I said yesterday that Michele was my motivation for turning
against my boss in 1978, which is only partly true.
She became an excuse to do so.
After four years working for the cosmetic company, the job
had worn badly on me.
While our boss, Donald, was kind of employees at times, he
was also an elitist, keeping himself distant from us, and encouraging Stanley
is supervisor to do the same.
Donald seemed to like the idea of being rich. And like many
people who earned their way to wealth (even though his father was a successful advertising
man in the 1950s), Donald tended to hide more and more behind Stanley.
But it was largely office politics that ruined the place for
me.
John Telson, who had come before the 1975 Christmas season,
began to play spy and special envoy for Donald through most of 1977 and has –
as he admitted later once while drunk – plotted to take my spot as supervisor,
when Stanley finally got promoted.
Two important revelations came to mind. The first was the
fact that competition for the higher-level jobs scared the shit out of me. The
second revelation was that I didn’t really see the promotion as important, even
though I was supposedly destined to take Stanley’s place behind the big window
that overlooked the warehouse.
Stanley had very little power as was proven when I became
the manager of the night shift during the 1977 Christmas season, and Stanley
felt threatened by how well I did.
This suggested that once he rose up to the next level, Stanley
would become even more controlling than Donald had been.
Much to my shame later, I felt threatened by John and harassed
him until he quit his full-time position in May 1977 – although he came back
part time during the 1977 Christmas season.
It is ironic when I knew my time with Donald was coming to
an end, I arranged to have dinner with John on a Friday night in May 1978 and
he arranged for me to get hired at his new place of employment.
The letters I had sent to all of the manufacturers were a
ticking bomb which I knew would lead to me getting fired. I’d hoped to quit
first.
The following Monday, Donald called me into his office,
confronted me with one of these letters and asked who had written it, and when
I said I didn’t know, he pulled out copies of my fictional stories and said the
type face matched.
He fired me on the spot.
A month earlier, he had issued me a warning after he had
overheard me talking to one of the other employees about their moving on – I did
not see a future in the warehouse for any of us.
Donald suspected I might be trying to unionize the workers
against him, an idea he absolutely hated. While he could do nothing about
outside forces possibly trying to do something like this, he would not tolerate
betrayal from someone like me who he basically had treated well over the years.
The fact that I had no such unionizing plans never came up
on our conversation.
I guess he saw my letter writing as part of this effort,
rather than simply an act of revenge for Michele and perhaps the whole spying
by John.
Fortunately, my letters did not destroy his business because
I later regrated the whole act and would have had to have lived with the guilt.
I vaguely wondered if I had succeeded, Donald might have
reached out to some of his brother’s mafia friends, a brief if paranoid
thought.
As it turns out, my actions appeared to have no effect, and
later, Donald would expand his business even further.
Life went on inside the cosmetic warehouse as if I had not
existed.
No comments:
Post a Comment