Why I Left My Old Job (The middle)

A Dysfunctional Company

The middle…

Here I had what I thought was about the most perfect job there is. I also had a great two year marriage (eight year relationship) with a man who fit into my little family perfectly. To add magic to the entire thing, I found myself happily pregnant. Things were wonderful. I continued in my position with A1 as we relocated our little data center to a new and fancier building down the block from where we used to be. The future looked great and I was ready to celebrate my tenth anniversary with them.

I gave birth to my son… a healthy happy baby who was everything we’d hoped for and more. A1 was great about granting me my maternity leave and they were terrific about dealing with my closed office door during the hours of the day I would pump milk and work. At that time they were an incredibly flexible company. This was before it was fashionable (and the law) to be sensitive to the issues of single parents, new parents, and people with personal problems and lives.

The one thing that was a bit of a black spot was that my boss decided to move to a different office and job so his manager’s position was given to a young strident lesbian former alcholic. I didn’t have a problem with any of that, actually. She was pretty good to me in that she let me take a lot of time off with my new son and she used to take me out for cappucino a lot because our discussions at work would always suffer interuptions. She was also dealing with a lot of issues from her very troubled past, as was I, so we had a great deal in common.

The problem was that she was a very weak and inconsistent manager. She made hasty decisions that sometimes had to be reversed in embarassing ways. She alienated many of the people who worked for her with excessive use of authority. She called in sick incessantly and eventually ended up leaving the company suffering from a nervous breakdown. Like most of the managers before her, she had made it two years, then dropped.

Now it was my turn. My little boy was almost two years old. I was not totally thrilled with becoming the manager as my opinion of the VP in charge of the facility had dropped consistently over the prior few years. But I really saw this management position as something I could actually do pretty much for the rest of my life. Boy, was I wrong!

I, too, made it about two years. I didn’t have a nervous breakdown… at least not visibly, but I was a miserable manager. After a dozen years working with everyone I had developed too many close friendships with the people around me. Two of my key people were the woman who was my son’s godmother and her husband. Both needed some firm guidance in various areas but I couldn’t do the job. I was too concerned about my personal relationship with them.

Another one of my key persons was the man who had helped me plan my wedding and had actually given me my honeymoon as the wedding present. He, too, needed a great deal of work since we were computerizing everything and he was technophobic. My fifth key person was an old acquaintance who became emotionally paralyzed as he watched all of his friends die of AIDS. There was no way I could pull these people together and force them to do the things I needed them to do.

There were more problems than this and I’m certainly not saying it was all the fault of these people that I “failed.” But I definately feel I failed and the VP in charge of the place agreed. Kindly, they let me retain the pay for the position, but I was shifted into sort of a highly technical Project Director spot. Oddly I was given a great employee review as manager… go figure.