baroque_mongoose

As I've previously mentioned, a long time ago I was the president of the students' union at the college of further education where I did the secretarial course which I had to do in a hurry because of my dad unexpectedly deciding to sabotage my degree. I didn't especially want to be the president of this students' union, but what had happened was that the previous incumbent had made a massive hash of it (not entirely surprisingly, as he was remarkably immature for his age), and I was a) conveniently there at the time and b) known. I was a member of the local Labour Party, which actually was the Labour Party in those days, and I had already established a good reputation within that context despite having serious reservations about the party's abortion policy at the time. (To put that as briefly as possible, I don't believe abortion is a good thing in itself. There are times when it is the best of a whole slew of bad solutions, which is why I'd still be strongly opposed to banning it; but I do feel that, rather than emphasising abortion as a solution, we need to be looking at what kind of social factors drive women to have abortions and seeing what we can do to fix those. But at the time there was quite a strong "free abortion on demand up to birth" mentality within the party.)

So I had my arm twisted into standing for president, duly got elected, and completely turned things around... not, I hasten to add, on my own; I had the full support and backing of an excellent staff-student liaison officer. I also had a student executive committee who were... varied. Some of them were pretty good. Some were a bit up and down. One of them was, frankly, a bit of a liability (he was nice enough, but far too easily influenced, and there was at least one occasion when I had to do some serious diplomacy to pull his backside out of the fire and then go and yell at him about it afterwards). I didn't half get to work on my negotiation skills in that job.

And then there was Jhangeer. He was, I think, the anti-racism officer. I liked Jhangeer very much; he was by far the most mature of the lot of them. He got on with things, he did a good job, and he was a really interesting conversationalist. He was a Muslim, so we had a lot of discussions about religion in general and learnt a good deal from each other. He was also, sadly, not very well; they didn't know whether he had ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, but either way he was frequently admitted to hospital, and - tragically for someone of Pakistani background - he couldn't eat spices. I thought that was very hard.

Jhangeer wasn't just interested in talking to me about Christianity. He was fascinated by religions in general; whatever your religion happened to be, if he didn't know much about it, he'd want you to explain it to him. And one day he told me that there were a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses in Sheffield and the number seemed to be increasing.

"Oh," I said. "I didn't know that. What makes you say that, in particular?"

"Well, they're building a new JW hall near Hyde Park flats," he explained.

I blinked. I lived, at the time, quite close to Hyde Park flats, and I passed them every day on the bus. "I don't know anything about that," I said. "I know they're building something, but I thought it was a..." (here memory fails me, as it was a very long time ago; I can't recall what I thought they were building, so let's say a sports hall. It may or may not have been.)

"No, no," Jhangeer insisted. "It's definitely a JW hall. It says so on the sign."

"OK," I said. "I'll have a look next time I pass. This is very interesting; I don't know anyone who's a Jehovah's Witness." (I used to - I was at school with one, as it happened; but I didn't in Sheffield.)

So, when the bus went past the flats, I took a closer look at the new building. And there, indeed, I saw the sign Jhangeer had been talking about.

It read: "J W Hall, Contractors."

I don't know what it is about me that drives other people to slap labels on me with such blithe confidence, completely irrespective of the facts. Not all that long ago, someone earnestly informed me that I couldn't hold down a job, despite knowing quite a lot about my life history. I've no idea why they decided that, because there is actually zero evidence to support it. I've certainly had a great deal of difficulty getting jobs in the first place, for a whole slew of reasons... obviously my dad sabotaging my degree was a big one, but also disability hasn't helped (the same person equally earnestly informed me that disability discrimination is illegal in this country and therefore doesn't exist, to which my response was pretty much the same as that of the golem in Terry Pratchett's Feet Of Clay... "To Make A Hollow Laughing"). But if I do manage to get a job, I have no problem at all holding it down. My first major paid job was a one-year contract; it was the presidency of my college students' union, it didn't pay a living wage but we somehow managed on it anyway, and I refused to stand for re-election (despite being asked to) because I had had enough of working full time for less than half what would have been the normal minimum wage if there had been a minimum wage at the time. My second was working for the lingerie business, which I enjoyed and was very good at, and which I'd be doing to this very day if the aforesaid lingerie business hadn't gone b... er... well, it went out of business.

And then I managed to land a clerical job. Which I stuck for seven years, which was actually more than twice as long as anyone else in the same job; if you had that job, you ended up either being invalided out due to stress (which was what happened to me), or moving up-and-sideways, or just moving sideways, or (in one especially sad case) committing suicide. To be fair, I don't know how far the job contributed to the suicide, because that person had a number of other problems too, but I'm pretty certain it didn't help. I'll be honest and say I seriously thought about suicide myself while I was in that job, which just proves how bad it was, because that is a long way away from how I normally think. Apart from that one spell, I haven't been suicidal since I was in my teens.

