I worked for Dish Network for about 20 years. The company has reached an agreement to be bought by DirecTV next year for one dollar, a deal that also says DTV will take on about 10 billion in debt. This news got me remembering my time there, before I left about 6 years ago. 

I learned two major lessons from my time and will talk about the first here, but, before I get to it, I should state that Dish was voted the worst company to work for in the US multiple times. I don’t mean “one of the worst” I mean the very singular, worst company. 

So, lesson one comes from why its employees considered it such a bad place to be employed. It came down to this, the founder, Charlie Ergen, paid you and for that reason, he expected you to do whatever he said and, guess what, many people don’t like that. When friends and family asked why I would stay at a company that was so hard to work at, I would ask them a question, “Have you ever uttered the phrase: That’s not my job?”  If you have, you would probably hate working for Dish. 

In my time at Dish from sales, to management, to operations, I did some out there stuff, none of which I was trained for. Here are just a few:

1. Security detail for a former president, an adult film star and a boxing match.  

2. Disaster relief work in Puerto Rico and the USVI.

3. Lobby work at a US Senate office.

4. Fought several lawsuits against Dish in multiple states. (I’m not a lawyer.)

5. Dressed up like a kangaroo.

I could go on, but, you get the idea. I was asked multiple times, pretty much weekly, to do things that weren’t my “job.”  I could have refused, complained or quit.  Two things stopped me. The first was that my paycheck always showed up. Even in 2008, when everything crashed, I never worried about being paid, and because Charlie Ergen always held up his end of the bargain, I did what was asked.

The Second reason is that the list above, and plenty of other things I did throughout the years, were a lot of fun and I learned a lot.  Sure, not all of it was fun (when we signed a deal with Costco to sell Dish in the early 2000s, Charlie told them Dish would help them sell the product, so as a salaried guy, I had to go stand in Costco and sell Dish on Saturdays one summer, many managers quit before they would lower themselves to this.)

I simply decided that my job was whatever I got told to do.  It turned out that that attitude paid off at Dish. If I guy will show up to help a contractor on Black Friday, he will probably be the guy willing to run a team of 80 techs on an island in the Caribbean. It’s not for everyone, but, it worked out for me.