Bland It All to Heck
My boss praised me yesterday. It was brief. I think maybe it went, "You did a wonderful job with that research." And it was actually mostly just the preface to a request for me to do another similar task for her. But praise doesn't come from her too often in any context, so I have to admit I did take note.
It's an odd relationship. By my lights, she's a strange person, and it might also be surmised that by her lights, I am a strange person. That ought to be true, at any rate. There are some signs, however, that rather than seeing me as a weirdo (which she should), she sees me as not only her protegee, but as an immature, imperfect and unformed version of herself. She will help me along, teach me the ropes, and the glorious culmination will be in a decade or so, when I find that I have finally achieved a state of being just like her.
Most of me does know that this will not happen. But there are times she seems so certain, I feel the chill of it all the same.
JoAnn (let's call her JoAnn, shall we?) is our head of corporate compliance (a VP-level position within our agency), and she seems to take pride in being as bland and corporate as she can be. She's quite smart, smarter than most nurses you'll meet. She got her nursing degree, as I recall, at a secondary campus of a state school in some Appalachian state. She has an MBA, too, with a concentration in computer science. She married for the first time late in life, and I think her husband is a tradesman of some kind. She has no children.
For a person of her intelligence and position, JoAnn seems strangely impressed by people even one or two rungs above her in the hierarchy. Our home care agency is a small subset of a giant and prestigious regional health system, so there are unfortunately many rungs above JoAnn. Because of her role, she ends up going to endless meetings with these people, so I would think that by now she would have figured out, I don't know, that their shit stinks too. But it often seems not to have ever occurred to her.
Writing it out like this, it seems clearer than it does at the office. It makes me think of the first exchange between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in the movie, where he psychoanalyzes her based on her good bag, cheap shoes, and suppressed accent. JoAnn is smart enough to have gone to fancy schools, but she didn't, presumably because of her background, though I know no details. She seems to be simultaneously disdainful of and intimidated by academics. And she puts appropriateness of behavior above most other concerns.
"I've noticed that you're very chatty on the phone with the preceptors and with patients, and that's great..." (have you noticed that "...and that's great" has a similar valence to "not that there's anything wrong with that"? Is that a recent thing? I've only recently caught on to it.) "...but you have to remember that you're sitting in an executive area now, and so you really have to keep your phone conversations professional."
Eeugh. It absolutely gives me the heebie-jeebies.
She counsels me with a kind of benevolent condescension on how I have to use my hands less when I speak. ("You're very enthusiastic... and that's great...") How I have to be careful not to speak too quickly, and at all times resist the urge to be self-deprecating. How I have to use professional language in my e-mails. Then there was the whole dumb fiasco about the pregnant job candidate (see, silly me, I blithely assumed that because it was illegal and unethical to not hire somebody because she was pregnant, that there was no question of our doing it... It all came out right in the end, fortunately).
What's hard is that I can't easily get her advice out of my head. I can't just naturally be who I am without either somehow in my mind either defying her or caving in to her. I don't know what she's right about and what she's wrong about. I don't know what's style, what's truly unacceptable, and what's just her hideous, bland, ass-covering corporate-speak paranoia. It's kind of awful. I can't help but second-guess. Am I really unpolished and out-of-control, as she implies? Is my reflex inclusion of what I see as humanizing remarks and small bits of humor in e-mails and phone conversations actually just cutesy, embarrassing, inappropriate? That's not what I see reflected back in the people I interact with, but all of a sudden I'm not 100% sure any more.
I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing, and I could certainly see myself doing it for a few years. But I do wonder how my psyche will hold up under nearly daily interaction with JoAnn. I'm hanging in for now, and really nobody knows how things might change. She might get reassigned or promoted or who knows what. Even just changing the cubicle configuration, which is actually scheduled, could change the dynamic (I won't be smack dab outside her office door any longer).
In the meanwhile, maybe I'll try hard to see it as a learning opportunity. I just don't want to be learning the wrong things.
