My last note on jobs ended with a sense of foreboding, but it certainly didn’t start out that way. I sent my CV to a recruitment agency that I found in the advertised in the post, they seemed to like me and I got a call the next week informing me that I had an interview the following day. However, this one didn’t go so well. The interview was in a village near Wallingford for an environmental research company and my strategy, having not been filled in all that well was to ask “lots of questions” to look interested. The result was that I came across as not having a clue about what the job entailed! I didn’t feel too comfortable at the interview besides, there seemed to be a lot of high flying professional young women, so I would have stuck out badly. The following week, however, I soon had another interview, this time at a not-for-profit publishing company that used its income to fund grass-roots projects in developing countries around the world.
My first impressions were good. The grounds seemed pretty and in the interview the manager seemed to be talking to me as if I already had the job and I seemed to get on with her well. Sure enough, I was soon told that I would be starting on Monday. I had only been out of work a month, and that during the Christmas holidays. The next six would be decidely mixed in terms of happiness. When I started I was trained by a girl who was off travelling to Australia next week and none of my future co-colleagues were present. I really enjoyed the quiet, the manager did her best to make me feel welcome (there was a break for breakfast in the morning) and the staff in the other departments were welcoming too. By the second week, I was alone, but I felt as though I was impressing with my work-ethic and the speed at which I acquired independence. By my eighth day I was training a new member of staff, who I got on well with initially. She was Polish and older than me, but seemed hard-working enough and we could relate to each other as far as experiencing the miseries of unemployment when you have a partner who is working. The job seemed glove-fitting for the first three weeks; I even made known my intentions at wanting to stay on permanently (though this was partially because I didn’t want to be stuck without a job again). However, things changed when a previously absent co-colleague returned to work at changed the dynamics for the worst.
She was surly, middle-aged, complained almost all the time and was the most thoroughly depressing person to be around I’ve ever met. She had just come back from having an eye-operation (laser corrected vision), because she was sick of wearing glasses and contact-lenses, and now she was back she seemed intent of asserting her position as office leader, having had a couple of upstarts branching out without her guidance. The other temp whom I had trained could adapt to this change, but, to put it simply, I simply didn’t get on with this woman. She irritated me by constantly complaining about her workload, gossiping and acute sensitivity to any noise that wasn’t her own voice, and I similarly think that she was, in some way, threatened by my dynamism and efficiency. Further, she didn’t play the game where any mistakes were dealt with and allowed life to go on; she very much made you feel like a small and terrible person for having not performed an administrative function in “her” way, using sniping comments and harsh words. Moreover, she would make sure our manager knew about any mistakes, large or small, and I was on occasion blamed for things that weren’t my fault.
Our manager, on the other hand, I soon discovered had quite a temper. She had massive mood-swings and at points was fairly lewd and childish in humour and at other point “livid” as she would put it. The other temp, who I initially got on well with, also grew to dislike me. To this day I don’t know why. We had a personal conversation once, which she instigated, but might resent me because she disclosed information to me she was not comfortable with me knowing. Also, I was certainly aware of her and my colleague gossiping about me, when they thought I wasn’t in earshot. Maybe when it came down to it, she shared more in common with the rest of the office than me.
How did I fall so out of favour? I should start off by saying that I wasn’t the perfect employee, as I’ll often forget in this splurge of experience. There was effectively a snowball effect, which happened two months into the job. It started with my colleague telling me not to get up when filing journals. I responded by simply saying that I don’t mind getting up each time. She countered that it was noisy, so I did as she said for the rest of the day and thought that was the end of it. It wasn’t. She must have regarded the incident as an “act of defiance” and told our manager, so she took me aside and asked about the incident and told me, to quote her words, “if she tells you to jump, you jump”. My response was to work as hard and as quickly as I could to show that I was actually a good employee, but out of the blue a couple of weeks later I was called into my manager’s office, or her “den of iniquity” (I wonder if she even knows what this means), and told that the amount of mistakes I was making wasn’t acceptable and if I didn’t sort it out, I would be out of a job. I tried to deal with it by working more slowly and writing an apologetic letter to my manager, but from this point on, I pretty much worked in fear, scared of making mistakes and went to the other extreme of working slowly and feeling horrible about coming into work each day. A couple of months passed and there was a separate incident, in which to my shame, I was 10 minutes late. This was a cue to be given my final warning. My attendence was fairly good, other than this, I never missed a day of work (even amidst the snow-storms) and was always willing to work overtime (although I seemed to be “banned” from doing this, because my colleague didn’t like it), but I can only admit that I was in the wrong and corrected this subsequently. There was further fall-out when I was caught checking another colleagues work. Again, this went straight to the manager and at this point I decided that I wanted to leave.
It was a shame because it started out well, I got to see a number of interesting journals, I got on really well with people outside my department (I still play football with some of them to this day) and I always looked forward to the work I did with another department on a daily basis, if only as an escape from my work-colleagues. The work, furthermore was fairly easy apart from exceptions to the rule, which made us reliant on my senior colleague.
Overall, though it was hellish. I was given a telling off for asking questions that “I should already know” having been told it once. I was made to feel afraid for making errors that were actually not to difficult to amend and bar the first few weeks never really given any positive feedback, no matter how hard I worked. There was a horrible gossip culture, which I hated, in which everyone and anyone was criticised and speculated about at some point (it makes you wonder what they were saying about me when I wasn’t there). It seemed as though the management only existed to police me and make me feel like some kind of convict. I have no problem with work being stressful in terms of workload, but this work was stressful because it pushed me to my emotional limits. I lost a lot of confidence and self-esteem and the job made me miserable. I think my use of hyperbole and my bias towards myself has skewed this article, but this is only because the whole experience made me feel so low. I acknowledge that I might be too fragile too, after all, there are always plenty of others worse off who have had worse experiences in work. I even wondered whether I was cut out for the working world at all and if any company would ever employ me. I felt like a failure and that I was letting people down when all I ever wanted to do was to be a big help and always worked as hard as I could. My time thriving at Thames Valley University certainly seemed a long time ago then. And my unceremonious exit would be another source of disquiet.