Crazy Town or the Catacombs of despair? This place is so dismal we could stage an Edgar Allen Poe reading. No one talks. You can go an hour without hearing another voice, even if you pass someone in the hallway. The only people who are moderately happy are the ones in computing. Every one else is busy looking for an escape route.
Why does this happen all the time at the university? Is it because we’re underpaid and under appreciated? I don’t think so. Our supervisor isn’t the most gifted leader in the bunch. She’s passive-aggressive and vindictive. She lacks the capacity to forgive. I’ve heard her call people stupid. She’s called the faculty dick heads just after kissing up to them mightily. She’s told anyone who’s voiced a complaint that if they don’t like it they should get another job. She promotes the incompetent (her friends and those that kiss up to her) over the qualified. She puts her need for personal revenge over the needs for the department. She refuses to accept blame for any wrongdoing. She takes umbrage at small discrepancies and totally ignores glaring red flags. She is a bad manager. And yet she has free reign. No one corrects her or attempts to redirect her in a more positive direction.
I have a theory about my workplace. I call it the Swamp Theory because the scum always rises to the top. I’ve seen it done time and time again - when they want to get rid of people they give them a glowing reference and boom, they’re out of the department and promoted. They become someone elses problem. If we look at the number of supervisors I have had here at the University:
Scherrie, Mark, Maureen, Loretta, Nancy, Theresa, Irene, Jorry, Pat, Pam, Jessie, Barbra, Joanna, Sharon. That’s 14. The bad managers were Maureen, Nancy, Jorry, Pat, Pam, Barbra, Joanna and Sharon. More than 50%! If it were only me who had complaints about them, that would be one thing. But nearly everyone else acknowledges their incompetence. Maureen once reprimanded me and my co-workers because when we were joking amongst ourselves someone said the other was evil. Maureen said that while she knew we were joking, people could get the wrong idea and think that there were evil people working in the clinic. She may have had a point if she had not chosen to ignore 2 of the nurses discussing their sexual adventures while administering to patients. One was telling about her “rug burns” and the other was saying how she did some doctor in the freight elevator in the hospital. Now what level of freedom do you have to have to feel comfortable sharing that information in front of patients as opposed to a closed room where patient access was very limited? Or, maybe it is just bad to be perceived as evil but okay to be a freakin’ hospital whore.
Where was I going with this? Sigh. To bed….