Episode 14: The Dream Job That Turned Into a Nightmare: My Raytheon Story

Brandon reflects on his transition from military life to a civilian career and the rollercoaster of personal and professional challenges that followed his Army service.

Please start with Episode 1. Go to my site BrandonHeld.com

• Built strength through intramural sports and weightlifting during military service
• Met and married 3rd, who initially wanted to become a Pediatric Physical Therapist and pulled a switcheroo
• Relationship dynamics changed dramatically after marriage when wife abandoned career plans to be a stay-at-home mom
• Faced challenging blended family situations with his son Ethan and new stepmother
• Landed a job at Raytheon through a chance connection with a personal training client
• Experienced the remarkable coincidence of his son's birth and dream job offer occurring on the same day
• Encountered toxic workplace supervision that led to unfair performance evaluations
• Successfully challenged his supervisor through HR, resulting in her remedial training and loss of supervisory position
• Lost his job during defense budget cuts despite moving to a better team situation
• Left reeling from sudden unemployment while supporting a new house and family

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome back. This is Brandon Held. Life is crazy. Episode 14. So last episode, I spent the episode going through my military life at Fort Huachuca. There were some things that I didn't talk about and I left out that I'll briefly just throw in here. I Played some intramural flag football, basketball, volleyball. I had some really cool intramural experiences. One time in a basketball game, I scored 35 points just by hitting pretty much all threes the whole game. Pretty much, obviously, because three doesn't go into 35. But I did have some... regular two-pointers and free throws. I won a volleyball championship and I just had a good time between playing intramural sports and working out. I was getting really strong, strongest I had been to this point in my life. I don't know what my max bench was because I never could max bench but I did a chest workout one day where I did flat chest bench press incline decline some flies and I think at the end just to burn myself out I wanted to see like how many reps of 225 I could do and at the end of a workout I did 15 repetitions of 225 and that was after I had done a complete workout. So I knew I was pretty strong and in good shape. And so again, I'd gotten divorced in bootcamp and I had been, uh, went through a little phase of being a man whore again after I did my first divorce of Ethan's mom. And, but again, it's not all terrible. I met and hooked up with some girls from Different cultures I had never been with, different races, different countries that happened to be here in Arizona. I had my second threesome with these two girls when I was dating and she knew there was a girl that was into me and into her also. So she invited me to have a threesome with her and we did. I had a second threesome and that was cool. All that stuff was just the miscellaneous, if you will. And then I met the significant part is obviously getting my MBA, meeting my buddy Jason. And then now I have asked Sonya to marry me. And so now I'm getting out of the army. We're getting married. I'm getting out of the army. And what I want to say is this, one of the reasons I had asked Sonya Sonia to marry me is because she was completing a bachelor's degree at the U of A. And when we first started talking, even though I was 30, about to be 31 and she was 19, she was saying that she wanted to go to school and get a doctorate and she wanted to be a physical therapist for children. And I thought that was really cool. And I thought, wow. How great would that be if you're a physical therapist for children and I have an MBA and you start your own business and you have an office and I run that office. I run your office while you run the physical therapy side of the house. And that was the vision I had for us as a future. And we got married and. Almost immediately after getting married, I saw this totally different side of her personality change. She became, she went from being more fun loving and easygoing to more serious and almost demanding to a point and definitely saw a spoiled brat side of her that I didn't really see before that I later would learn is because that's how She was, and that's how her father let her be. And almost right after we got married, she insisted on getting pregnant because I was quote unquote old. I was 33 years old and she was calling me old, too old to be a dad, basically. And we got her pregnant and basically she said, all right, I'm going to be a stay at home wife now. She had a job at the time she was working at a commissary and going to school and all that. But she graduated school and then shortly thereafter quit her job at the commissary. And she said, I'm going to be a full-time mother. That's what I'm going to do. And I said, wait a minute. That's not what we agreed upon. That was not the future I saw for us. I thought you were going to, what happened to you getting a doctorate and becoming a physical therapist? I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going to be a stay-at-home mom. So that's what I was told. And I didn't agree with it. I didn't like it. I didn't want it to be that way. But what could I do? She was pregnant with my child at this point. And I already was going through the bumps and bruises of having Ethan and not being with his mother and now living across the United States away from him and dealing with All that difficult situation of basically getting him in the summers, which is what I was doing. I was getting him every summer and she was great to Ethan. When I got Ethan the summer before we got married and she was my girlfriend or fiance. She was great to Ethan. She treated him really well. She loved him. They got along great and everything. was great and then we got married and then she got pregnant and then we had Maximus our first son who again I love him very much and he knows how much I love him he's the only son that I still see on a regular basis every other week even though he's 17 and he's about to be 18 and in a few months, not through any fault of Maximus's. Once he was born, his mom like just didn't care about Ethan anymore. As a matter of fact, she went the opposite direction. She was mean and nasty to him. And so