Life with a boss from hell | Vis-A-Vis Magazine

TAKE THIS JOB
AND SHOVE IT
Life With A
Boss From Hell

By Melissa Cantor

If you were my girlfriend, I would annoy you sometimes. I’m not the kind of girl who “understands” when a friend cancels plans because her boyfriend has suddenly remembered she exists. And if you have chosen to stay with a cheating or just generally jerky boyfriend and call me up in the middle of the night to complain about what Mr. But-He’s-So-Good-In-Bed has done now, you will get as much sympathy from me as you would from the girl he was engaged to when he started sleeping with you. That’s because I come from the school of He’s-Just-Not-That-Into-You, the twenty-something version of Dr. Phil devotees who are tired of women who mistake being sweet with being walked all over, women who assist unhappy circumstances by not standing their ground and demanding respect from their families, friends and lovers.

Given my constant and unapologetic preaching in this vein, I can only imagine how many of my friends were secretly thrilled and vindicated by seeing me at my first job. This is the scenario: I’m 22 years old and have had a pretty successful academic career. I finished college in three years, held the reins of a national magazine, and then I accepted a full-tuition scholarship to study creative writing at the graduate level. By the time I graduate, I’ll have an ego that can barely fit through a doorway. Intending to save my writing energy for turning my thesis into what will, of course, become a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, I do not take a job writing for magazines. Instead I let myself be courted by a local entrepreneur who finds the combination of my professed confidence, age and degrees impressive, and is convinced I am a businesswoman in the making. Although I have about as much interest in marketing as I do in indulging the aforementioned girls in sympathetic conversation, I join her firm as a copywriter.

Now, never mind that I’m spending half my time as the office receptionist (did I mention my master’s degree?) and the other half writing brochures about law firms. This is all okay because I am saving my creativity for the novel that awaits me when I get home. The real problem is that I never get home – at least not before dark. To earn my pitiful salary, I’m at the office form 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. theoretically, but my would-be mentor quickly reprimands me for being so eager to leave at the end of my 10-hour (with no paid overtime) day. Every five minutes she tries to improve my job performance by making me repeat things until I learn to “speak up,” and coaching me for the umpteenth time on how to answer the phone.

Although the only part of this job I am actually trained for is the copy editing, this task might occupy two hours of my day when I’m lucky. When it does happen that I am editing – rather than stuck in meetings with my boss about my “progress” or lack thereof, or answering calls from lawyers who believe that because they charge people $400 an hour for consultations, they should somehow be impervious to the five seconds it takes to get my boss on the line – I am doing a terrible job. My mistakes only multiply, and with it my boss’ verbal assaults. Tinged with sexual impropriety, she reminds me that she has hired me to “do more than sit around and look pretty”; forces me to try on a T-shirt while she pats my breasts to “assess the right size for a logo”; and once, even throws a barrage of markers at me “to get [my] attention.”

Because I am apparently beyond subtlety, the projectile office supplies do not alert me to the fact that this is all tantamount to psychological abuse. It is, instead, a frustrated friend who finally asks me when I will quit my bitching and find another job. And I, who only a few months prior had been so sure of my imminent Pulitzer-worthiness, reply that I don’t think I can find one, that maybe I was never as good as I thought I was, and that I am lucky to have what I have. And that is when I realize I have become the woman I have fought so hard to empower, the one who settles for what she has for fear of not attaining better, the one who allows another person to dictate her sense of self-worth.

Following this realization, I tell my boss off and she fires me. I am subsequently unemployed for a humbling month before securing two jobs that I love and, might I add, am good at. My confidence levels off at a healthy level, approaching neither rock-bottom nor epic proportions.

I am not yet a big enough person to hope that my former boss is doing well, but I have grown enough to realize that sometimes we all give our power away to another – and to grudgingly refrain from judgment when a friend cancels our plans because Mr. But-He’s-So-Good-In-Bed has beckoned.