This item makes me wish I were more of a think-outside-the-box person:

It is a piece of hemmed cotton fabric, with a button on one end and a buttonhole on the other. A non-zero amount of work went into this item, considering it was only used to wrap around a pile of four napkins I bought on clearance for $2.98 at Target. It seems as if it could be USED for something, rather than tossed in the trash after I harvest the button.

Elizabeth tried to use it as a cat collar, with comic results.

Speaking of Elizabeth, she went to a day camp this past week and had a great time. On the last day, there was a performance/show/demonstration-type thing for parents, and the camp director got a cool high school girl to be the judge of the competitive part. Elizabeth was PISSED that at the end of the judging, everyone got the same ribbon, with the judge declaring herself unable to pick among so many wonderful competitors.

I was explaining to Pissed Elizabeth on the way home that although I too dislike the “Everyone’s a winner!” kind of thing, in this case it would have been tough to do otherwise: some kids were in their sixth year at this camp, while others were in their first; some kids were going into 8th grade and others into 2nd; etc. We talked about it for awhile, Elizabeth mostly seeing it from the campers’ point of view and me mostly seeing it from the camp director’s point of view. We agreed on the idea of doing a variety of prizes that let everyone get a ribbon (which appeared to be the goal) while still letting kids feel as if the prizes were real. Things like “Best costume,” “Most poised,” “Funniest.” You wouldn’t even need to come up with the categories ahead of time: the judge could think about each child’s performance and pick what was the best part of it and make the ribbon for that. This would be hard with a really big group, but in this case there were only six kids.

This week it’s Edward and Henry’s turn for day camp. Normally this camp is hosted by our town’s elementary school, but this year our school couldn’t do it, so we had to join with the next town over. At drop-off, I was reminded how much I dislike new/unfamiliar things. At our elementary school, I know exactly how to get there, exactly where to park, exactly where else to park if the usual parking is full, and exactly which entrances are possibilities. I know my way around the inside of the school, and I recognize/know the teachers, and I recognize a lot of the teenaged counselors. But this morning, I had to wing it. It went fine, of course it went fine, but I was surprised at just how disorienting it is.

I was describing this book to Paul and Rob, and the three of us together came up with this: that it’s like The Bourne Identity (in which someone wakes up and has to figure out who he/she is, and also why he/she seems to be well-equipped with cash and skillz) + Men in Black (in which someone is recruited into a secret government organization that fights the weird/supernatural/alien) + X-Men (in which there is a world where certain people are born with interesting abilities). I felt so pleased with us for summing it up so clearly and evocatively. Then I was looking at reviews, and basically everyone was saying the same thing. So. Well, it means there’s CONSENSUS.

(image from Amazon.com)

The Rook, by Daniel O’Malley.

I found the book extremely enjoyable, and kept wanting to go back to it. The writing was a little rough in places, and I have never liked the exposition-via-letters gimmick (NO ONE would EVER go into SO MUCH DETAIL in a letter, NO MATTER WHAT the situation was); but the former felt like first-book issues, and the latter was easy enough to go along with in this case where it seemed justified.

I love it when a character is put into a situation that would be hugely tense and upsetting for almost anyone—but then turns out to be able to handle it.

Last night I dreamed I was pregnant. SUPER vivid dream, including running my hand over my rounded tum and thinking about names. (I was thinking, “Funny how I think I am just DYING to choose a name, until I actually have to choose one.”) Seven or eight years ago, I would have woken up and cried that it wasn’t real, and maybe spent the day brooding and eating fudge. Today I woke up IMMENSELY RELIEVED that it was a dream. I mention this in case you are where I was seven or eight years ago, feeling as if you will never be able to live a happy life unless you have another baby, and wondering if that feeling will ever go away. I can offer only one anecdotal “yes, it will” data point, but here it is if it helps.

