On a recent Saturday night, my husband and I were at the lovely, newly built vacation home of family friends. Over the course of the evening, the conversation drifted to our jobs. The host, an accomplished lawyer at a well-regarded law firm, swirled his fragrant malt in the bottom of his glass, shook his head, and commented, “I have worked for some real assholes.” I smiled in solidarity and commiseration. Both of us are managing attorneys at our respective companies, a choice influenced to some extent by frustration, and sometimes outright misery, with bosses.
My list of disturbing supervisors goes back to my early employment days when I was a teenager. One of my first jobs was at a fast-food restaurant, where the manager, a married man more than twice my age, flirted with his subordinates persistently and aggressively. He made it clear to two of us that he was interested in a menage a trois. I did not speak French, but I knew what that meant. My co-worker, a student at a cross-town high school, and I repeatedly demurred, but gently enough so that we would not offend him. We did not want to risk getting fired.
When I was in college, I was thrilled to get a part-time position at an animal diagnostic laboratory. My primary task was to run blood samples through spectrometry and chromatography equipment for toxicology analyses. My immediate supervisor was a smart and capable woman who took a particular interest in mentoring me. I soon learned, however, the reason why I was special to her: she was an alcoholic, and she needed a mule to drive to the liquor store to buy wine for her. She referred to her damaged liver affectionately with a pet name, and she sipped from an insulated thermos bottle all day long. After establishing a sufficient buzz, she would occasionally regale me with stories of her and her boyfriend’s sexual escapades. I suffered in silence. It was, after all, an era when the term, “hostile work environment” was a fledgling legal concept.
Law school ensued. In hindsight, I should have chosen employment law as one of my elective courses.
I was thrilled to get my first legal job upon graduation, working for a solo practitioner who had a general business and estate planning practice. Soon after I started, my employer invited me to lunch to meet his wife. We arrived at a small but quietly sophisticated restaurant and exchanged pleasantries after our orders were taken. The conversation took a turn when my employer questioned his wife about a domestic matter involving their home. Her answer was apparently inadequate, and he raised his voice and asked her again. She murmured a more detailed answer, which for some reason enraged him. He rebuked her while I sat in quiet mortification for her.
My boss was a monstrous man, but I was stuck. I could not risk tarnishing my resume with a short-term position. I vowed to stay at least one year. He never spoke disrespectfully to me, but I saw through cracks in his polished veneer at his carious interior. He was fit and healthy but would doze during conference calls with clients, forcing me to cover for him. I once overheard his conversation about the IRS seizing his bank account. I quit after twelve months, but not before seeing proof of his marital infidelity through a curtainless window as I left the office one evening.
I accepted an associate attorney position with a middle-sized firm which merged several years later with a large Seattle one. It was there that I experienced sexual harassment by a junior partner, who treated me kindly and fairly – until we were alone together. Then sexual innuendo jokes would tiptoe in. I would stretch my lips over my teeth in a gesture that was more grimace than smile and try to change the subject to the case that he purportedly wanted to discuss. The intentional distraction only fueled his desire, and the comments became blatant and explicit. He joked about my physical relationship with my husband and what we did when we were alone together. Becoming a partner quelled my fear of losing my job for not playing along and allowed me the freedom to walk out of the room before the verbal harassment began.
I left the Big Law firm to work closer to home in a small creditor’s rights practice. The owner of the firm was a hilarious, brilliant, and highly-regarded attorney – who was abusive to everyone in the office except for me. He would berate paralegals for mistakes they made, yelling at them, his face purpled with rage. I would sit in my office, shaken and humiliated for staff members, feeling helpless to confront him and face his wrath. He systematically deprived employees of normal human dignities by not allowing them to eat at their desk and forcing them to relinquish their purses into his desk drawer every morning. He installed a timeclock so that he could ensure they did not abuse their twice daily 15-minute breaks and lunch hours.
Starting my own law firm almost twenty years ago was an act of both trepidation and deliverance. Though I had been occasionally mentored by superiors that were respectful, thoughtful, and considerate, I witnessed all too often the dark side of authority -- the need to control. Becoming my own boss gave me the liberty to never submit to tyranny again.
It is difficult for me to acknowledge that I played the acquiescent employee in the past, the nice young woman who did not want to cause trouble. The hard truth is that there were times I traded my principles in exchange for employment security and career elevation. But I forgive myself because I did not have the legal – or human resource – support to combat it. And feeling shame for the appalling acts of others is acceding in a way that I will no longer tolerate.
A dark comedy that I have watched many times has a line that contains a still-present hard truth:
The key to success, and they will not teach you this in business school, is taking shit [from bosses.] – Horrible Bosses, 2011 a movie produced by New Line Cinema, directed by Seth Gordon.