Work Drama - Part III
By Keiti | June 2, 2007
Normally, I do not make disagreements personal. I generally don’t think it’s right, and it doesn’t solve anything. Not to mention, I’m intelligent enough to realize that when people disagree it’s smarter, not to mention more productive, to keep the disagreement focused on the actual cause of the disagreement. In this case, however, I am more than willing to go down the personal route since Maddie is the one who chose to make it personal first.
After I chose to quit my job because I simply couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to work for a company that felt that its employees were expendable, I filed for unemployment. Now, I really didn’t think I’d be approved for unemployment, but it is absolutely my right to file. Because I was the one who chose to walk away, it automatically went to an adjudicator – something, based on a comment in the rebuttal that was sent, Maddie didn’t understand. The first thing I had to do after I filed the initial claim was send in a statement of why I chose to quit. Because I try to keep things focused when it comes to disagreements, I kept my personal feelings about Maddie out of it, only naming names when it was to illustrate a specific occurrence, and overall kept things in general terms. The company, of course, was allowed time to send in a rebuttal. Maddie, I’m assuming, handled the rebuttal which consisted of the barest minimum of truth colored by personal attacks under the guise of that truth, a number of outright lies, and a complete distortion of the situation. I do have to give her some credit, though, because, frankly, it was the best spin on a situation I had ever seen. She painted me as a volatile, extremely unstable person who no one like, no one wanted to work with, and who all of my supervisors advised them to fire. I was the constant ringleader for all sorts of things and the source of all ills at the company (neither of which are completely true statements. I can claim trying to round the employees together on the issue of late paychecks, and having to fight for our expense checks, but generally tried to stay out of everything else.)
At first I was angry and hurt – no one likes to hear unflattering things about themselves and as much as I try to use these kind of situations to make myself a better person, I am no exception. I think the worst part for me was her using my anxiety attacks against me. I’ve had them since I was 19, and they can make certain situations a bit difficult, but there was no need to throw them back in my face for any reason. After having time to mull things over, and discuss the situation with a former co-worker (who, I might add, had the sense to get out, too) I realized that her rebuttal statement said volumes more about her than it did me, and have come to the conclusion that Maddie’s a lying, manipulative bitch and a world-class con-artist. I suppose these could be viewed as good traits to have in sales, but she’s really nothing more than a bully and I’m far better off without her in my life in any facet. She’s smart and wily, but she’s also toxic and has absolutely no clue how to run a business or manage her employees effectively. At the end of my last post I mentioned that David’s biggest mistake was letting Maddie take charge of everything – especially those things that were employee-related. She was big on promising things she couldn’t deliver (not only to the employees, but to the clients, as well, which created its own problems.) She was much more interested in pitting the employees against each other under the guise of motivation, and I have to say that she succeeded to some extent. After having read her rebuttal statement, I realized that she had gleaned information from other employees – things that she had absolutely no way of knowing otherwise. Throughout my year with the company, some of the other employees were more interested in gossiping about whether Maddie and David were sleeping together, and who simply had to know everything that was going on in everyone else’s lives, work-related or not. Even after I quit, it came to my attention that a certain person was digging for information about me and the things that were going on in the drama between me and Maddie and David. Things that, frankly, were none of her business. But them’s the breaks, I guess, and, as I stated above I’m far better off rid of them and the bullshit. I happen to like my life on an even keel and have no use for senseless drama.
One of the things I realized is that Maddie is keen on sycophants – she adores “yes” people, and I wasn’t one of those people. The way I always frame situations like that is that if I don’t kiss my dad’s ass (and I absolutely adore my dad) I sure as hell am not going to kiss anyone else’s. I have a brain and a mouth, and generally try to use them – sometimes responsibly, sometimes not. I thought about the other employees who had some of the same problems I had, and realized they were the same way, more apt to call Maddie out on her behavior and her seemingly inability to follow through on anything that she told us. If it had been just me having the issues, I could have felt, probably rightly so, that all the responsibility fell on me for the craziness. But I was hardly the only one fed up and frustrated with all of the bullshit. We did try to change things – we tried to talk with the bosses about it over the course of our respective times with the company and were consistently told we had negative attitudes and essentially needed to get with the program. Nothing ever got fixed. Instead we were constantly told one thing only to discover down the road it was nothing more than lip-service.
Topics: Work |