It is partly made up of sensible things: I am now older than I would like to be for a pregnancy, and the gap between my youngest and another baby would be MUCH larger than I’d like it to be, and at this point I don’t want to start again at the beginning. It is also partly because the other children have gotten older, and I’ve thought, “Ohhhhhhhhhh, wait: I wanted a lot of BABIES, but I do not necessarily want a lot of three-year-olds or a lot of fourteen-year-olds.”

But I think it is mostly that The Feeling went away. I think it is a mistake to underestimate the role biology plays in a passionate desire for children: some of it is because children are neat to have, but a lot of it is a species-benefiting biological set-up that isn’t necessarily in the individual’s best interests. I remember when I was crying about the situation to my OB/GYN (he asked during a check-up if we were planning more children, and I burst into tears), and I asked if the baby cravings ever went away, and he said, “I don’t know. I can only tell you this: that older women no longer talk to me about it.” That’s not entirely comforting: my guess is that older women stop talking about it because it’s an option that’s no longer available. But now that I am a bit older myself, I am revising that guess to include the idea that when the option is no longer available, for most of us it also stops being so appealing. Biology stands down and lets most of us stop pining.

Still, I do think we should have had a sixth child, back when Paul said no. At this point that child would be six or seven, and I think that would have been great. And also, I do think that Paul saying no to another child, when I wanted one so badly I felt I could not live a happy life without one, had a lasting, non-positive effect on our marriage. I’m not saying he could have said anything else, if he really felt that strongly about it; and maybe if he had given in to what I wanted, perhaps it would have had some detrimental effect in the other direction; and perhaps there was NO possible happy outcome from that deadlocked situation and there would have been a negative effect no matter what we’d decided. But regardless, I don’t think back to that time and think it went the way it should have, or that he was right. He has never been good at thinking ahead to the future, so I don’t feel he made a decision based on a good evaluation of the situation; and he made me feel that when it comes down to truly important decisions in our shared life, it’s his happiness over mine.

I cannot figure out how to balance the children’s need to continually talk to me with my need to not have children continually talking to me. We are on Year 18 of this struggle, with no resolution in sight.

Older women tell me that the solution is to wait until the children are gone and then to wish fervently that I had not wished this precious time away. This does not seem like a satisfying solution. Furthermore, it indicates to me that there will be a mental transformation of some sort, a transformation that will render me unable to remember with any level of accuracy what this time of my life was like. That is discouraging. Already I have seen the early signs of it: I look with damp-eyed nostalgia at women shopping at Target with babies and toddlers, thinking fondly of how when I was in their shoes I would keep shoving goldfish crackers into little mouths to keep them from continually talking to me.

Well. Nothing brings this issue to light quite like summer vacation. Soon the children and I will gather to have our annual discussion about summer goals/plans, and I hope to find a way to say to them that every word from their lips is like precious gems to me, but could we stop the practice of dispersing those gems in every-90-seconds increments, a practice that makes it so that the only way I could survive the incessant interruptions with my mind intact would be to sit, motionless and receptive, doing nothing else but waiting for the next child to talk to me?

Furthermore, the other day I did an experiment that was even more disheartening. It was morning, and I’d had an idea for a post, so I was working on that while the children were getting ready for school. They were interrupting me SO INCESSANTLY that a literal LINE had formed. So I thought, like the sensible, patient, reasonable mother I long to be: “This is clearly not a good time to try to write. I can write later. I don’t need to SET UP a situation where I will be driven crazy.” I stopped writing, I went into the kitchen to be available to the children—and no one talked to me. I waited 10 minutes, doing various little tasks, and not one single child talked to me.

So I thought it was probably like the lines in Target, where first no one is in line and then suddenly a dozen customers all appear at once. I had just hit a little flood of children-wanting-to-talk-to-me, but now it was over. I returned to my computer, started writing, and I am not exaggerating even one tiny morsel when I say that within 30 seconds a child was talking to me. And then another child. And then a third child.

So I thought, okay, the LULL was the anomaly. I went to the living room, and I sat in a chair doing nothing. That is, I just Made Myself Available. AND NO ONE TALKED TO ME. I waited another full ten minutes. NO ONE TALKED TO ME.

