The Gold Watch

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 23, 2026

When I retired, I bought myself a gold watch.

Not because I was honored. Because I wasn’t.

I worked for GoDaddy from 2017 to 2021. That is not a lifetime, but in the modern American workplace, especially on the retail front lines, it does not have to be. A few years is enough to understand how the system is structured. Do the work. Meet the metrics. Keep the operation moving. And when it ends, it ends without ceremony.

GoDaddy presented itself as something more than it was. The role I accepted was described as customer service combined with sales, and part of the reason I took the position was to develop sales experience. In practice, especially on the shift I worked, roughly 4 p.m. to midnight, the job was retail. Pure retail. Customer-facing, volume-driven, and built around people with billion-dollar dreams and Coca-Cola budgets.

About a month after we began working on the floor, our team was placed into a pilot program. We were given an additional two dollars an hour, which effectively replaced whatever sales upside we might have developed. At the same time, the role shifted. We became a Tier 1 technical support team, and the calls routed into our queue reflected that change. The job we had been hired to do was no longer the job we were doing.

The structure around that work did not hold. We were told that we would meet regularly with a team lead to improve performance and develop skills. In my experience, that did not happen. When calls came in that exceeded what we could handle, we were expected to resolve them without meaningful support. Escalation was discouraged, and guidance was limited. At the same time, we were still evaluated on performance metrics that assumed training and coaching were taking place.

That contradiction defined the job. Responsibility remained with the worker, even when the support system described by the company did not materialize in practice.

During the COVID period, the gap between the job as described and the job as lived became even more visible. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate. There was no office, no workspace designed for what the job required. I built one anyway. My initial setup was two television trays and a folding metal chair supporting a dual-monitor system and a phone connection that had to be hardwired into the internet.

It was not unusual. One agent I knew worked out of a closet because it was the only space available in her apartment to set up a desk. That was the level of adaptation required. The system did not adjust to the worker. The worker was expected to adjust to the system.

Eventually I acquired a basic desk, and the company provided a chair from the call center. The underlying structure, however, did not change.

The leadership structure did not hold either. My supervisor eventually left the company. The official explanation was that he had moved on to other opportunities. I have my own views on that, but it is enough to say that the structure changed. I was invited to stay, but by that point the pattern was clear. This was the second time in my career that a direct manager left under unclear circumstances, and shortly afterward, I left as well.

Companies like GoDaddy did not create this system, but they operate within it and reinforce it. The modern retail and call-center model has been built over decades to prioritize efficiency, metrics, and throughput. The individual worker is expected to adapt to that structure, not the other way around. Recognition, continuity, and closure are not built into the design.

I know someone from the Occupy days who likes to point out that I worked for “big companies.”

Life Fitness. AT&T. Toyota Financial Services. GoDaddy.

As if that means something.

It doesn’t.

The size of the company never translated into stability, recognition, or long-term security. It didn’t protect the worker. It didn’t change the structure. It didn’t guarantee anything except that the system would keep running exactly as designed.

By the time I worked there, the outcome was already defined. Do the work. Meet the metrics. And when it ends, it ends.

So I bought my own gold watch.

Not a real one. A cheap golden pocket watch from Amazon. About forty dollars. It was the kind of gesture a company used to make when a man’s years had been worth marking. In my case, I had to make it for myself.

And then that watch was eventually stolen.

That, too, feels appropriate to the era. Even the small act of recognition had to be self-funded, and even that did not last.

Because that was still more recognition than the job was ever going to give me.

The time existed whether it was recognized or not.

So I marked it myself.

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews