Ask and thee shall receive! Below find the first of (hopefully) many more contributed office stories; Ideally, I’d like to spotlight weekly one tale (other than my own daily cubicle rants) from the office trenches of Office Tells readers. This gem is from a lovely lady (I’ll refer to her as Miss J, for now) who I used to work with (and whose boss makes mine look like Mr. Rogers). If I’m lucky, this will be the first of many more from her:
So, yes, as my former coworker mentioned in her blog post (My Boss, My (almost) Nemesis), I currently have the SHITTIEST BOSS EVER.
Up until a month ago, I had a job that I actually liked. Despite the terrible pay and boring subject matter (I was an editor for a small magazine) I had a relatively relaxed working environment, some independence, and good friends that made it a little easier to drag my ass out of bed every day.
But, somewhere along the way, I got bit by The Greedy Bug. To be truthful, I wasn’t really surviving on my salary at this job. Plus, I was living with this guy at the time and growing more and more anxious that he was never going to get a “real job.” (I sort of got this impression after he said, “I’m never going to get a real job,” about a million times.)
The moral of the story? Never make decisions based on the fear that you will wind up broke, pregnant, and wearing a rented maternity wedding gown. This fear is the work of the devil—which, coincidentally, brings us back to my new boss.
This woman is evil. She may masquerade outside the office as the smiley-faced founder of a small public relations firm, but once she’s in front of that computer she’s a crazed psycho.
She hired me knowing that I have no public relations experience, has given me no training, and then she’s surprised when I don’t know what I’m doing. She says, “You need to ask more questions! You can’t just make assumptions!” and then, “Don’t you think the answer to that question is intuitive?”
In fact, she is so evil that I need to use bulletpoints. She is bulletpoint-evil.
• She sends a mass e-mail to the entire office (well, to the other two chicks that work there) if I walk in at 8:35. instead of 8:30.
• She has asked me not to go the bathroom when she has clients in her office.
• If I dare to take my half-hour lunch, I know there will be several psychotic e-mails waiting for me in my inbox, demanding to know why I’m not answering my messages.
• She’s paying so little for my health coverage that I can’t afford the balance.
• Three weeks into the job, she called me into her office to let me know that I’m simply not “hitting it out of the park,” or “keeping in step with the pace of the office.” I was given a week to improve, or she would have to “let me go.”
So, here I am now, desperately trying to hold onto a job I hate while simultaneously searching for a new opportunity. And all the while, my old job sits there and mocks me for my anxiety and bad decision-making abilities. I picture my former coworkers gathered ‘round my cubicle, laughing and making jokes about me with my replacement.
The only good part about my job is that I am in a private office, completely alone. Of course this means that I feel free to pick and scratch whatever needs picking or scratching at my discretion. The other day I spent ten minutes gnawing at the stubborn bits of candy still clinging to a blow-pop stick; I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. Do I suspect my boss is recording me? Absolutely. In fact, I would be disappointed in her if she wasn’t.
I am a firm believer in every person’s right to be disgusting when they are alone. This is a deeply held principle for me—I once caught a then-boyfriend (yes, the same loser from above) picking his nose and eating it. And since I probably shouldn’t have been peering through his ground-floor bedroom window and spying on him in the first place, I’ve never once judged him for it.
Anyway, I’ve gotten a bit off-topic here, and I’m kind of exhausted. Plus, a new editorial position that is PERFECT for me was just listed on MediaBistro, so I need to go put together a cover letter and gear myself up for a little mo’ rejection.
I’ll keep you posted!
