Unchain my Heart
This new boss and my problems are too numerous for me to name, but suffice to say that I am no office manager by the hardest stretch of anyone’s imagination, no more than this guy is a blade of a boss. It’s my own fault though, and I know it. Can’t blame a soul for what’s happened here. But I have to ask myself, Sophie Mae, how many secretarial jobs will it take for you to realize this kind of work ain’t right once and for all?
Like every other secretarial job I’ve ever taken, when I was hired for this one, the boss told me he was looking for an office manager who could really act independently. A self-starter type, he stated. Someone who was willing to take charge and organize things so that he didn’t have to bother with any of the small details anymore. He wanted time to do real business, he said. To contemplate the big picture.
It was a bald-face lie.
From the very first day, I have never been allowed to even order a No. 2 pencil without his written permission. And every little thing I do I have to check with him first, because he has an affinity for small details done his way.
It’s not all his fault though. I am beginning to believe ours is a problem which lies deep within the core of the boss-secretary relationship, a problem which will never go away no matter who I work for or where. It is a real tricky issue. But it’s not hard to get at the sum and substance of the problem. In the relationship, one person gets to be the boss, i.e., the one in charge, the big cahuna. And the other has to be the secretary – a person whose entire reason for being is to make the boss happy. Period.
Unfortunately, I have always been on the ass end of this arrangement, know what I mean?
But this one last time, when I applied here, I was willing to accept these terms on face value for simple economic purposes. I needed a job. But this truly dense side of me just went ahead and bought into what he told me during the interview even though I knew better. I said to myself before going in, Sophie Mae, allow yourself to take this one last secretarial job (temporarily, of course) and immediately start looking for what you want to be doing. But after the interview, I thought to myself, hey office manager, well maybe this will turn out to be different, a job I can sink my teeth into. You never know.
Then it got plain ridiculous. See I accepted the fact that I was being hired not to think about the big things. That my job was to facilitate someone else to contemplate the big stuff. I accepted this as part and parcel of the position when I took it. But that wasn’t what it was, see. Once I got on the other side of the job interview, the reality of what I was was even worse than I had imagined, because here I am, not even allowed to contemplate the littlest details such as what kind of cream to get for the coffee. My boss spends all his big picture time thinking about these things for me.
I tell you, after a string of jobs like the ones I have had, anyone in the same situation would have to ask themselves, if they weren’t just plain dumb as a post, with no thought in their head at all, “Why the hell do I do this kind of work for?”