I returned to my computer. The children appeared and started talking to me.

It was like a JOKE. It was like a SITCOM. It was like a FAMILY CIRCUS comic. It was as if there were a sensor in my computer chair that set off little activation switches in the children’s brains. It was one of the most depressing experiments I have ever performed.

Hi Swistle, could you do a post about what comics you read? I started reading Dumbing of Age because you mentioned it in a post once and I really love it. And I think it was you that mentioned Bad Machinery too, and I love that too. I’m going through a bit of a reading slump where I’m struggling to find a book that I feel like reading more than a couple pages of, but I realized I still enjoy comics, especially the sort that tell an on-going story. So I was hoping you might have some more recommendations.

Thanks

Nancy

This is a great idea: I want suggestions TOO.

Here are the comics I currently read, of the sort that tell an on-going story (those are my favorite kind, too):

Dumbing of Age

Bad Machinery / Scary Go Round – This one seems to do several different sometimes-overlapping comics, in batches. I’ve never figured out what the pattern is, or which series is named what: I just go with it.

Questionable Content

Alice Grove

And here are the comics I currently read, of the sort that don’t tell an on-going story per se:

Dinosaur Comics

Hark, A Vagrant!

Robot Hugs

xkcd

Nancy and I would like to know what comics YOU read—particularly the kind that have a long-running storyline, but also the kind that don’t.

This morning I am thinking about two things that are more like one thing, or at least two things with significant overlap.

The first thing is when someone wants something very reasonable, something it would not be weird to expect to be able to have, but can’t have it. Like when someone really wants to get married and have children: no one would say to a child with that goal, as we might if the child’s goal to be a world-famous actor and then President of the United States afterward, “Oh, well honey, that’s a GREAT plan, but it’s a good idea to have a BACK-UP plan, just in case.” Marriage/children is a normal thing to want, and a normal thing to get, and yet there are lots of great people who want those things and can’t get them.

The second thing is when someone has something very desirable, something a LOT of people want but can’t have, and doesn’t want it. Like how I am married to a man who likes to cuddle at night, but I can’t sleep with someone touching me. I think of that episode of Friends where the guys are discussing ways to get out of a cuddle, because all their girls want to cuddle. Meanwhile there’s me, using those tips in vain. It feels so wasteful, and also so hard to complain about. Like saying “Ug, I just HATE having all this MONEY.” Or when the hairdresser is using the thinning scissors on my hair, and the elderly ladies getting perms to make their thin hair look thicker are squinting at me with envy and resentment. I’M SORRY I DON’T WANT WHAT YOU WOULD KILL FOR.

It’s on my mind right now because I want something that seems reasonable to me, something that does not seem weird to expect to have if I want it, which is to live near my parents. Furthermore, that seems like something a lot of parents WANT: they complain that their children live so far away, and nag them to live closer. My parents were in that group: my mom was very persistent about trying to get us to live near them. And then they got what they wanted, what LOTS of people want, and ALL their children moved close to home: my brother moved from across the country to live an hour away, and I moved from across the country to live .3 miles away. I wanted to live where I was already living, and I really didn’t want to move to the location where my parents lived, but my parents wouldn’t move to where we were, so I made that trade.

And now my parents have moved almost as far away as they can get and still remain in the same country. They still live here for part of the year, but that’s only because we’re here: they would like to move permanently to the new location. I could theoretically still have part of what I want: if my primary geographical goal is to live near family, which it was when I could still move freely, I could dig out all our roots, sell our customized house, take all the kids out of their schools, take us away from all our friends and hard-won social groups, leave my brother and sister-in-law and niece and nephew and sister-in-law’s siblings, and follow my parents. I could keep doing that every time they moved. Or, my parents could move back here, choosing live-near-family preferences over geographical ones. This is like saying that someone who really wants marriage and kids could have an arranged marriage, or that someone who doesn’t like cuddling could accept being cuddled because that’s what someone else would want.

