My first "official" job was as a telemarketer, but please read on before you hate me. My first day of work there, I spent most of the time sitting in the middle of a smokey room, reading aloud the speech we were supposed to give callers. I guess that was how they trained new people, but it was pretty embarrassing for a shy person like myself, particularly when the manager would repeatedly say to me, "Speak up! I can't hear you!" I was off of work the next day and I spent most of the time dreading going back. I decided that I couldn't do that job, so the next morning, I called and quit. I never even went to pick up my check.

At one of the restaurants where I worked, we had a Request Book where we were to write down days that we needed to be off. I needed to be off for an entire week for college finals, and I mentioned it to the dining room supervisor, since most requests were only for one day. She dismissed me, telling me to "write it in the book." Since she obviously wasn't concerned about it, I shrugged and wrote it in the book. When I returned to work after that week, I was called in to speak to the managers. One of them was saying how she was writing me up, since I took off from work without clearing it with them. I was shocked: I said, "I told Sue and she said that I should just put it in the book!" Sue said, "I never told you that!" I was even more shocked and now angry too that she was standing there lying. The other manager was saying how I would need to sign the write-up and I said, "No. I'm walking out." She said, "So you're terminated?" I wish I had said, "No, I quit."

I worked at a paint store, where my title was "interior decorator" but my duties were basically those of a salesperson. There were just two other people who worked there and at one of our meetings, the store manager had said that we would all split the task of cleaning the store. One day I took it upon myself to mop, since it was a pretty slow day. The manager saw and remarked, "Oh, you're mopping. Good, because the floor looks like s---." I was taken aback that this guy who acted so professional would say something so crude. I was particularly incensed that he said that after I started the task without being asked, and I didn't think the floors looked any worse than usual. Plus I hadn't been at work for a while, so if the floor looked so bad, it was the fault of whoever was working.

A few months after I started to work for the company the bosses wanted me to order some presentation folders that we could use to put marketing material in and distribute to potential clients. I called various companies, trying to find the best deal. Finally, we chose the cheapest one, but the examples that we received looked dreadful. MA was very angry about it and said that she wanted Daryl, the business manager, to speak to the folder company to cancel our order and get our money back. MA, KA, and Daryl were in my area (the front office), and KA was saying that I could talk to the company. MA said angrily, "Anne doesn't know - " and trailed off. I don't know what? How to talk to the company that I ordered the folders from? I was insulted that MA would say such a thing with me right there in the room. However, that was merely one indication that the people I work for have zero confidence in my ability to do anything.

Rocky, a retired friend of the bosses, arrived at the office one day. As he waited, I offered him some coffee. He declined and soon one of the bosses appeared to greet him. After their meeting, KA told me that I should be a little more hospitable to the guests: Rocky had told them that I did NOT offer him any coffee.

As time went on, MA began to dislike Daryl. Whenever she would talk to him, she would rudely snap at him. For example, one day he was telling me about the tasks he had in the works so I could know what to say to people that called for him. MA entered his office, wanting to know what was going on. He politely explained, but she snatched the papers that he was about to give me, saying that *she* would look into those things. Another example of her flaming rudeness to Daryl was after he had assisted a guy in the office next door. As I recall MA had demanded to know what he was doing in that other office, and he explained simply that he had helped the guy recover a file. MA scoffed, "That's nothing! My sister is teaching her five-year-old how to recover files!" Daryl wasn't implying that he had averted a major crises or anything; I don't know why MA felt she had to put him down.

Often, KA will ask after as he has looked through the day's mail, "Did we get any checks?" I feel like responding, "Oh, yeah, we did, and I took them out of the mail and hid them just so you would have to ask about them." If they had received any checks, they would be in with the stack of mail.

MA was being a total b ... ear about - believe it or not - the addresses on a FedEx label! There was some miscommunication about what address was the sender and what was the destination; the solution was as simple as adding an address to the label, but as we tried to sort it out she became positively irate! Her attitude made me so mad that I couldn't see straight. She's such a know-it-all; her attitude is like, "How dare this ignorant secretary try to speak up to me? She needs to learn her place!!"

One day, MA came out of the workroom, waving a piece of paper in her hand: she demanded, "Why do I keep getting these when I try to fax? Is the paper loaded wrong?" She was getting an error message when trying to send a fax. I replied that since the error message (in her hand) said that there was No Answer, it means that the fax machine she is trying to *send* to is - surprise! - Not Answering. She was, like, "NO, that cannot be it." WHY does she even ask me when she is just going to argue with my response?!

Another time, MA approached my desk oozing with quiet fury, as only she can. She asks, "Did the GSA try to contact us from July 1st through the 18th?" Why yes they did, and since they are pretty important I decided to throw ALL of those messages away! (Sarcasm there.) I replied that they didn't. She said that they insisted that they've been trying to contact us and because we didn't respond, we lost a business opportunity. I said firmly, "Well, they didn't talk to me, or I would have told you." As if trying to console me, she said, "Oh, I know." *Does* she know? She proceeds to say again that they insist that they contacted us several times. Now, both they and I cannot be telling the truth, and I know I am. She appears a few minutes later having solved the mystery: they had been contacting another company with a name similar to ours. A ha!

During the Christmas season, the boss had asked me to look for something like a shirt or a briefcase that we could imprint with our company logo and distribute to the employees as gifts. I suggested that we simply give gift certificates, like we did for Thanksgiving. MA didn't like that idea. She snapped, "With certificates, people just choose what they want!" I still don't understand why that was a bad thing. Apparently she was determined that our employees have a cheap trinket that could advertise our company.

Our office has a small counter area that has cabinets and a brass bar-type sink. Apparently, a visitor had remarked to MA that the sink looked filthy. (The sink was a little tarnished, but it was clean.) When the cleaning lady came in for her weekly visit, MA approached her and said, in the tactless, accusatory way that she has perfected, "You're not cleaning that sink." She could have phrased it much better, such as, "Could you check on the sink? It's looking a bit tarnished." But no, she chose the most insulting way possible.

Later, the cleaning lady didn't show up for a couple of weeks. She had mentioned earlier that a relative was sick, but she didn't say that she wouldn't be in. Finally, I was able to reach her and she insisted that she had left us a voicemail message. KA spoke with her on the phone and said that she had agreed to come in. A few minutes later, we received a fax from her. In it she said how KA had asked her, "What phone number did you dial?" I think that was the insult that broke the camel's back. I know KA was just trying to figure out what happened and why we didn't get the message, but that question is purely ridiculous. It implies that the cleaning lady didn't have the sense to know if she was leaving a message with the wrong company. Not surprisingly, in her fax she wrote that she was quitting.

One morning, I found an email from the boss asking me to check some numbers in a report that the HR guy had put together. I thought, "Gee, talk about pointless extra work." I mean, just how much double-checking do we need? I thought of just saying, "It looks okay." Then I thought, "What if HR Guy or KA deliberately put a mistake in just to see if I'd catch it?" So I skimmed over it, and there was a number that didn't match the ones I had. I wrote to tell KA that it didn't match my number and KA wrote back that it was a change he had made, but "Since you caught this, you passed the test with A grade." (Yes, that's exactly how he wrote it, too.) When I read that, I was so mad I couldn't see straight! I mean, sure I'm not perfect, but I really don't think ANYTHING I've done warrants them playing stupid little games and testing me like that.