Magnify

­ Squinting through my windshield in a rare January downpour that had people exclaiming, “Thank goodness this isn’t snow,” I drove to my alma mater for what turned out to be a perfunctory interview with the woman who would be my boss. Then I spoke with her boss. Neither of them asked many questions. Neither was interested in my references. I figured they were desperate to get a replacement hired quickly, and didn’t want to waste time on a full-blown interview. It was 1996, and the director of the program that had awarded my master’s degree had recommended me to fill in temporarily for an employee at the college who’d gone on maternity leave.

The Monday I showed up for work, the HR representative raised her eyebrows and peered at me over the papers on her desk.

“You know your boss quit last Friday?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And her boss quit, too.”

So, there had been some managerial transitions. I didn’t care; mine was only a three-month commitment.

Just before the end of my placeholder period, the woman I was subbing for called to say she had decided to stay home with her baby. I agreed to remain a little longer, as a part-time employee.

Then I became a full-time, permanent employee. Managing the college’s ads and publications was interesting work. My colleagues were smart, sensitive and funny. I respected the college’s mission—who doesn’t like seeing students blossom? The campus, with its grand marble staircase that somehow suggested serious purpose, suited me; I even liked the acrid aroma of overcooked popcorn rising from a basement corridor. From the tiny alcove where I worked, I could see herons glide serenely above the urban fray below. It was the workplace for which I’d been searching for decades.

One promotion followed another, as summer follows spring, until I became a director. I noticed that the college seemed beset by executive turnover, but I couldn’t know that in the 11 years I would ultimately work there, I would have 11 bosses. One would last a mere seven months.

My first few bosses were benign. Then I got the one with the bad memory who, in my performance review, fussed with her scarf and inadvertently read me someone else’s (poor) evaluation.

She was followed by The Great Boss, who brought out the best in our team. I would come home at night chirping, “I love my job and I love my boss!” Sadly, she left after three years.

Then I got the interim manager who just stared at me when I spoke to him.

Smoothly suited as if for a magazine cover shoot, my next boss talked about his expensive possessions for the first half of meetings and inveighed against the college’s culture during the second half. He fired someone he didn’t like and tried to eliminate my job. But since he didn’t hold onto his own job for even a year, he can’t be blamed if his plans for me didn’t have time to ripen.

After my tenth boss, I was tired of the transitions, of each new boss overturn- ing the directives of the previous one, of having to explain who I was, what I did—and where the bathrooms were. I entertained offers from headhunters. Yet I couldn’t imagine not working at the college.

Wearing a meticulously arranged shawl, my next boss swept into our suite before she officially began her job and fired quick questions at us.

She was a worker; I’ll give her that. But workaholic bosses spawn overworked employees.

At colleges, most employees are overworked, perhaps because we have to attend all those meetings convened to make sure nothing gets resolved until there are at least three more meetings on the same subject. After 10 years at the college, I was used to that. But now, the number of department meetings I had to attend escalated and lengthened from one hour to two. My apartment began to look like a satellite office of the college, filled with budget printouts and giant PowerPoint reports. (Our department made unsolicited presentations to other departments; we even made presentations to ourselves.) My dining room table was covered with publication proofs. My neglected, but fortunately self-sufficient husband had to live like a bachelor. The work I was responsible for increased, and the deadlines got shorter. Everything was a priority. My stomach lurched each time I saw an email that began, “I want all the directors to... by...” With little control over incoming work, it was impossible to schedule my staff’s time. I worked faster and faster, just to keep reasonably behind; catching up was out of the question. My friend Ava called me a pack mule.

My boss was all verbs; I tried to banish extraneous parts of speech whenever I spoke to her. After several miscommunications between us, I took to checking in with her daily. She later told me that the supervision I seemed to want made her feel I wasn’t performing up to my level.

I began distrusting my ideas, suppressing my suggestions. I became tentative, like those women who call in to public radio with a question mark in their voices. “Hi, this is Marcy? From Omaha?” I wasn’t acting like an employee on my level.

I lost sleep. My chronic digestive problems worsened. It seemed unfair: After finally finding my right work writing about my alma mater for new generations of students, it had been sullied—by a Jenny-come-lately, an interloper.

Strangely, my boss and I actually worked well together on joint projects. We admired each other’s wardrobes and had innocent laughs together. But somehow I couldn’t help disappointing her. She would praise me one day and regard me silently the next.

After 10 months of this regime, as I sat in a publication meeting, I suddenly realized I didn’t care about this brochure’s format (stapled, folded or perfect bound?). In fact, I didn’t care about my job anymore.

Shortly after this epiphany, my boss acknowledged my months of Herculean efforts with the first mediocre performance review I’d ever received. In each section of the evaluation, her positive comments on my work were followed by searing criticism.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a couple of weeks after that evaluation, my job and I came to a parting of the ways. Exactly who dumped whom doesn’t really matter—at least not to me. What does matter is that when hard times hit the nation a month after I left my job, my college was not exempt. As at many other institutions, hiring and raises have been frozen, and other cost saving measures are in effect. Had I remained there, my situation would not have improved. Instead, in addition to the old stresses, I would have had new budget pressures to contend with. So, instead of having been a victim of bad fortune in that job, I have actually dodged a bullet. On subsequent visits to the college, I have marveled at not feeling anything about my old job—no regret, no remorse, nothing. A former colleague explained, “It’s no longer the place you loved. You grieved for that a long time ago.”

She was right.

Lynette Benton lives in the Boston area. She writes about higher education, often but not always, under the cover of pseudonyms. Lynette Benton is her real name.