Terrible bosses, bad jobs and happy endings.
The worst
job ever? A terrible boss? We’ve all had one or the other. Lucky me, I’ve had
both and at the same time. It sure didn’t feel lucky at the time. It was darn
awful. The luck came later.
A while
ago, I had a temporary job at a call center. The work was okay, just making
calls and reading a script. The problem was that whenever I had a question I
was told to look in the training manual. So I did that and I did whatever the
training manual told me to do or say.
Here’s
where I have to tell you something you might not know about call centers. The
management folks listen in on calls. This makes sense. They have to check up on
the employees to make sure everyone is doing the right thing. Apparently, I
wasn’t doing the right things. I found that out on a couple occasions when my
supervisor would stop by for a chat. She’d tell me I was “off script” or
“following the wrong process.” Then she’d ask me why I was doing whatever it
was that I was doing. And, for some crazy reason, she didn’t like it when I
referenced the page number of the training manual.
Even after
all these years, I can see the curl of her lip and the blank look in her eyes
when she spoke with me. It was as though she couldn’t believe someone so
inferior had been parked in her cubicle row. “It doesn’t matter that the manual
says that,” she’d say. “Just do what I said.” I would’ve been totally fine with
that approach if it hadn’t been for her dreadful attitude. Having her lurking
nearby, listening in on calls, waiting to zero in and expose my every inept
response made most every minute of every day terrible.
When does
the luck come in, you want to know?
It came
years later, while working on a story. I needed an inspiration for a bad boss.
Viola! There she was. My dislike for her was so strong, my memories were--and
still are--crisp and vivid. Having her there in my memory made creating the
nasty boss I needed for my new novel, Unfinished Business, almost
instantaneous.
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