I have taken to heart the thing about how instead of teaching our daughters to escape being raped, we should be teaching our sons not to be rapists. You’d think a big national rape case would provide excellent material for talking to our sons about not being rapists. But no, unfortunately yet again what we have is excellent material for talking to our daughters about how to escape being raped.

It’s especially frustrating because I just recently read somewhere that it feeds into rape culture to say “This is something that happens to women in our culture.” This makes it harder for me to tell my daughter what I want to tell her, which is the actual truth: this IS something that happens to women in our culture.

Furthermore, “in our culture” is only accurate if we mean “in our timeless worldwide human culture,” because this is an ancient worldwide problem and not a local or recent one. We are in fact fairly lucky if we live in a time period and part of the world where at least theoretically rape is against the law, and where a victim of rape is not put to death for the crime of being raped, or forced to marry her rapist. So lucky!

The basic timeless worldwide problem we are dealing with is that a certain percentage of humans, almost exclusively male humans, are rapists who don’t see anything wrong with raping, and don’t seem to learn otherwise no matter what we do. And that another certain percentage of humans, some overlapping the first group but many not overlapping, will defend those rapists and instead attack the women who have been raped.

And so two terrible things happen to a woman who is raped: (1) she is raped, and (2) she is blamed for it. (Well, at LEAST two terrible things. Other options include not being believed at all, having to deal with a pregnancy resulting from the rape, having to deal with an STD resulting from the rape, having to deal with the extensive and multi-layered psychological fall-out of being raped, etc.)

There is a big element here of that thing people do when they are scared and want to feel safe: if we can find something that the victim did, and if that thing is something we ourselves can avoid, then we have made a magical protection spell around ourselves. There have been plenty of articles written about how women have to live their lives constantly worrying about being attacked/raped by men, so I won’t go over that again here. But if you are living in that kind of constant fear, it is natural for certain superstitions to arise: if I don’t walk alone in the dark, if I walk confidently, if I stay in a good part of town, if I wear the right kind of clothing, if I don’t step on a crack, if there are an even number of steps between here and where I live, if I don’t let my foot dangle over the edge of the bed—if I do all these things right, I don’t have to be so scared because the bad thing won’t happen to me.

It’s too bad a self-soothing mechanism can so easily lead to saying “SEE?? You forgot one of the rules and THAT’S why you got raped! It’s YOUR fault! WHEW: that gives me some relief for my distress.” It’s an understandable panic/fear reaction, but education helps: as with the problem of the bystander effect, the solution is to know it exists. As soon as you know it’s a Thing, you’re much less likely to be tricked by it.

Well. What I needed was a version of all this that was geared for a 5th-grade girl. Sometimes getting started is the hardest part. What I started with was saying to her that there was a news story right now that was making me even more worried about her and her friends. Then I went slowly: we had about a 35-minute car ride, so even though the next few paragraphs may look as if I sat there ranting and lecturing and talking too fast, it was pretty casual, with lots of responses from her.

I told her that a man had raped an unconscious woman, and that he still didn’t seem to think he’d done anything wrong except drink too much, and that the judge had decided he shouldn’t be punished too much because that would have a negative effect on his future, and that a lot of people were saying it was the woman’s fault for being unconscious. I reminded her of the statistic that approximately 1 out of 6 women will be sexually assaulted, and that it’s likely that number is wayyyyyyy too low because of how many assaults go unreported, and that the majority of sexual assaults are done by a man the woman knows (which contributes to under-reporting and feelings of self-blame). I hope I adequately covered how very Not Your Fault a sexual assault is (even if you liked the guy, even if you were flirting, even if you were drinking, even if you were wearing sexy clothes, even if you participated willingly with other physical things, even if he’s your boyfriend, and so on), but we will return to that subject again and again over the years.