When I started this job, I had two bosses, M and K. M was awesome. He and I were as different as cheese and Wednesday; you could pretty much guarantee that if one of us was bad at something, the other one would excel at it, and we both recognised that and made a great team. He was also a great character. He liked to derail conversations by telling people he was in a mental hospital when he was 16 (he was; he worked there, and, my word, he had some stories). He once asked me to translate his motto into Latin for him, and like an idiot I agreed to do it before asking what it was. I should have known. M was a Geordie and, shall we say, very straightforward. I ended up handing him a piece of paper bearing the words "numquam stercorem accipio", and he was so delighted that he printed it out in big letters and stuck it on the wall of his office. And then there was the quiet morning when there wasn't a lot to do, so he called me into his office, sat me down, and asked, "Did I ever tell you about me horse-s**t business?"

I said, no. So he told me. It was long, and amusing, and it's probably an entire blog post in its own right for a later date. Suffice it to say, for the time being, that it wasn't a metaphor. This business really did involve a lot of shovelling.

If I'd just had to work for M, all would have been fine; but, sadly, K was in the equation to start with, and when M went off to take up a professorship elsewhere, I was stuck with K all the time. And she was not in any way a reasonable woman.

I think the first point at which I realised she was going to be a serious problem, rather than just someone I had a bit of trouble working with (and right from the start I realised I was far from alone in that respect), was the time I walked into the office one morning and discovered that I had a new e-mail provider. All my work e-mails were on this new account; nothing was missing. Unfortunately, one of the things I routinely had to do as part of my job was send out mass e-mails to various groups within the organisation, and this new provider had no way of doing that. M didn't know anything about it, so I went to see K, complained I now couldn't do my job properly, and asked her what on earth was going on.

"Oh," she said, "we're testing this new provider, so I just transferred you over to them. I know you're all right with tech stuff, so I thought you wouldn't mind."

"But I can't do my job properly!" I protested. "It has no way of allowing me to send mass e-mails. It's not fit for purpose."

"Oh. Well. I wasn't expecting you to get all upset about it."

Right. So... you change my e-mail without any consultation, and then it's my fault when I'm upset because the new system isn't letting me do something I need to do for my job? Right. This is a bit more serious than the airy "oh, you don't really need any disability adaptations" that I got from her when I first started (after I actually injured myself due to not having a particular adaptation I needed, she changed her tune rather fast).

I could go into all sorts of detail about the individual things that she did, but it would be depressing, so I shall just summarise. She was very controlling and she micro-managed (to the point of instructing people to use her favourite font for a document which was personal to them, not her, and would only ever be seen by about three people). She tried to order people around when she had no authority to do so (and there was a string of complaints about her as a result). She told people off for complimenting other people, because, apparently, that was somehow an insult to her (because it wasn't her you were complimenting, I think?). She made everyone under her do things exactly the way she would do them, rather than concentrating on results and just letting people do what worked best for them - she seemed to have no concept that anyone could possibly work in a different way from her. She told other people off for doing things that she did all the time. She randomly decided certain things were insulting or offensive (notoriously, one of them was beginning a sentence with the word "Well...", despite the fact that she did so herself regularly). She was extremely unpredictable; you might be all right if she was in a good mood, so you were on eggshells around her all the time. (I got to the point where I could not only tell she was approaching due to the distinctive clack of her high heels, but I could also gauge pretty well what sort of mood she was in from the sound. Because I had to.) She was also another labeller; she labelled me "aggressive". I was actually terrified of her, so I have no idea where she got that from, but nonetheless she sent me on an assertiveness training course to "deal" with this. And when I explained this to the course tutor, she said, "What is she talking about? You're not in the least aggressive." Yes... I knew that. Everyone else who knew me also knew that. But K was like my parents; if she decided something about someone, that meant it had to be true.

She really was in an unfortunate position. The thing was, she was absolutely brilliant at process. You wanted a process designing, she was the person to ask. If she could have had a job merely doing that, not only would all the people she'd otherwise have managed have been a lot happier, but I'm quite sure that so would she; because it wasn't just that she was an appalling manager - she was also a spectacularly insecure one. I'm convinced, looking back, that most of the reason she was so overbearing and inflexible was that on some level she knew very well she was a terrible manager, and so she had to try to prove to herself that she was a good one by over-controlling. Apparently such jobs do exist these days, but they didn't at the time; if an employer wanted her process skills, they had to give her management responsibilities too, and then just deal with all the resultant wastage. I wasn't the first person to collapse out of that job with stress, and I'm very sure I was also not the last.

But... I did last seven years. And I didn't kill myself, in the end. That has to count for something.