Everything I Needed To Know About Corporate America I Learned from 'Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead'
Messy action can stand up to experience nearly every time
Long before I ever walked through the doors of an office building, looking for the great big sign that reads “Personnel”, I was already well versed in corporate America through the eyes of Christina Applegate as Sue Ellen Crandell (aka Swell) in the cult classic Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead.
Thirty years later, the movie that gifted us “I’m right on top of that, Rose” still delivers when it comes to navigating corporate culture.
🏃➡️ Action is everything
The whole movie is Swell taking action to do or fix something to maintain some semblance of an enjoyable summer. She is unwilling to give up and have her summer ruined or run by any authoritarian figures.
“You want me to call Mom back? Because I can. You want to call Aunt Pat or go crawling to one of Mom's semi-wretched friends? All right. We don't need a warden, we don't need somebody telling us when to eat and sleep and vacuum. We can still have a great summer, we just have to work together.”
📝 Resumes are not the most important part
Let’s face it. We’ve all looked at resume templates and tried to make magic of our own. Swell goes one step further and lifts her resume straight from the book, but she’s 17 so let’s cut her some slack.
Her stellar, yet faked, resume was not the clincher though. Her eventual boss spent no more than a minute looking it over. Her eventual hiring was based on her personality and it being the opposite of Carolyn, the rude receptionist gunning for the job who “talks like she’s chewing her face.”
👺 Carolyn was the villain because she was overly focused on others, and mean spirited while doing it
We’ve all been assholes at the workplace. I’ve been immature, petty, and impatient. And I’m sure on more than one occasion.
Everyone in this movie falls in this category too. Carolyn however is the only one who never budges from her spot of resident office jerk. She doesn’t get momentarily frustrated and let someone or something get the best of her. There is no return to a pleasant person.
Instead she is constantly on the hunt to prove that someone else is not qualified for the job she wants — instead of focusing on showing why she is qualified for it.
🌹 Rose is Every Executive
Rose is competent, confident, supportive and capable. But she’s also nervous, overly worried about the board at times, gets fooled, and makes a couple mistakes along the way (ie. trusting Gus, hasty hiring practices).
Too often early professionals hold ‘executive status’ on a pedestal and assume it means something more than a job title. I’ve thought it and said it before. More than one client has said this to me — “I wish I could be in the room where executives/leadership are talking and making decisions.”
That meeting room is filled with flawed people making their best like the rest of us. It’s no different than the meetings you are in.
Speaking of meetings…
🪄 Meetings aren't where the magic happens
Don't wish you were in those meetings where important people are. Make shit happen by starting conversations with them outside of the meeting rooms. There are no meetings in this movie. We see Swell acting on ideas.
This movie predates the internet, but they already knew that meeting could have been an email.
🚀 Kenneth is the OG come up story
You can be a screw up and come back from it. Kenny goes from a roof top stoner shooting China dinner plates with a gun instead of cleaning them, to a responsible Kenneth who is ready to upgrade his Mocha Swiss Amaretto Belgian waffles from munchies for friends to culinary king staple.
Getting your foot in the door isn't enough. When you’re not sure what to do, doing something, even an ill advised attempt to figure it out is better than giving up or doing nothing.
Yes, this all comes with a gigantic grain of salt. Swell lies and gets in hot water when her pay back plan of borrowed petty cash doesn’t work out as intended.
But she also plans an important catered event, designs a fashion line and gets prototypes, holds down a job to feed her siblings, delegates those Q.E.D. reports, and saves a company from going under… at 17.
Are the consequences unrealistic? Maybe. An elderly woman dies and there are basically no questions asked. A teen lied to get a job, to keep a job, and inadvertently showed her four younger siblings how to do the same.
But she was a grown up in the end. When her mother said "you're in big trouble young lady" she said let's talk about it tomorrow when everyone is rested.
Eventually you have to face the music. And that music wasn't about how she was unqualified. Had she lied, yes. I don't recommend that. But she was qualified in ways she hadn’t yet realized and more ready than she thought.
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P.M. Dawn - Set Adrift On Memory Bliss
“Christina Applegate you gotta put me on.”
Fitting song to come on the radio as I was drafting this one out. She really has nothing to do with the song, just a fun name check in the lyrics from a time period long ago.