Unfinished Business
The worst job ever? A terrible boss? We’ve all had one or the other. Lucky me, I’ve had both and at the same time. It sure didn’t feel lucky at the time. It was darn awful. The luck came later.
A while ago, I had a temporary job at a call center. The work was okay, just making calls and reading a script. The problem was that whenever I had a question I was told to look in the training manual. So I did that and I did whatever the training manual told me to do or say.
Here’s where I have to tell you something you might not know about call centers. The management folks listen in on calls. This makes sense. They have to check up on the employees to make sure everyone is doing the right thing. Apparently, I wasn’t doing the right things. I found that out on a couple occasions when my supervisor would stop by for a chat. She’d tell me I was “off script” or “following the wrong process.” Then she’d ask me why I was doing whatever it was that I was doing. And, for some crazy reason, she didn’t like it when I referenced the page number of the training manual.
Even after all these years I can see the curl of her lip and the blank look in her eyes when she spoke with me. It was as though she couldn’t believe someone so inferior had been parked in her cubicle row. “It doesn’t matter that the manual says that,” she’d say. “Just do what I said.” I would’ve been totally fine with that approach if it hadn’t been for her dreadful attitude. Having her lurking nearby, listening in on calls, waiting to zero in and expose my every inept response made most every minute of every day terrible.
When does the luck come in, you want to know?
It came years later, while working on a story. I needed an inspiration for a bad boss. Viola! There she was. My dislike for her was so strong, my memories were--and still are--crisp and vivid. Having her there in my memory made creating the nasty boss I needed for my new novel, Unfinished Business, almost instantaneous.
Hayley, the main character, has a job that isn’t so bad. She’s a temporary administrative assistant at an apartment complex. She takes care of resident issues, answers the phone and email, and does whatever else needs doing. That’s not so bad, right? It’s her boss, Caroline, who’s horrible. Caroline is condescending, nosey, and manipulative. She’s always lurking about, waiting to find Hayley doing something wrong or not quite right. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the book:
Caroline is marching toward my desk. “Are there any messages for me?” she wants to know.
Why can’t she stay in her office—which has a door—and leave me alone in my ‘office’, which is actually a desk sitting in the middle of the clubhouse that doubles as the rental office?
“Here you are.” I hand her a mini-stack of messages carefully printed on pink sheets of paper.
“Anything for Bob or Tony?”
“Four for Mr. Hastings, one for Tony.”
Her face puckers. “Four?”
“Three from Mrs. Klonski. She says Snickers was barking for two hours last night. She’s convinced someone is stalking her dog. She’s worried someone is trying to steal her precious pooch.”
“We’d never get that lucky,” Caroline snarls. “I wish that stupid dog would die already.”
I’m not shocked by her nasty attitude. I’ve been listening to her say the same sort of thing for the last six weeks.
The big scandal around North Pointe Farms—one of them anyway—is that Mrs. Klonski is allowed to have Snickers because she is the only tenant left from the dark days—the time before the careful landscaping, the time before Bob Hastings’ charming security booth. The time when North Pointe Farms was Motown Manor.
There is nothing to say about Caroline’s death wish for poor, little Snickers. So I say nothing. Instead, I watch the way her lip curls as she reads communications meant for other people.
After she reads Mr. Hastings’ four messages and Tony’s one message, she hands them back to me and scans my desk as if she has some sort of extraordinary vision that can detect the evidence of wasted time. Finding nothing to let on that I’ve spent most of the day studying reviews of self-improvement books—who knew so much information was so easy to get? And that self-help books had such great covers?—she tucks her messages into her pocket and creeps back to her private office.
Kind of has you rubbing your hands together, just waiting for Caroline to get what’s coming to her, doesn’t it? You aren’t alone. Hayley’s waiting for it too. And until me, Hayley is going to get the satisfaction of seeing Caroline get exactly what she deserves.