The perils of nonprofit

With some jobs, avoiding the booby traps can be serious survival business

Before you make a move, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re actually in the fire, and not just the frying pan.

One morning about three years ago I woke up to discover that I had been working as VP/IT Manager at the same medium-sized bank for ten years! No raise, no bonus, no path up the management ladder. Omigod! I immediately started looking for a new job, and after three or four months, I found a great one: IT Manager for a small, non-profit HMO I’ll call London Square Deal Family Health Care.

I had my work cut out for me. London’s Windows 2000 server was running both Active Directory and Exchange, and as far as I could tell, it had never been defragmented. There were only 140 users, but it took almost 10 minutes to log on! Every network backup I ran froze halfway through. Our firewall was a bad joke. The organization had just acquired a dilapidated old hospital that needed a huge amount of work on its IT infrastructure. And to make matters worse, my two support technicians were overworked, underpaid, and annoyed with me for swooping in and telling them what to do.

I took a deep breath. Then (while ordering, configuring and deploying 12 new computers over a 500-square-mile area), I began gathering information to create a comprehensive IT upgrade proposal.

When I met with the CFO to present my proposal, the meeting started off well. But as soon as I got to the price tag — $22,000 — he gave me a look so nasty I began thinking back on my decade at the bank with new fondness. He insisted that there was absolutely no money to pay for the upgrade. I made my best case, pointing out that if we didn’t upgrade, we might soon be unable to do business at all. He stared at me as if I were an obnoxious insect, muttered something about looking into it, and shooed me out of his office.

Later that week one of my support techs quit, and I began a frantic search for a replacement. That led to several clashes between the HR director and me as to what kind of person was needed for the job and how much we could pay. Then, on Friday, the CFO asked me to accompany him on a visit to the newly acquired hospital facility. I took advantage of the drive to “sell” the network upgrade, reminding the CFO how badly we needed it. For some reason, he seemed far more receptive this time around, and made several favorable comments about what a good job I was doing.

When I showed up for work on Monday, the HR Director called me into her office and told me I was being terminated. My performance, she said, was “unsatisfactory.” The CFO would not even look at me, and nobody would tell me anything more specific about why they were firing me.

Luckily I had become friends with one of the organization’s in-house grant writers. At first he was reluctant to divulge any information about my abrupt dismissal. But after I promised to keep it confidential, he told me that they had let me go to free up my salary so they could pay for the network upgrade I had worked so hard to sell to the CFO! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

My next job was in the for-profit sector.