Late on the Fourth of July

My boss is routinely rude to me, and his ordinary communications are flecked with a thinly-veiled hostility. His emails are terse and contentious. His monthly evaluations and scorecards carry the hint of a threat, of impending "corrective action." Odd thing is, my numbers this month are among the best on the team. My scored calls are strong, and I received a customer compliment last month. I process nearly eleven calls an hour, with courtesy and professionalism. I was late twenty minutes on the fourth of July, but that was the first time in three months, and it was the slowest day of the year.

Any day now I expect he'll fire me, and if he does it will be a relief. He's hostile. He's abrupt. And he has been almost from the beginning. My only hope is to perform strongly and escape his attention by choosing another shift at the next shift bid.

He's overweight and a bit of a buffoon. Recently he sent us all an email stating time cards had to be completed by Thursday, that six of us had waited until Friday and this was (sic) "unexceptable". I emailed him back, asking him for a clarification of the policy, since in a meeting just a few weeks ago he had told us specifically not to forecast our time, and this email told us to do exactly that. I apologized for my unacceptable behavior, but without italics. I've had the feeling that from the first week of working for him that something about me pissed him off, that all of our petty little run-ins and calls to his desk were vaguely personal. He fired one of my coworkers a couple of months ago, without warning. I think he enjoys that part of his job.

Our company has a weird culture. There's a lot of group-think and sloganeering. We don't really solve the customer's problems; we just apologize for them. Our engineering and technology is faulty and repeatedly fails, and in customer service, we absorb abuse and send patches that don't really work. Folks are angry to be calling back three and four times. I don't blame them. Our products are expensive. I'd fix it if I could. I'd be more thorough in troubleshooting but I have to keep my handle time down. Most of my coworkers keep their numbers looking good by evading the scheduling of trouble calls, sending resets that don't really work. We're required to sell extra products, so the good soldiers create bundled packages, offering customers a discount on their existing products and adding a third product they don't really want or need or use and usually plan to cancel later. It's a dance of cynicism and inevitable distrust. I make peace with it by politely offering new services and scheduling transfers and additions when I can. So far I've evaded the noose.

But it's coming. I have no doubt if I made some kind of mistake or was unlucky enough to encounter an angry, vindictive customer (and we have a few of those) my boss would throw me under the bus. Particularly if it made him look good, made him look decisive or organized. I have coworkers who have half the sales percentage I do, 20% lower calls per hour, glaringly low work order accuracy and deplorable attendance, but somehow I am G______'s chief target. It's a repetitive misery I choose to ignore, because I can't do anything about it. It's a fact: not everybody is going to like you. If that person is your boss, fasten your seat belts, because it's going to be a bumpy ride.

You might think, why don't you just go in and talk to him, try to clear the air? You can't really clear the air on a vendetta. This conflict is like the Arabs and the Jews, it has nothing to do with reason, there's no real room for negotiation, and most of enmity is based on long-buried history so deep and hostile it's become almost primal and genetic. I remind him of someone. He doesn't like the way I speak or answer his questions. He's probably not even aware his dislike of me is so irrational and one-sided.

As much as possible I like to get along with everyone. I like harmony and peace and wholeness. I work to earn a living and pay the bills. I wish I was a good enough writer to make a living writing. I wish I could win the lottery or get saved by an act of fate or good timing. In the meantime I'll muddle along and do my best, and try never to be late again. If I lose this job I'll look for another one. I just hope I don't wind up saying, do you want fries with that?

That would be really hard for me, because all day long my heart would be screaming silently, don't eat the fries, they're bad for you. Have a salad and a nice grilled chicken breast instead.