Option A: Go postal, shooting myself and taking out a few of my colleagues at the same time.
Option B: Flee for the colonies.
Option C: Jump out the window.
“Leave, I guess,” I said.
I wonder now why I played along. I should’ve told him to stick it and walked out.
“You just don’t have any respect for me, do you?” he queried one day.
What did he expect me to do? Bow down and kiss the hem of his Eton-educated garment?
Apparently I wasn’t ‘mature enough’ to have my promotion. And yet I had seen my previous manager, Ed, rant and rave and yell and they still gave him his promotion and all I’d had was one little ‘girly fit’ – a yap.
So much wrong with this company, commented a colleague, and yet nobody could really do anything about it. And now, to be honest, I don’t care. I’m in my happy place – working for myself.
On the final project I was on, a third of the people were off sick with stress leave. Most of those left behind despised their lives. The boss started bullying me by telling me to do the wrong things and then laughing at me when I obeyed her instructions. Telling me to fix bugs and then laughing at me when I did it.
“The clue was that nobody else was doing that.”
“That’s wicked”, said her boyfriend, who was on the same project.
Bye, bye. Wave bye bye, he said as I was leaving work.
They started up with the wolf laugh. Oh hoo hoo.
What the hell was all this anyway? Some kind of weird mind-game? What are these people getting out of playing these games? A power trip? Are they really that fucked up, that their only fun is attempting to give somebody else a nervous breakdown for blood-sport? I thought they banned fox-hunting in Britain, commented a friend when I relayed the incident to her.
My colleagues were workaholics. One senior executive admitted he suffered panic attacks on holiday. Surely that’s not normal. Money and status were gods to these people; their entire sense of self-esteem seemed bound up with whether or not they were ever going to make senior manager. They wouldn’t date anybody further down the corporate food chain than them. Feeling unable to cope with my double workload of literature and IT, I headed to my local GP in East Dulwich, hoping perhaps to be prescribed anti-depressants or rest or both.
“I can’t go on like this,” I wailed.
“No, of course you can’t”, he glibly replied in a tone that implied that he didn’t give a toss.
Part of me thinks it’s unethical to encourage employees to sign out of EU working time regulations, since those rules were set in place to protect workers from exploitation. It’s the ten grand joining bonus that lures them in. A likely looking piece of bait. Chomp – down comes the mouth upon the hook.
The decent manager, Ed, left for greener pastures and now works for J.K. Rolling-In-It. I had a nervous breakdown from the pressure, couldn’t work out how to get home from work one day, was diagnosed with a brain tumour and now work for myself. Anybody who succeeds or stands out risks becoming a target. But I wonder about the other women. The ones who come along after me. No doubt they too will have been raised to believe that their hopes and dreams can be fulfilled. Then they end up with their heads in ovens.
Trickery, treachery, deception: if you read Churchill’s Wizards, you’ll begin to realize that the British admire these qualities. They are seen as valuable psychological tools – weapons to use against an enemy. Is that how they saw me – as an invader from the Antipodes, a foreign body?
Then there are the medical professionals. We are taught to put faith in them. To trust them. We don’t expect to be harassed by a doctor, nor do we expect them to be negligent. If a man goes to the doctor he’s taken seriously. A woman gets told “it’s psychological”. Even if she does have a genuine complaint – such as, for instance, a brain tumour.
My intuition and my perception were telling me not to continue in such a ruthless, cut-throat environment. I was too thin-skinned to be around these people all the time. I began hearing ominous music playing in my head each day as I was walking into work. I didn’t want to end up like Amy Winehouse – a walking train wreck, with the onlookers gathered round, all feasting on theSchadenfreude. What good would fame do me anyway? You can’t eat it. You can’t sleep with it. Fame was fickle and capricious; here today, gone tomorrow. I found myself caught up in worlds that were glamorous, but treacherous. As slippery as black ice. You could easily go for a skate.
During my last days at work, I felt the borders of my world disintegrating; I was fading away, melting, like the Wicked Witch of the West. I started laughing and talking to myself.
Not fit to be in an office, read my last work assessment.
I was chain-smoking, down to forty-five kilos. A walking skeleton. I collapsed in the tube station, unable to find my way home from work and was admitted as an outpatient to the Maudsley. I was told that it was a psychiatric emergency and that if I tried to go into work they would hospitalize me.
You are two feet away from complete psychological collapse, said the shrink. I laughed in his face. I couldn’t help it. In times of extreme stress (being hit by a car, working seventy-hour weeks) I don’t start crying, I laugh. Some people experience this phenomenon at funerals. They don’t mean to be rude, or socially inappropriate; it’s stress relief.
We’ve seen it all before, the nurses told me. People work too hard, they get caught up in the rat race, they burn themselves out. They run out of energy.
