I knew I needed to write about the most recent way a man has treated me like trash in my place of work after a recent conversation with friends. Please note, I have many of these stories and I plan on writing them down. Welcome to Installment 1 of who knows how many.
Let me preface — I am 43 goddam years old. I’m on blood pressure medicine and have a CPAP. I have successfully guided a team of over 60 people to rebuild and restore a municipal IT system after a cyber intrusion ransomware attack. I have almost 20 years of professional experience and am an active Eisenhower Fellow.
Some fucking men stay treating me like an idiot. Here’s the latest *abridged* story.
I recently (almost 14 months in now) took a new job with a prestigious museum in New Orleans. Each interview was weird in its own way. But in all it sounded exactly like the change I was looking for and so I accepted a generous salary and started as the VP of Technology. I had a team of five — one director, one cyber/network lead, one technician, and two with the ability to troubleshoot most problems, but no specialty.
They were all miserable. There was no help desk system (phone calls only, no follow up) and there was no way to know who was working on what project because they never had team meetings. Communication was one way, from the director to the others. He demanded they do what he asked immediately and told them to not trust each other. Some days, when he was in a real mood, he’d tell someone they should be grateful they have a job, because without him they wouldn’t be working here. Or maybe he’d spin a tale about how one of our colleagues was plotting to get ahead so they shouldn’t be trusted. It was rank. It was highly toxic.
Not to mention all the banal shit. When I asked for diagrams and documentation of the network and systems he had been building for the past 20 years I was met with a scoff and snippy, snide reply.
“We’ve been too busy to document. You’ll see,” snapped the director.
Over the course of my first six months I basically just listened. Every person on my team had different issues, but the crux of each problem was the director’s behavior. I could see it in the requests I gave him — a pretend eagerness to do just enough to appear to be following orders. No real deliverables ever delivered. Each question about specifics elicited a garbled mess of barely coherent jargon. It was maddening, yet I didn’t see a way out as he had deliberately kept so much information to himself that we were all uncertain of the design of several key systems.
Then his bad behavior escalated and he did something that got him into the ultimate corporate discipline tool — the dreaded Performance Improvement Plan — or PIP for those in the know.
The PIP served as a catalyst to document all the work he refused to do. I am saving you all the gory details of this process. Just know. It was outrageously painful. And at the end of it, instead of getting fired, he retired. Good job, buddy.
I played nice! I threw him a retirement party. We all humored him when he wanted to wax poetic about the early days of the museum. He’d lament how he was so alone here all those nights, except for the rats. I mean, top notch, woe is me, you should be so lucky I did all that, shit. Now I knew why he never tried to lead the team — he never wanted a team in the first place.
His last week arrived and his raunchy behavior got worse. He wouldn’t do anything without a fight. I heard from several people he was telling anyone who would listen that he didn’t want to leave, but I was making him. To my face he would be complimentary, and behind my back he would talk about me more than any teenage girl ever had in high school.
Throughout his last month he’d been telling my boss that he was doing all the documentation and necessary work to transition his duties. He had done almost nothing — surprise, surprise. I finally found out what he’d been doing every day —spending the majority of his time squinting at a monitor barely an inch away from his face, trying to decipher code that he himself had written fifteen years ago. It was always glitching, yet it was perfect, if you asked him. You just couldn’t update the application or the database or it would break. He lied constantly to everyone. The insanity was real.
On his last day he deliberately shamed a colleague he had been working with for 13+ years by saying,
“You’re lucky I was here for you. You would’ve been fired many times if not for me. Good luck when I’m gone.”
The employee on the end of that statement cried. And then he proceeded to have a four hour meeting “transitioning” all of his duties to another staffer. When asked for passwords or access, he would pretend to forget or would deliberately set up someone’s account wrong. I was listening in on the last hour and I had to several times demand he give access immediately. It was a ploy so very clearly designed to make us all feel small and stupid. Joke was on him though. We still had our jobs.
I put up with this bullshit for 13 months. Some of his colleagues had been putting up with it for a decade or two. All because leadership before me had kicked this proverbial can down the road instead of dealing with it.
At 4pm on his last day, I begrudgingly stepped into his office and demanded he leave immediately. His smirk told me everything. He had been getting sick enjoyment out of everyone’s frustration.
And then in a rush the whole truth hit me. He was just an awful person. The most disappointing part of this story is that outside of work, this person seemed like a good guy. He was a Unitarian and believed in science. He pledged faith in social justice work. We could talk about interesting subjects and it sparked imagination in my mind. I became enraged and also incredibly sad that I’d been duped the whole time.
I told him off. I told him he should be very ashamed of himself. And I told him that we all know his lies now. I didn’t allow him to respond. But he looked satisfied, with a shit-eating grin on his face and his arms crossed. Just 10 minutes ago there had been a lightening strike that coincided with the end of his four hour meeting. It was like the universe was saying — end it already!
The team found out about a lot of the director’s lies. How he had pitted them against each other and discouraged teamwork — actively — to keep control. They are currently still unraveling his cruel “booby traps,” places in our systems where he’s made a mess to make things harder for the team. Or cryptic messages like a folder title, Too Late, in our team’s shared files.
This happens way too fucking often. My friends have so many similar stories in their own professions and I am hoping that I can bring those to you soon! I have plenty more in my own drawer of misogyny, so either way stay tuned and stay strong.
It is atrocious that you've had to deal with so much misogyny, including this most recent episode. It's also sad that so many of your friends have similar stories. I hope telling your stories helps the world - and men specifically - improve in ten thousand ways!