Never Meant to Be Read: An Angry Letter to a Misogynistic Pig

The following is a letter that's never meant to be sent. It's meant to help me cope with my past.

***************

To Whom This May Concern:

You were hands down the worst boss I've ever had. You moved from Florida to take on a new job during the pandemic. You left your wife in Florida. You didn't want to disrupt her world (so you said). You were tempted by the allure of a six-figure job, I'm sure. So she stayed behind in Florida. . . and you moved to some random city you had never visited.

I thought you were an asshole for moving to the midwest and leaving your wife and kids behind. To me, this highlighted that you were emotionally immature, and you'd do whatever you wanted and whatever floated into your mind. You'd do what you wanted without rhyme or reason. You would expect others to do whatever it takes to get a job done; you would force people to make big sacrifices.

I was right.

So let me spill the tea on the multiple grievances that still make me angry one year later. I will cover things that happened to me and my coworkers.

Let's begin.

*****

I was concerned for a worker who was sick one day and couldn't come into work. She was pregnant. This was her second pregnancy. Her first pregnancy was a nightmare, so I was concerned she might go into labor early.

You rolled your eyes. You mocked my empathy. You said it was cloying that I cared. You went on and on about how you knew all about pregnancy because your wife had six kids. You assumed I had never had children and that I knew nothing about pregnancy. You assumed I was young and didn't know shit. You looked at my face and thought, oh, she's just a young hire.

You went on and on about your wife's pregnancies. And your six sons.

By the way, that coworker who was pregnant, she did go into labor early. I guess she defied your expectations?

*****

You were more likely to talk about my shoes than anything of merit that had to do with work. You'd go on about my red shoes and that I could use them to vanish off to Emerald City. (I don't like weird comments about me that make it sound like I'm a fantasy character and my worth as an employee is hollow because I'm cute or pretty.)

You would explain things to me that I already knew. You infantilized me. You acted like I had just graduated college and was a rookie. Even though I earned my Master's more than ten years ago. And it shouldn't matter whether someone just graduated college or not: give them their due respect. Stop with the ageist nonsense against people who are 40 and under. Don't throw them under a bus because they didn't have the same experiences as you. You're not smarter just because you're a baby boomer.

*****

You told me I was a bad hire. And that hiring was going to be different now to prevent people as young as me from being put on the schedule.

You forced me to come into work on a weekend during a blizzard. Then you had the audacity to tell me all the work I did that day wasn't up to par with your expectations. . . these were expectations you had never communicated to me. THIS WAS RIGHT AFTER 15 PEOPLE WERE LAID OFF THE DAY BEFORE! Those people worked on the weekends, so of course quality was going to take a big hit when you cut us down to a skeleton crew.

You would buddy up with the men in the office. You'd talk about sports with them. You loved to talk about the New York Giants.

You'd go on about your good old days in New York and Florida. No one could get a word in edgewise because you always wanted to talk about Florida and your epiphanies about the midwest. We already knew those things about the midwest because we all lived in the midwest, many of us growing up there. . . and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out New York or Florida.

You'd come into the office yelling, banging doors, and blowing off steam. Some of the female employees would huddle in corners. There were tears. Secret sessions. People encouraging each other to keep working. Sharing methods to "manage the manager."

Many left and in droves. I was planning to leave as well, but you decided to fire me instead of letting me put in my two weeks notice. You ripped up my resignation paper.

You told an Asian lady she wasn't the kind of minority they wanted for a particular job. That "they", the company, wanted someone who was black.

A bird got loose in the office and you turned off all the lights, hoping that darkness would communicate to the bird that it should leave. What kind of kooky plan was that? You'd yell at people who'd turn on the lights!

You thought you could do the IT person's job. You decided you were going to send computers home when our office went remote. The IT guy had to call people while they were at home to undo the damages and to instruct them on how to set things up properly. You wanted to prove your knowledge of computers, but you knew about as much as a shrimp in a Hawaiian shirt pretending to be a supreme court justice.

You had yelling fits in other people's offices. You would talk very loudly about employees you didn't like. You produced a toxic workplace, congratulations!

Many of your top performers left because they wanted better working conditions, and they didn't want to get stuck talking to an obstructionist blowhard who thought he knew what was better in every situation.

You mocked our work and constantly said it wasn't as good as the other places you previously managed. The other places, that you left behind, were your golden children. We were your perpetual scapegoats: you blamed others so you didn't have to do the hard work of looking at yourself in the mirror.

You didn't know how to apologize. You were the king of the blame game.

You would complain about pollen and dry leaves on your windshield as if it was too hard to wipe those things away. Did you want us as lowly servants to wash your car?

