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I'd have to say an 80/20 mix. 80% good 20% bad. It's just that the negative seem to leave a bigger impression then the good people. I wonder why that is?
In 1972 the summer after my freshman year in college, I was the first woman ever hired for anything but a cashier position by a local Washington, D.C. sports store. I did a lot of backpacking and wanted to sell camping equipment. It was still legal to deny a woman a job then based on nothing but her gender, but they reluctantly hired me. I was told I had to wear skirts or a dress to work. The first time I had to climb up the ladder to pull down a particular backpack in the stockroom, the manager and salesmen all crowded underneath to look up my dress. I wore shorts under it after that. They also made a lot of comments about my figure, and couldn't understand why I wasn't flattered. I loved helping the customers, but that was the worst workplace I've ever been in.
When I got out of graduate school and started working in my field (which consisted primarily men at the time), I ended up working for the nicest guys imaginable. They didn't look at me like a sex object, but interacted with me very professionally because of our shared interest in our chosen field. I stopped working for one supervisor when I moved out of state, but he and his wife and I are still best of friends almost 30 years later.
I block the "nasty ones" from my memory - and rarely consider the nice ones, either.
Daily living keeps most folks off my mind - especially ones from the past.
I am middle aged and have been in the workforce now for thirty years and thought I had seen it all.
Sometime I lay in bed and wake in a cold sweat after a nightmare about someone I used to work with. While most of the people I have worked with over the last 30 years are forgettable and passive, I just can't get over all the terrible people I have survived at the various jobs I have worked at. There are just so many terrible people out there in positions of authority in the workforce.
Few of my jobs have been the type I could just sit there and stare into a computer and ignore everyone and just do my work. Doing my work and being effective in my job involved interacting and gaining the assistance of some terrible people through the years. And have I experienced some terrible bosses through the years. They would step over their own mother to get ahead and lacked any humanity at all.
Do you have stories of terrible people that you had to work with in previous jobs?
YES I do...and there are too many stories to tell. Let's just say they all involved women. I despise working with women in an office setting. It was the motivating factor for me to start my own business and work from home. Years later, I couldn't be happier!!!
I have seen many people in my years of working that lend a whole new meaning to the term " human nature", but I take comfort in knowing that nothing I could have done to them would anyway compare with what Karma has probably handed them.
Practically EVERYWHERE I've worked there has been one person of different degrees of difficulty: the "queen bee" who needs to be in charge of you, even if she is not your supervisor; the "overweight" one who is hostile to anyone who is thinner than she is; the "micromanaging superviser" who checks on you every 15 minutes and/or wants to do your work for you; the "bully" who yells, belittles, and throws temper tantrums; the "social butterfly" whose busy social life prevents her from doing her work and showing up for her scheduled shifts, requiring you to pull doubles. I've had at least one of these in every place I've worked going on 35 years. The last one I worked with was a combination of "overweight queen bee bully". When I occasionally have to drive past her house, I still find myself making snorting pig noises, but she no longer haunts my dreams. She did for a while. She was one of the worst.
Now, blessedly, I can honestly say I have NO complaints about my supervisor or any of my co-workers. Nicest bunch of women I've ever had the pleasure to work with.
Last edited by Mrs. Skeffington; 07-04-2013 at 07:50 AM..
I am middle aged and have been in the workforce now for thirty years and thought I had seen it all.
Sometime I lay in bed and wake in a cold sweat after a nightmare about someone I used to work with. While most of the people I have worked with over the last 30 years are forgettable and passive, I just can't get over all the terrible people I have survived at the various jobs I have worked at. There are just so many terrible people out there in positions of authority in the workforce.
Few of my jobs have been the type I could just sit there and stare into a computer and ignore everyone and just do my work. Doing my work and being effective in my job involved interacting and gaining the assistance of some terrible people through the years. And have I experienced some terrible bosses through the years. They would step over their own mother to get ahead and lacked any humanity at all.
Do you have stories of terrible people that you had to work with in previous jobs?
God, yes. The worst have been drunks or drug addicts. Unpredictable and illogical. But there have been plenty of bullies, sneaks, backstabbers, racists, and just plain psychos. People are pretty awful.
There is one that I still think about from time to time and actually feel angry about. It was 30 years ago. I was 17 and hired as a lifeguard at a local pool and the pool manager was only a year older than I was. She used to order me to do all the work she didn't want to do, while she spent her days hanging out drinking with some of the pool members. One day I walked into the pool house and found her smoking a joint in there. All of a sudden she was my best friend, acting super nice and apologizing for treating me rudely. I was so gullible and flattered that I believed it. I didn't report her. This went on for a couple of days, and then one day while I was finishing a shift, the guy who hired me (HOA president) came by and told me I was fired because she had told him that I was sleeping while on duty. Totally outrageous and untrue. Of course at that point he wouldn't believe anything I said about her. It was so Downton Abbey. I am still pissed about it.
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