Personal Stress Relief from Economic, Environmental Issues

I’m wondering how many people are now facing a new issue when it comes to their jobs. Some of us who are working are at the hands of unreasonable, tyrants who call themselves Bosses. It seems to me that because of the economic climate and the unemployment rate, more and more people I speak to are being mistreated and have no choice but to hang in there because they need a job. Our bosses have us over a barrel and I for one am dealing with a real winner!
I have been employed as an office manager / slave for the last two years. I work in a home office close to home which is why I didn’t make a move sooner. Although, twice before I told her I was quitting and she told me she would change. Stupid me, I gave in. I have done everything from painting and repairing furniture to repairing cabinets and doing other household repairs. I wrap every gift, make and cancel about five doctor’s appointments a week, I fill and drain her pool and load and unload her work vehicles as well as taking out the garbage and cleaning up her messes. Not exactly the responsibilities of an office manager. I am more like a personal assistant at the pay rate of an amusement park attendant, which in itself is basically what I am without the amusement.
Now, I’m a very patient person with an extremely high tolerance for getting stepped on, but this lady is out of hand. She is totally incapable of organizing her time or herself and every moment of her life reflects this. Every day, when I leave work I straighten out my desk. Every morning it takes me a half hour to clean my desk from the mess she made the previous night. This is what I walk in to. If she takes a folder out of the file cabinet, she drops it on the floor when she’s done. Every cordless phone goes missing, every pen she touches disappears, every important paper is buried somewhere in the mounds of paper upon her desk.

She has yet to leave the house on time or without the need to have me call her cell phone so that she might locate it. Nine out of ten appointments require a phone call from me to inform the person she’s meeting that’s she’s running usually about an hour late. As she leaves the house she’s barking orders and for the most part as soon as she’s in the car, she’s calling and frantic about all the other things that she forgot to do that I now need to do. She emanates stress and ultimately it’s projected on those anywhere near her. Every day I have vendors asking me how I can stand to work for her and clients calling saying that they don’t want her on the job because she makes them uneasy. Yet, miraculously, she has been in business for seven years.
I work for her full time, 9 – 5 Monday thru Friday. I go above and beyond and frequently surprise her with my skills and my well rounded capabilities. I work with no vacation, no sick days and no medical. In January of this year, Mike and I came close to foreclosing on our home. It took a lot of phone calls and it caused us a lot of stress, but we managed to get back on track. Through it all, I got my job done. Figuring I had been here long enough, a few weeks later I finally asked my boss if we could discuss a few vacation or sick days. Her response, “Why don’t we first discuss how productive you’ve been?” How understanding can you get? I had frequently listened to her whining about her daughter, her boyfriends and all the events of her life and tried to understand. Her thoughtless comment did me in. This women is so “understanding” that when I hurt my back and was in pain for a month she had the nerve to say to me that it was getting annoying to her that my back was bothering me because she needed me to clean up after her.
Just to be fair I should tell you that my boss is not totally without heart. On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, she threw me a bone. She told me that I could leave at 3:00 and that she’d paid me for the day. However, without missing a beat she interjected, “I’m not paying you for Monday, though.” Nice, thank you for your generosity!
To further explain my day to day ventures working for a lunatic I tell you this. Understanding that I keep the books, I write notes, sometimes with dollar amounts. On one occasion there was a sticky note on my desk with a question. “What is this?” The sticky note was one that I threw out two days prior with a check number and amount on it that I needed to research. To make this perfectly clear, my boss goes through my garbage to see what I’m doing. Needless to say, now anything I think she might be curious about, I shred. I’ve talked with the girls that work for her and across the board when you tell her anything she questions and second guesses. After all, she’s the only one that does everything right.
My bosses latest episode with me was over my clothing. As a matter of explanation, I am thin, she’s not. I wear clothes that compliment me, but do not dress like a floozy. I dress as nicely as I need to dress for a home office where I have no interaction with anyone day in and day out. On a recent rant my boss decidedly told me that she wants me to dress differently so as not to cause any undo attention from the landscapers and the workmen around the neighborhood. This panic on her part was due to her distress that someone might think I live there and come back and rape her at night. Now I ask you, how would you respond to that?
As another example of the kind of person that I am tolerating every day, I offer you this. This self serving individual has a very strained relationship with her daughter who has two adorable little girls. My boss continually complains to me that her daughter is insensitive and doesn’t care about her. The other day she told me that she and her daughter were not speaking “again.” The reason; my boss totally forgot that her granddaughter was having surgery and neglected to call or show any interest in her well-being. My boss expressed to me that she is overly stressed and had so many things on her mind and then she asked me if I thought she was justified. I told her in no uncertain terms that there she has no excuse what-so-ever and that she was totally wrong. Without a word, my boss left the room.
Just in case you have any doubts, here are a few more abridged versions of “her” episodes. She left me a voice message that she woke up with a bug bite and that if anything should happen to her she wanted me to know because people die from bug bites. Upon being invited to stop by my house for a birthday party I was throwing, she opened the door and walked into a house down my block with a handful of balloons and insisted to the owners that she was in the right house. She judged this by the similar car in the driveway. She called me at 10:00 at night and left a frantic voice mail that she left her purse in PakMail, which had closed hours ago, and she needed me to come by and open the house for her. I didn’t respond but found out later that she called the police who contacted the owners and they opened the store for her. She sent me an email with all the particulars of her blind date; name, phone, picture, email, etc. just in case. The following day I received another email telling me that we need a code word that she could send me just in case her “blind date” was going to kill her. That way he wouldn’t know that she alerted anyone. I’m pretty sure those examples have given you a clearer picture of my boss!
Well, now I’ve ranted and given examples of what I’m dealing with on a day to day basis. In a normal economic climate I would have been long gone. Mike has problems as well with his boss who recently thought it okay to deduct money from his paycheck for the company items that were stolen out of the company truck. Mike has no recourse, he surely can’t confront his boss and risk losing his job. How many of us are “stuck” under the rule of a boss who is totally taking advantage of the fact that we have nowhere to go. What’s the chance of getting another job? Is making waves worth the risk? Need we all be subjected to abuse at the hands of our boss who now has us “biting the bullet” because we are out of options? How many of us are in the same boat?