You sent out an email about how no one got hurt covering a protest. You congratulated everyone on staying safe even though there were workers who got tear gas in their eyes and got hit with rubber bullets. How is that safe? Clearly, you didn't give your staff enough protections to prevent them from getting hurt AND some of those people. . . sought legal action against you.

*****

You told a worker who was in the middle of a call with someone who was suicidal to just hang up and let the professionals handle it. This was on your first day of work. This was to a worker who had been there long enough to have lost a colleague to suicide; no one had forgotten him. In fact, our workplace had a strong message to the community about mental health awareness and preventing suicide because someone had died there. So why shouldn't someone call us to talk?

You told that employee who was on the phone to forget the past. Get over the person who was enthusiastic and then one day didn't come into work because he hung himself. Your handling of mental health issues was so sloppy that people would have preferred working for King Herod.

I can think of 20 women off the top of my head who left that office because of you. They complained that you were impossible and noticeably misogynistic.

But you didn't just have it out for the women. . .

You told one of the people on my team that no one liked him, that he was the worst worker, and no one respected his opinions even though he was the top performer.

You were a bulldog in the office. You could see a trail of annoyance everywhere you went. Some of us thought you were hired by corporate to get rid of as many employees as possible so that corporate could hire new people at a lower rate.

We thought you were hired to intentionally make the working environment a living hell. (You succeeded at doing this.)

*****

During that blizzard I mentioned earlier, you made fun of several of us for living far away. We asked for accommodations. You said, "Corporate doesn't pick where people live. They don't give you housing. You picked where you live, so that's just too bad if you live twenty, thirty, or forty minutes away. You're coming in regardless of the weather."

Another employee involved in that conversation was furious with you. She said, "Of course, typical white man stuff. Does he not know how extremely privileged that comment about housing was?"

He didn't.

He wanted to be revered. He wanted to be worshiped as a god or king. He was a narcissist who always wanted to talk but could never listen. He glorified his plans. Anytime someone had an idea that he didn't come up with himself, he would say, "That doesn't really fit with the budget. And I'm the keeper of the budget."

*****

The adjective you kept using for me was "young." You'd go on about my gender and my youth. You'd tell me to just sit there and look pretty and let others do the real work because I'm not smart enough or capable enough to do a job I've done for almost a decade. A job where I received awards. You told me to not worry my pretty little head. . .

You would listen to men if it was about something that seemed fun to you. You hated men who seemed like they might have more power than you. You hated all women and saw them as beneath you. You also thought you knew more about pregnancy than women.

If someone tried to address something important you'd tell them to stop worrying and, "What would be the big deal if that person didn't come into work?"

You threw a fit when someone quit because she didn't want to work in a pandemic. She was a part-timer, and she looked at what could happen if she landed in the hospital and found that the hospital stay would be more expensive than all the money she could earn in a year. You told her you never heard of anything so stupid in all your years of managing.

You blatantly called another woman a bad mom. You thought you were making a funny joke and that people would applaud you. It made things awkward and uncomfortable. Your barrage of harassments never stopped.

You decided to do 2018 assessment reviews in the middle of 2020 because somehow 2018 and the way people worked back then (when you weren't even the manager) was in your mind relevant to how people worked during a pandemic.

It was like getting in trouble for a snowy winter day in the middle of a blistering summer day. It made no sense!

You were full of yourself. You thought you were the king of all answers. You thought you were the perfect boss, husband, and father. You were in way over your head, and you'd berate other people in hopes that people wouldn't see that you were actually the incompetent one. You loved to gaslight. You loved to make others feel like they were wrong and their side of the story didn't matter.

*****

I think about you randomly when I wake up. Sometimes I daydream about jumping on your desk and screaming obscenities. I think about how I could hit you in the head with a baseball bat.

You made me feel so small. You made it sound like I was a total failure. You told me I wouldn't amount to anything. That I would never figure out my job, but I was already performing well in it, and you even asked me to train new people! Who in their right mind would ask someone to train others if they wanted to fire that same person?

*****

I hope karma comes for you. That you'll realize all the insulting things you told people. That the way you measured others will come back to you sevenfold.

I know there were a lot more grievances going on than the ones I mentioned. People were smart enough to not talk about you while in the office. I hope you get served. You were a trainwreck who ruined people's careers.

I hope your downfall is a fantastic ride to watch.

By the way, you replaced an amazing boss. You were just the filth that came up in a corporate merger gone wrong.

Sincerely,

That Worker You Thought Was a Young, Incompetent Failure Who'd Never Amount to Anything

P.S. I thought it was really strange that you made homemade masks for us to wear in the office and that you carried around a bag of homemade masks.