I graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1979 at the age of 27, with dreams of becoming a famous fashion designer. Those dreams never came true. On to Los Angeles and struggling to get into the world of film and TV. I finally gave up, becoming a teller at California Federal Savings and Loan. ATMs were gaining popularity and I learned everything there was to know about installing, data communications for and balancing them. Within three years I was an internal auditor. Though the head auditor was a tough, fair boss, I hated auditing – only the facts please, do not help or train people not to make the same mistakes again.
For 18 years I moved up, going from bank to bank, data processor to data processor, making more and more money each time. Debit and credit card processing expertise was my ticket to success. In 1989 I took a job at Visa in San Mateo. Though my dreams of creativity and fame were never realized, the work was easy for me, with technical and message format manuals as my bibles. I never became a manager. In fact, I was told by one incompetent manager that I never would be, as I was just “a mere technician.”
Though I had to travel the country, working long hours, with my personal life interrupted by pager beeps, the work itself was not the cause of my constant battle with unhappiness and depression. It was the people I worked with, most specifically the bosses I reported to.
In my 18 years of corporate life, I reported to many managers, and I can count on one hand the number who were fair and honest people. Of note, they never lasted in their positions, someone always stabbed them in the back or discredited them, and they were fired or removed from their positions. The petty meanness, lying, manipulation I dealt with everyday made me truly enjoy long business trips away from these people. When one of my Visa clients told my boss he was incompetent, and that they wanted to talk to me about a data processing issue, my boss called me in and said, “I know why these people like you so much, you are having sex with all of them.”
In those days, this behavior was tolerated. There was even one high level manager who physically assaulted women, and HR did nothing but move the women to another area of the company. I compartmentalized my life, found a good therapist and stayed as sane as possible.
Today, our country has the ultimate bad boss, running our lives, and I no longer find it possible to compartmentalize. I spend much of my time doing everything I can to try to remove this bad boss from all our lives, and I have not had the time to find another good therapist. There are moments, like our last vacation, when I am happy and at peace. But then it is back to working en masse with over half the people in this country to fight this malignant, bloated thing – along with his followers – and to try to regain some measure of sanity and stability for all of us.
In many ways corporate life is a mirror of our country and of our inability to understand the folly of continuing to promote incompetent, toxic people to positions of power.
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