now I had this problem where I had a wife that I needed to try to get along with. I had a son with her that was a new baby boy. And then I also had another son who would come to see me in the summers and now he had to put up with this evil step-mom. And maybe a dad wasn't as cool as he was before because I was in the middle trying to balance both, right? I was in the middle trying to keep my wife happy, but also not be too hard on my young son that I only get to see three months out of the year. Granted, I wanted to put some sense of structure into his life because it appeared he didn't have any with his mother, at least not the way he related to me. He didn't really have a bedtime with her in the summertime. He didn't have rules. If he took a shower or whatever, he was pretty dirty. Let's just put it that way. He would leave his towels all over. He would leave his clothes all over. He would just help himself to whatever food at whatever time he wanted. It was just, it was an unstructured childhood. And I was trying to bring a little structure to his life and balance that delicate situation. So anyway, not to be... Jumping the gun too much, but I got out of the army and I was trying to survive by being a personal trainer at LA Fitness and being newly married and having a pregnant wife. And I was applying for other jobs and I was talking to people because I was now living in Tucson, Arizona, and this was all new to me. I didn't know Tucson. I didn't know what was the way to live life in Tucson. And everyone kept telling me, oh, Raytheon is the place to work. If you're going to live in Tucson, you want to work at Raytheon. That's the place to work, right? So I kept hearing everyone say this. I never really went to apply for any jobs at Raytheon. I was looking for things and applying for things, but I didn't make my way to Raytheon just yet. And then while I was a personal trainer at LA Fitness, I was training this guy and we got to talking and his name was Gene. And Gene was cool. He was lighthearted, fun, big guy, taller than me. I'm 6'1". I don't know how tall he was, 6'4", 6'5", bigger guy. And we laughing, joking around, having a good time while I'm training him. And we just got to discussing how I had gotten out of the army and I had an MBA and I was just personal training until I found a quote unquote real job. And he's, oh my gosh, I work at Raytheon. He's, you have an MBA, you can come work for me at Raytheon. And boom, just like that, I had a connection. He said, you still got to apply. You still got to go through the interviews. I'll recommend you and you should be good to go. And so I was excited, right? This was great. The move that I was looking for in life, this to me was the reason I had gone through everything I had gone through prior to this was to get this type of job and this type of career. And so he set everything up where I would go to this event that they do a recruiting event here in Tucson, where they set people up in a really nice hotel here, La Paloma. And then they do interviews and stuff, and then they offer and hire people based on these events. I had a nine month pregnant wife and he said, you don't have to come stay at the La Paloma since you live here locally, but you will need to go out here to the recruiting event. And I said, sure, no problem. And on August 15th of 2007, That morning, my wife gave birth to Maximus. She gave birth to Maximus and Maximus was born at 8 AM that morning. And like 9 30, 10 AM. I had to be at a Raytheon recruiting event that same day. So I had been up all night with her in labor at the hospital. Maximus was born. Then I had to go put on a suit, drive to this recruiting event and be interviewed. And I was dead tired running on adrenaline, basically, of the birth of a child and potentially getting a job to start my career finally for the first time in my life. And it went over so well that the same day they offered me the job with a, a pretty nice income and certainly an income I had never been used to in my life. And it was just an amazing day. Maximus was born and I got a job offer to go work at Raytheon and It just felt all the struggles, all the trials, all the hard times, they were finally starting to pay off. And this one day was just an incredible day. So now I have a newborn son that I got to name. By the way, Maximus is the name I came up with because he... I loved that name since I saw Gladiator and I knew I wanted to have a son with that name one day. And she had agreed to previously, if we had a son, he was going to have the name Maximus. So it was just all great. Outside of the fact that I didn't have Ethan on a regular basis and things were starting to go sour with him and Maximus's mom, my new wife. I felt everything else is going well, we can work on that too. So I was just really positive and really happy. And I was taking on the new role at Raytheon, doing my new job, which frankly, when I got there was quite underwhelming. I got hired as a senior configuration analyst and I got there and I was expecting this professional large corporation to just have their shit together and they just didn't. They put me on a program under someone that I was supposed to quote-unquote replace who was retiring and she was supposed to train me as part of her last three months before retiring. Come on, that's just stupid. There's a lot of personal personality that goes into being someone like that. You're three months out from retirement. What recourse do you have if you don't train the new guy and you don't want to spend your day and your time training a new guy? None. There's nothing anyone can do to you. And again, she just didn't, right? She would do the very minimal with me. She might spend half an hour to an hour in a day showing me how to do something. And then she just left me the rest of the day to myself. And I didn't, I wasn't really learning anything. Yeah, they had some modules to go through, but that wasn't really so much about the job. That was more about your basics, your sexual harassment and all those other things you go through. But I was just really underwhelmed and dissatisfied with the start of my career there at Raytheon. So I was dealing with that and then dealing with a newborn son and a wife who had gone from being my wife to now being full-time mother, 100% of the time, much less concerned about about being my wife and much more concerned about being a mother. And then about a year into it, she's, I want to