It's an odd relationship. By my lights, she's a strange person, and it might also be surmised that by her lights, I am a strange person. That ought to be true, at any rate. There are some signs, however, that rather than seeing me as a weirdo (which she should), she sees me as not only her protegee, but as an immature, imperfect and unformed version of herself. She will help me along, teach me the ropes, and the glorious culmination will be in a decade or so, when I find that I have finally achieved a state of being just like her.
Most of me does know that this will not happen. But there are times she seems so certain, I feel the chill of it all the same.
JoAnn (let's call her JoAnn, shall we?) is our head of corporate compliance (a VP-level position within our agency), and she seems to take pride in being as bland and corporate as she can be. She's quite smart, smarter than most nurses you'll meet. She got her nursing degree, as I recall, at a secondary campus of a state school in some Appalachian state. She has an MBA, too, with a concentration in computer science. She married for the first time late in life, and I think her husband is a tradesman of some kind. She has no children.
For a person of her intelligence and position, JoAnn seems strangely impressed by people even one or two rungs above her in the hierarchy. Our home care agency is a small subset of a giant and prestigious regional health system, so there are unfortunately many rungs above JoAnn. Because of her role, she ends up going to endless meetings with these people, so I would think that by now she would have figured out, I don't know, that their shit stinks too. But it often seems not to have ever occurred to her.
Writing it out like this, it seems clearer than it does at the office. It makes me think of the first exchange between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in the movie, where he psychoanalyzes her based on her good bag, cheap shoes, and suppressed accent. JoAnn is smart enough to have gone to fancy schools, but she didn't, presumably because of her background, though I know no details. She seems to be simultaneously disdainful of and intimidated by academics. And she puts appropriateness of behavior above most other concerns.
"I've noticed that you're very chatty on the phone with the preceptors and with patients, and that's great..." (have you noticed that "...and that's great" has a similar valence to "not that there's anything wrong with that"? Is that a recent thing? I've only recently caught on to it.) "...but you have to remember that you're sitting in an executive area now, and so you really have to keep your phone conversations professional."
Eeugh. It absolutely gives me the heebie-jeebies.
She counsels me with a kind of benevolent condescension on how I have to use my hands less when I speak. ("You're very enthusiastic... and that's great...") How I have to be careful not to speak too quickly, and at all times resist the urge to be self-deprecating. How I have to use professional language in my e-mails. Then there was the whole dumb fiasco about the pregnant job candidate (see, silly me, I blithely assumed that because it was illegal and unethical to not hire somebody because she was pregnant, that there was no question of our doing it... It all came out right in the end, fortunately).
What's hard is that I can't easily get her advice out of my head. I can't just naturally be who I am without either somehow in my mind either defying her or caving in to her. I don't know what she's right about and what she's wrong about. I don't know what's style, what's truly unacceptable, and what's just her hideous, bland, ass-covering corporate-speak paranoia. It's kind of awful. I can't help but second-guess. Am I really unpolished and out-of-control, as she implies? Is my reflex inclusion of what I see as humanizing remarks and small bits of humor in e-mails and phone conversations actually just cutesy, embarrassing, inappropriate? That's not what I see reflected back in the people I interact with, but all of a sudden I'm not 100% sure any more.
I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing, and I could certainly see myself doing it for a few years. But I do wonder how my psyche will hold up under nearly daily interaction with JoAnn. I'm hanging in for now, and really nobody knows how things might change. She might get reassigned or promoted or who knows what. Even just changing the cubicle configuration, which is actually scheduled, could change the dynamic (I won't be smack dab outside her office door any longer).
In the meanwhile, maybe I'll try hard to see it as a learning opportunity. I just don't want to be learning the wrong things.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 9:33 PM
1 Comments:
Fuck JoAnn (sorry for the inappropriate non-corporate language, I just couldn't stand it). You are exactly who you are and where you are for all the reasons that JoAnn can't ever understand (and, I gather from both this post and conversations with you about her, all those reasons probably intimidate the hell out of her too). Do not change, please, just to make her happy. I've known you for about 35 years longer than she has and I know. (Plus, as a faculty member in that most ego-laden of institutions, a School of Medicine, boy do I interact with JoAnn and her brethren -- sestren? -- often!
I'm sorry about the smell of vomit anxiety, though. That must suck.
I too am so glad you're back!!
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