It was the biggest mistake of my life. Within weeks of
taking a job as the office manager of a teacher's professional
development non-profit, I knew it wasn't going to work out.
I had gone from one desperate situation to another: my partner
was moving out and I needed to cover her share of the rent. My
choices were to continue to pursue a low paying editorial job in publishing and supplement my income with part-time gigs or take advantage of my administrative skills, such as they were, and move on to a job that I could leave at the office so that I could pursue my writing in my spare time.
I poked around on a local electronic bulletin board and was
attracted by an ad for office manager for IMPROVE. IMPROVE receives grant money from foundations and corporations and filters it down to innovative educators. I was sick of the money-grubbing pressure of the for-profit world (I was assistant to the vp of sales for a children's publisher) and this seemed like a worthwhile cause that I could get behind for 40 hours a week.
The interview went great, everyone seemed really nice, and they were offering me 30% more than I was making pushing paper for a former Marine Corps drill instructor.
The first few days were spent training with the manager I
was replacing. She had been at IMPROVE for three years directly
out of college, from which she had graduated with a degree in
systems engineering.
Talk about big shoes to fill--this woman was the Sasquatch of office managers. In consultation with the three directors--the only three people in the office, director of communications, director of development and the Director -- she had developed several different filing systems, along with various accounting systems, an extremely complex inventory management system for the books and tapes produced and distributed by IMPROVE, and databases of lists of teachers and grants and foundations that had to be constantly tracked.
By the time she left the office to me, my head was spinning. I had gone from a cushy secretary's job where all I had to do was open mail and kick out memos to a Position which entailed a massive amount of responsibility, including supervising a couple of high school interns and an administrative assistant. Then there was the unholy Trinity of directors, all of whom had their own special agenda and two of whom had the same name, Mary, which only compounded the confusion of those first few weeks.
It soon became apparent that the reason I was hired had much
more to do with how I answered their ad--via email--than my
resume. I was wired and that meant, so the Trinity assumed, that I was a gearhead who could open up a PC and actually understand what I was looking at. They assumed that I could be trusted to purchase thousands of dollars of computer equipment, set it up and maintain it to the meticulous standards set by my predecessor.
By the time the first couple of paychecks rolled in, I realized
that I had to humor the Trinity at any cost. I had to become a tech-weenie -- or at least act like one -- or risk getting kicked out onto the street without unemployment benefits or anything else to fall back on, except the temp agencies I worked for when I first moved to New York. And I was not going back to working for low hourly pay and no health benefits.
So: I started reading manuals and PC magazines, running
Norton's diagnostics on a daily basis (this allowed me to sit
back and do absolutely nothing, while appearing to the Trinity to be engaged in super-vital computer maintenance), manually back up the computers every other day and generally pass off the taxing administrative duties to my assistant, Thad, who was wise to my game early on.
Of course, I was wise to his too, and we soon formed the kind of bond people in a bad situation often forge: we learned to loathe the Trinity together.
In addition to the fact that neither Thad or I were career
administrators -- people who genuinely enjoy organizing an office and facilitating its smooth operation -- Thad was a self-professed anarchist and political activist, while I myself could not cotten to the task of ordering other people around. Therefore the built-in hierarchy that separated me from Thad in our job descriptions did not exist in our relationship and, indeed, became the first major source of conflict between me and the Trinity.
Thad was coming in late, calling in sick and slacking off
when he did manage to make it to work. Mary D., the Director,
wanted me to crack the whip, while Mary M., the communications
director, wanted me to crack Thad over the head with a baseball
bat -- in other words, make life a living hell for him so that he would quit. This was their signature squeeze play tactic that I later learned the Trinity used on many former employees to avoid whatever cost IMPROVE would incur if those employees filed for unemployment.
The pressure was on to put the screws to Thad, putting me in a position where I was forced to examine my own ethics in relation to my employers' demands.
(continued next week!)
Harry Goldstein is a writer and editor living in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Utne Reader, American Book Review, Promethean, AltX, word.com, and other periodicals.
© 1996 Harry Goldstein, All Rights Reserved
See also Tripod's Job Search Savvy, an interview with Patrick Sheetz.
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