have another child. I want to have, I don't want my kids to be too far apart. And so I thought it was too early and too quick. But again, at the end of the day, I try to be a good man and I try to consider my partner in things, even if it's not exactly what what I want. So I agreed. And so life was going on and I was working at Raytheon and she got pregnant again. And then eventually we had our second son, Bexton. And it was a crazy time. I was doing a job that I was struggling to make my way through because again, like every career before me, I was trying to give 110%. and do the best that I could because I wanted to advance. When I started my job at Raytheon, this is where I would spend my entire working career. I really thought I would spend the next 30 years of my life, maybe less, working at Raytheon until I retire. I would carve out a career and that's where I would be until I retire. And so, yeah, I was pushing to work hard, pushing to do whatever I could do to differentiate myself and assert myself as a leader and someone who should be strongly considered for promotion and moving up in the ranks. And they put me under someone named Mary Bonnet. Absolutely destroyed my career at Raytheon. So Mary Bonatati was someone who had been working in the configuration analyst field for another company in Florida for 20-something years with nothing more than high school education. But Raytheon hired her based off her experience, even though they told me they required degrees to be employed there, and I had an MBA at this point. And she got to come in at a higher level because of her work experience. So now she was my supervisor, my new supervisor, and she was just not a good person. Just a conniving, underhanded, dirty person. And I got caught in her web. And so... I would go to work and I would constantly come under certain scenarios that I had never seen before. I wasn't trained for them. I hadn't seen them before, so I didn't have experience on them. So my only choice was to go to my supervisor and say, hey, this is an issue that I have. How do you want me to handle it? So she would always verbally tell me, this is what I want you to do. And so a few times that direction that she sent me in, even though I knew in some of those cases that didn't sound right, I wasn't sure, but it didn't sound right to me. I was following her direction because she was a supervisor and that's what I was doing, but end up being the wrong direction. Right. And so then it would fall back on me and the people on the team that I was on would say, Why did you do this? That wasn't right. Why did you do this? I would say my supervisor, Mary Bonatati told me to do it. And Mary Bonatati would go, no, I didn't. And she would completely throw me under the bus so much to the point where she had written two evaluations on me within a year. And they were both negative evaluations and none of them about my actual work. She was making up personal conduct BS that I would rebut in the evaluations, but it didn't matter because her evaluation and her score for me was all that mattered in the end. So by the second time she did an evaluation on me, I went to HR. I went to human resources and I said, look, this lady is corrupt. She's conniving. She's a liar. And I went through everything with HR. And Mary came to this meeting at HR with, wouldn't you know it, the department head, Gene, the very guy who got me in to Raytheon and got me hired supporting her, having her back. And HR decided independently that she was in the wrong and she needed to take remedial supervisory training. And she eventually got fired as a supervisor. So I was going through all this while now having two young kids. So Bexen was born and my wife at the time was 100% focused on being a mother, 0% focused on being a wife to me. She woke up, she attended to my boys and she went to bed with my boys. My boys slept with her in the room. And some nights I slept by myself in a different room and she slept in a different room with the boys. And this was my life. This is what I was going through. And when I thought everything was going to be great, everything wasn't. I got moved again after going through all this. A little over three years at Raytheon, I got moved again to another program under finally a supervisor that I... thought was a good supervisor she seemed to have my best interest at heart and she seemed to want to help me succeed and do well and her name was sherry cook and with sherry i thought everything was going great right i was only under her for about six months and then you people can like whoever you want or dislike whoever you want. What makes America great is the fact that we are a melting pot, a cocktail of people with differences of opinions, different religious beliefs or no beliefs at all, different political beliefs. You can believe whatever you want. I have no political affiliation. I've never felt no type of way of about any president until President Obama became president and he made cuts to the Defense Department. And when he did that, that hit Raytheon and then it hit me personally. So Raytheon now lost a bunch of money from the defense budget that they were going to get because Obama cut the defense budget. And because he cut the defense budget, that meant the program that I happened to be on was getting shut down. Now Raytheon could do anything at this point. They could move the people on that program to different programs, or they could let people go. So Raytheon It just so happens that I happen to be a white male on a program that needed to be cut. And oh, by the way, I had two bad evaluations, my last two evaluations, because I had a horrible supervisor who, mind you, was put in remedial training by HR for being a bad supervisor and being found to be untruthful. And now I was laid off from Raytheon. I got called in one day and I got laid off. And I was just felt like I got punched in the gut and got just the wind knocked right out of me. And I didn't know how to breathe. I had just bought a new house. I had two young kids, a wife that didn't work. And now I'm being laid off. And in almost no time, it felt, because that time just flew by. By the way, I went from sitting on top of the world with a newborn son and getting a dream career job to, holy crap, how am I going to take care of this family of mine? Yeah, that's where I'm going to leave off. and pick up next time. So thanks for joining me and next time I will continue from there.