I told her that it was sickening and crappy that she would need to be taught how to decrease her odds of being raped, but that here we were. I mentioned the thing about teaching your sons not to be rapists, but that this situation in the news was not helpful, and she agreed. We talked about using the buddy system, and not letting your drink go unattended, and keeping an eye out for other women—strangers as well as friends. I told her about that other story that’s been in the news, about the women who were eating in a restaurant and saw a man put something in another woman’s drink, and they told the woman and also the waiter and also the police. This is the kind of thing we can do to help each other. Or if you see a girl at a party, and she seems drunk and you see guys circling her as if she is prey, you can help her back to her dorm/apartment or into a taxi or WHATEVER. If she won’t leave, you can go stand next to her. You can get some of your good guy friends involved. You can call campus security to help you. We also touched upon the topic of rape kits.

That was around the time the car ride ended, so I’ve left it there for now.

All of the talk about how reporting a supervisor’s behavior can pay off later even if it seems as if it goes nowhere at the time (for example, if another employee mentions the same problem later, their complaint may be taken more seriously because of the previous complaint) has reminded me of a satisfying story from earlier in my working life.

I was in my very early twenties, working for a plant nursery. I was taken on as a general-helper employee who could be sent to help with any task that needed it that day, and I did very well. In a job that pays minimum wage with no benefits, an employee only has to show up reliably and not slack off to “do very well,” but also I was cheerful, and interested in what I was doing, and I did well at the work itself, and I was soon a preferred/requested helper for tasks. In less than the usual amount of time (which probably contributed to the problems I’m about to describe), I was promoted and assigned to a particular greenhouse, which meant being responsible for more of my own workday: more figuring out what needed to be done, rather than waiting to be told what to do.

The trouble was, there was another employee assigned part-time to the same greenhouse where I was working full-time. And Doris and I turned out not to be a good fit. It seemed to me that the problem was entirely HER, but of course it WOULD feel that way to me. But I was coming in to work and doing a good job, and she was constantly pecking at me and criticizing me. It felt territorial: I was on her turf and she didn’t like it. But it was hard to tell for sure if that was what was going on, because surely MANY people doing a bad job feel as if they’re doing a good job. Maybe I WAS doing a bad job, and just didn’t have the experience yet to know it? A lot of the tasks were judgment-call tasks (“Does this plant need water or is it okay for another day?,” for example, or “Should these be transferred to bigger pots this week or wait until next week?”) rather than clear tasks (“This must be done every Tuesday,” for example), so maybe I was regularly making poor judgment calls and couldn’t tell. But as month after month went by, and I was promoted again, and the supervisor kept checking and praising my work, and as I gained more and more experience until I no longer felt as if I were in the learning phase of the job, it was harder and harder to feel as if the problem was with me.

An example. One of my jobs was to figure out each morning which plants in the greenhouse needed watering. If I watered them, Doris would tell me they shouldn’t have been watered, and she would tell me the information on over-watering I’d already been told many, many times. If I didn’t water them, or hadn’t watered them YET, she would draw my attention to them needing water, and alert me to all the same old information about under-watering. She would say it as if it was my first day: “See how if you stick your finger into the soil it feels dry?” But it was still hard to figure out, because what if I WAS IN FACT making the wrong decision each day? The only hard clue that my impressions may have been correct: one day I didn’t water a section of plants, and she said I should have watered them; so I watered them, and later that SAME DAY she came and told me I shouldn’t have watered them. Still, I was not sure if I was just being too sensitive, especially because she periodically informed me that I was “the sensitive type.” (In general, by the way, I have found that when someone likes to tell you who you are, it is not a good sign.)

Other little clues that something was amiss: the previous person in my position, a mellow/chill/easygoing woman, had left in large part because she hadn’t wanted to work with Doris anymore; Doris frequently complained that her grown daughters thought she was being pushy/interfering/bossy when she was just trying to help / would always be their mother.

