Custer’s Last Zine

I lived in LA for a couple of months in the beginning of 2020, taking advantage of an office opening to get out of NYC during its sad months and treat my annual funk with sunlight. It wasn’t as relaxing as I had hoped— I shuttled around in traffic between three different offices during the day, always on the look out for a borrowed room to take an HR call from, and spent a lot of late nights on calls with Berlin, trying to respond to due diligence requests delegated down the chain for a funding round that I was nervous wouldn’t come through. 

But it was a really special time too, and not just because the world went upside down a few weeks later. I would sit on the porch of my little Culver City Airbnb at sunset with a glass of wine and source vintage oriental rugs for an office I was pouring too much love and sweat into instead of hiring a professional. I went for runs on the weekend alongside a dried out riverbed behind movie studio lots and understood why people leave New York for this, calculating in my head how much money I’d have to make to live a bi-coastal life as I forced my body to stay in motion. And on the day that funding round did come through, just before it was time to open the new office, I took my team to HD Buttercup and went a little crazy. We spent the money that would have been better set aside in the beginning on long lead items like softer overhead lighting on these stunning oversized rugs instead, rugs whose cost I added up in my head as a percentage of an FTE. We loaded them into the back of my colleague’s hatchback and drove off with an invoice, feeling like we’d just pulled off a heist. 

My sister and I were on the same time zone during those months for the first time in our adult lives and she’d call me while she drove home from her office and complain about work. Decision makers layers away were about to make a change that she was determined to prevent, and over the weeks she started building a case slide by slide, while I cooked scrambled eggs for dinner and listened to her try out different storylines. I called it her “Custer’s Last Stand,” a metaphor you’ll have to forgive because I realize now more than ever how many of my work metaphors are about going to battle, and also because my understanding of American history is actually total shit. But the analogy was meant to be about realizing you have to go all out when you’re facing an existential loss, about channeling your frustration in order to fight for a different outcome— realizing you care enough to try.

I’ve seen a few people build these “Last Stands” now, usually an exasperated product manager or p&l owner drafting a moving story instead of just another dry McKinsey-style market analysis. It always circulates quietly, a designer getting added before that one critical executive gets looped in, people starting to whisper about it. Inevitably someone gets annoyed that they haven’t been asked to contribute, a counter argument comes together from somewhere on the sidelines (Finance). But there’s something magical about watching people build these plans, the slow trickling “maybe this is it” feeling that moves person by person. There’s something intoxicating about people talking about work like they care.

I only built my own version for the first time this past Friday, a frenzied four hour sprint on my couch after a long day of stewing, screenshotting slides from a board deck to copy paste them into my zine of a master plan. I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner. It’s a little different here, at an organization this size and in a role where I’m proposing organizational changes instead of a new business strategy, no slow circulation across stakeholders but an abrupt “hit send” on a Saturday morning to the CEO. But I called my sister afterwards, and took a cab to her house, just on the other side of the park, to joke with my niece that Aunt Jena might get fired.