Crisis 1: Hating My Boss after 1st Day (From Six Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

KRCL, DAY ONE:

My new boss Linda (name changed), the station's development director, took me to lunch on my first day and told me, confidentially, just between the two of us, that my predecessor had been really terrible to her and she'd been ready to fire her...She assured me that she was perfectly willing to fire someone if she had to. I think she felt she had to tell me that because my friend was the chair of the board of directors and I might feel untouchable and have an attitude...

But I really was untouchable and I knew it and had gotten the job in the first place because my friend was the chair of the board of directors and I knew this and I knew she knew this and I didn't take her at all seriously, but since I was also friends with my predecessor I felt grossly insulted by her remarks and disliked her intensely from that moment on and had a terrible attitude about any work she gave me, which after a while was not very much.

And the actual job consisted of mostly grappling with a miserably unpleasant DOS program called Memsys (that I eventually grew to love and admire after years of dating) and giving donors who walked into the station their t-shirts and weird thank-you gifts and of answering the phone, mostly incredibly easy tasks which I routinely failed to perform well if at all, and I spent most of my time avoiding Linda, and ignoring the phone, and talking to the volunteer DJs while they performed their 3 hour on-air shifts.

Crisis Resolved:

After only a few weeks at the station I realized that almost everyone associated with the station hated my boss Linda even more than I did, she was universally loathed as a miserably unpleasant, controlling, and half-witted toad, and had even had people hurl cups of coffee into her office and scream at her in public meetings. She'd kept her job by smoking with Bart (name changed), the General Manager at the time, and by viciously fighting with Betty (name changed) at staff meetings so Bart wouldn't have to. Toward the end of her tenure, Linda had become so powerless that I remember telling her I had done nothing to prepare an ill-considered mailing that she'd asked me to prepare, and I remember telling her this with I am now ashamed to say an inordinate amount of glee. Linda left when Betty was made GM. Weeks after she'd left, Betty went to me and as a final turn of the screw asked me to call Linda up and tell her she owed the station money for some questionable purchases she'd made on account the previous month.