I tried to deal with it myself. I had already tried listening to her and taking her advice and so forth: when I was newer to the job, I had followed her instructions completely. But when I had gone way beyond learning every single thing that needed to be done (and it was not super-complicated stuff) and she was still treating me exactly like a new hire, I started speaking up. I tried jokey responses and firm responses and respectful responses and THANK YOU I’VE GOT IT responses, but nothing worked. She would follow me around, or go behind me checking my work—and neither of those things were her job to do. She was not in charge of me or my work. And I was not yet comfortable enough (especially with our age gap) to say, “Doris, you are not in charge of my work.”

Finally I went to my immediate supervisor about it. I was calm, but my basic message was that this arrangement was not working out either for Doris or for me, and maybe I should be placed in a different greenhouse. That is when I learned that my co-worker had repeatedly gone to our immediate supervisor about me. It was not pleasing. But what WAS pleasing is that because of my co-worker’s complaints, my supervisor had been keeping a close eye on my work—and she said I WAS doing it right. In fact, she said I was doing too good a job for her to want to move me to another greenhouse: she wanted me to stay where I was. This was gratifying at the time, and less gratifying looking back on it: it was a “sorry, no, this is better/easier for us even though it sucks for you,” couched as if it were praise. My supervisor suggested I let the criticisms roll off me, and not worry about it.

Time went by and the situation escalated to the point where I felt like I was going crazy. I KNEW I was doing the job right, but she was continually telling me I was doing it wrong. It didn’t seem to matter how I responded. And in between criticisms, she was being confusingly nice. I felt like I’d get all happy and “Hey, this is WORKING now!” and then she’d sucker-punch me with a smile on her face. She’d “encourage” me by saying not to worry, I’d figure the work out eventually. I kept thinking I must be imagining things, or being too sensitive, or doing it wrong, or SOMETHING. I had a regularly-scheduled review with my supervisor’s supervisor; she’d been filled in by my immediate supervisor on what was happening, so I told her the situation was continuing. She re-asserted that I WAS doing a good job, and that she would address the issue again with the co-worker.

The day came when I was doing my work, my I’m-pretty-sure-it-was-GOOD work, and the co-worker was standing over me ranting that she didn’t UNDERSTAND why I wouldn’t LISTEN to her; that SHE had listened to HER superiors when SHE first started, and so on. I couldn’t even respond anymore. I HAD listened to her when I “first started,” and had CONTINUED listening to her, but now I was WELL AND FULLY TRAINED, and in fact WELL BEYOND well and fully trained, and she was criticizing no matter WHAT I did, and she was NOT IN CHARGE OF ME. She had told me a thousand times that I was doing a Very Simple Task TOTALLY WRONG, and now was condescendingly re-explaining the absolutely clear reasons for how to do things the way I was already doing them. Tears were running down my face and I was just so discouraged I couldn’t even answer her or look at her anymore. I went to the office, told them I was sick and needed to go home. That night I came back after everyone was gone, and left a letter explaining why I was not coming back. I said I knew I should be giving notice, and I was sorry that they were being punished for this situation by having to scramble to find someone to do my work, but that I had let it go on longer than I should have and at this point couldn’t stand even one more minute. I described the scene that had been the final straw as well as summarizing what had happened over the past year.

I had a good relationship with another co-worker, Beth, and she stopped by my apartment after work the next day, all like “DUDE.” She said that she had asked my supervisor what HAPPENED, why Swistle had quit, and my supervisor, my nice, chill, zero-gossip, nothing-bad-to-say-about-anyone supervisor had replied: “Doris rode her back until she fled.” I still CHERISH those words. Rode her back. Until she fled. It shows that although my supervisor couldn’t/wouldn’t figure out how to fix the situation, she SAW it and BELIEVED me.

A second very satisfying thing happened a few months later. Beth told me they’d put someone else in that greenhouse in my place. This time they chose someone quite a bit older (Doris was older) and also someone significantly less sensitive and non-confrontational: a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, confident employee with lots of experience, who also was friends with the owners. After a couple of weeks, that person came into the office and said, “Doris is impossible to work with” and explained why, saying the same things I’d said, with “relentlessly, unreasonably critical” topping the list and “won’t get off my back” following as a close second. AND THE COMPANY ASKED DORIS TO QUIT RATHER THAN BE FIRED. AND DORIS DID.

