-second window. That’s the kind of ship they run in the US Navy, and that’s the way I like to run my business here.”

“I understand,” I said, knowing this was a lie.

I understood nothing about what he was saying.

What I did understand, more clearly now than ever before, was that this was all stupid. Working for this guy was stupid. This job was stupid. Working for any guy doing any job like this was stupid.

What kind of crazy masochist must you be to work for that kind of hard-ass? The only reason I agreed to work there at all was because I felt desperate not to lose my house and to pay for groceries for my ever-growing family.

But this was punishment. It was all so embarrassing, so emasculating, and so insulting.

It was one of the worst jobs I ever had, not because of the work—the work itself was fine. I liked designing and building websites, but not for other people.

I decided that day, once and for all: “Working for other companies is not for me.”

I counted down the days until I could quit that job, and the first moment I had an opportunity to, I left. Before I did, though, I was promoted to marketing director, got a parking space, and finally got my own office with a door and everything, but none of that mattered. My numbers looked fantastic: after 13 months on the job, I doubled the company’s marketing revenue, but that didn’t mean a thing.

Actually, it meant one thing: it meant that when I showed my numbers to prospective employers, they were very impressed. So when I finally got a job offer, I told the new company, “You have to make it worth my while.” So they added another $10,000 to the salary, and I agreed.

I knew my long-term strategy was to work for myself, but I was willing to take on another full-time job in the interim as I built up my business. So that’s exactly what I did.

The first day I could wake up and not have to report to my horrible boss with an ass-in-seat mentality, who thought he was a Recruit Division Commander needing to whip his sailors into shape with punitive military strictness… that was a fine day, indeed. I smiled for the first time in a long time.

Working there made me feel like a criminal doing time in prison, not a valued member of a team or an expert at my craft who was appreciated and paid well for my skills. When I left, I could breathe free air again.

Looking back now, I can’t even understand why I put up with it for as long as I did.

Actually, I can understand why: my level of confidence in myself was so low that I was willing to sign up for punishment with a tough taskmaster who treated me like unworthy garbage and shamed me by making me sit in front of his office so I could be constantly under surveillance.

These days, I would never do anything like that again. I’m allergic to it.

If I were forced to go back to boot camp (or as they say in the Navy, “Recruit Training Command,”) I’d fail. I would willingly take any separation, honorable or otherwise, to get out of such a bad situation.

I never signed up for the military, and the “work culture” in Corporate America™ is far too rigid for me. No, I call my own shots now.

These days, I’m an immutable entrepreneur: nothing can change that about me. I’ll never go back to the prison of working for someone else.

That’s not to say it’s been easy: being self-employed has been insanely hard at times. I once had to sell the wheels off my car to get grocery money… but that’s a story for another time.

Believe me, though, I’d do that all over again, and more, in order to never have to work for someone else ever again.

These days, I like to pop into Einstein Bros. Bagels on occasion, and when I do, I still order the very same cup of Vanilla Hazelnut Coffee and a toasted and buttered Dutch Apple Bagel.

I sip on my aromatic coffee, bite into my crunchy bagel, and smile as I think about how far I’ve come from those terrible days of working on the brig in the Navy.

Never again.