Really, I am not sure anything so satisfying has ever happened to me. It’s too bad they didn’t ask her to leave when she was tormenting me—but I wasn’t going to be staying there long anyway, so it actually worked out better the way it happened.

And also, it doesn’t in the end feel good to think of her being asked to leave. I mean, it sort of does, of course. Affirmation! Consequences! Justice! But imagining a woman in her late sixties being asked to leave a job she loved and was good at—well, it is too bad she couldn’t have been moved to a greenhouse where she could have been the only one in charge. Looking back on it, she is reminding me of a cat who can’t live with other cats: they can be GREAT cats, but only as an ONLY cat. Doris had serious problems working with others, but I believe she would have been a great worker as an only cat. A supervisor who could have made that happen would have kept two good employees.

I got a reply to the letter I wrote to my supervisor’s boss.

Good things about the reply:

1. It did not make me regret writing my letter.

2. It was respectful and nice, if perhaps written using a template from A Quick Guide to Management. Thank employee for raising concern. Assure employee that input is valuable and appreciated. Give indication that concern has been heard. Thank employee again for raising concern. Sign off and say, “Whew, THAT’S taken care of!”

3. It was an email, not a phone call.

4. It did not make me think, “Welp, that’s it, now I HAVE to quit” OR make me hunt for gifs of burning things to the ground.

5. It did not contain fuel for ragey mental arguments in the days/months/years to come.

6. It was not instead an email from the supervisor, saying “Boss forwarded your concerns to me.” (This was my lying-awake nightmare.)

Less-good things about the reply:

1. It did not sound at all like any of the fantasies I had where the boss would be appalled, APPALLED, at the treatment of his staff by this supervisor, and perhaps the reply would be followed by a company-wide apology from the supervisor. Paul reminds me that this would never, ever, ever happen. I know, I KNOW, obviously I DO know, there is no need even to agree with Paul because I TOO agree with Paul—but still. There is that little deflated feeling when the scene ends up playing out in an ordinary way, devoid of triumphant swelling music.

2. It did not sound as if anything will be changing as a result of my letter, or that the boss thought the concerns I raised were anything to get all het up about.

I AM glad I wrote my letter. One of my biggest concerns was that this would be one of those things that would seem like a really great idea beforehand, but silly and/or melodramatic after the fall-out (or even “as soon as I pressed send”). A gentle slump onto the side of “Eh, that was surprisingly uneventful” is VASTLY PREFERABLE to an exciting plummet into “WHAT WAS I THINKING??? DID I THINK I WAS IN A JULIA ROBERTS MOVIE OR WHAT???”

And Paul thinks it is highly possible that the boss WILL speak to the supervisor, even if what the boss is saying is “Employees are getting upset for some reason, so could you change the perfectly-acceptable way you do X” instead of “You are mean and unfair so could you stop, and also I was thinking we should hire Swistle as a consultant, she’ll basically be your boss, just send all staff communications through her from now on so she can edit them to sound as if a reasonable human being wrote them to other reasonable human beings.”

I dreamed last night that I was in a building that was on fire but I kept not leaving. I kept thinking, “I need to get out RIGHT NOW,” and then I’d get distracted by trying to find the cat, or trying to figure out if I should bring anything with me, or trying to put on pants. It went from “I know the house is on fire but I see no evidence of it yet” to “I feel the heat and hear the crackling and smell the smoke and the floor is feeling as if maybe half of it has been eaten away by flames,” and STILL I didn’t leave. I feel as if I could make a good allegory with that.

It’s been a week since a supervisor sent out a pretty bad email, and I am still thrown for a loop by it. I wish I were more the “roll my eyes and go on doing what I know is a good job” type, but I am NOT.

Anyway, my degree is in business management / HR, so I tried to think of this from the other side of things. It went like this:

1. Should supervisors speak to employees this way?

2. Should anything be done about it, if they do?

3. If something should be done about it, what should that something be?

The answer to the first question in this case is just no, they should not speak to employees this way: the email was scornful and unfair.

The answer to the second question is harder: it really depends on how serious, how frequent, what the rest of the supervisor’s behavior looks like, etc. Insufficient information to make a call on this one.

The answer to the third is what interested me most. I’d been thinking that if someone said something to me and I didn’t like it, the correct thing was to go to that person and talk to them about it. Which, duh, I would rather stand in a burning house trying to put on pants. But then I realized that is what you do in PERSONAL relationships. In WORK relationships, that is not always the answer.

Some work relationships are between co-workers of equal rank, but in many work relationships there is a considerable imbalance of power and authority. If a person of higher rank has a problem with a person of lower rank, they have the power and authority to ask the person of lower rank to change. When it’s the other way around, that when there’s a problem—especially if the lower-ranked person fears the consequences of criticizing someone who has input over their schedule, pay, work load, evaluations, reputation with upper management, entire work environment, etc.

This is why there is a different system in place for dealing with a supervisor’s bad behavior: the correct thing in many of those cases is for the employee to go to the SUPERVISOR’S supervisor. This accomplishes many good things:

1. It means there can first be confirmation that the behavior WAS out of line with company standards, removing the “Wait, IS this a thing?” element, and making sure the criticism of the supervisor’s behavior is fair. Like, let’s say an employee got all upset because the supervisor said nicely that they had to stop coming in half an hour late all the time.

2. It means that if the supervisor’s behavior does need to be criticized/corrected, the criticism/correction can be done by someone of higher rank than they are.

3. It means the entire thing is on record with the company, which should make retaliation more difficult.

As soon as I realized all of this, I stopped having trouble figuring out how to write the email. It went from “Wah, wah, I don’t like it when you talk to me like that / Wah, wah, that’s not FAIR, I didn’t do anything wrong!!” (letter from me to supervisor) to “I would like to bring something to your attention and let you decide if and how you would like to handle it” (letter from me to supervisor’s boss who is also my boss).

The next question was whether to actually send it. There is the matter of COULD a person complain, and then there is the matter of is THIS one of fights I want to fight. I’m not going to send a letter every single time anyone does anything I think was wrong—so is THIS one of the very, very few letters I want to write?

I went for yes. In this case, the email from the supervisor significantly sapped my loyalty to the company and my willingness to take extra shifts; it also made me feel falsely accused and inappropriately punished. This is presumably not the effect my boss’s boss would hope for. Possibly I am the only employee who had that reaction, while everyone else rolled their eyes and got on with their days, but possibly NOT. If other employees feel as I do, this is a serious issue and worth a letter.

Furthermore, I am only willing to be spoken to in this way by a supervisor a very limited number of times before I quit, so it does not feel like a waste of a letter: if I wrote one letter for each time I was willing to be spoken to this way, I would end up quitting before I ran out of my limited allotment of letters.

I am in a rare position: I don’t need the money from this job (I WANT it for the kids’ braces and college, but it’s not the groceries/rent income), and I can easily find another job, and we’d be fine during the time of acquiring that new job and waiting for the first paycheck from it. My personal risk is low: if the response from the supervisor’s supervisor is terrible, or there are other unpleasant consequences of my letter, I can think, “Whew! How nice to have it made so clear that quitting this terrible company is the right thing to do!” Many of my co-workers are not in that position AT ALL: if THEY complain, their personal risk is very high.

Without putting on a cape or whatever (although…is that an option?), this is a job for Swistle: I can afford the risk, and I can write a business letter. I sent it yesterday morning. Now we play the “flinching every time I hear the new-email sound” game. Oh no, I just thought of something: what if the supervisor’s boss CALLS me??