Last Day, Again

I suppose something is wrong with me.  I don't think I will try to change that though.

Maybe it's because I was harassed too many times by other kids in school.  With a July birthday, I was one of the youngest in my class each year, and there were always a few bigger kids with IQs about 40-50 points lower than mine who would bother me.  Or maybe it was my mother.  Mom could be very negative sometimes.  Freud would say it was Mom.

In any case, I reached a point somewhere in my life, long ago, when I decided that I really didn't have to ever be treated like shit again by anybody, ever.  I'm kind of sensitive to that.  I fight back when I'm treated poorly, or I walk away.  This brings me into conflict with the corporate world, where treating employees like dirt is seen as a right handed down by God and is built into the HR handbooks. 

I left another job on Monday.  It was kind of winding down anyway, but I wound it down a little faster.  My boss had fallen into a mode of judging everything I did by how fast it was, trying to make sure that the company was getting maximum impact out of every dollar they spent on me.  The problem is, you can't supervise a senior accountant by trying to measure output per hour, any more than you would try to measure a lawyer or a novelist that way.  Not me anyway, not for long.

This had been going on for a few days, so I arrived at work ready to call it quits if it continued.  Things started out well; I was working down a list of reconciliations.  Then around noon my boss decided that she personally needed to be sure that she was getting the absolute most bang for her buck, so she  asked what I had been working on and suggested particular items I could complete.  Then she made the mistake of asking what exactly I had accomplished that morning and how long each item had taken.  Then she asked how I had gone about it, suggested that there was a more efficient way, said that we needed to do everything as efficiently as possible, and told me I needed to think about these things.  Mistake, mistake, mistake.  You kind of crossed the fine line there between supervising a professional and treating them like a teenager on their first day picking orders in an Amazon warehouse.

I was, I suppose, humiliated, although I'm not sure that's exactly it.  I was most certainly pissed off; I'm sure of that.  So at the end of the day, I told her that Friday would be my last day.  She asked why.  Maybe she should not have.  I told her, word for word as well as I can remember, that the next time she asked me what I had just been doing, how long it had taken, and exactly how I had done it, I would walk out mid-sentence.  And of course that was the end of that.

She was surprised.  She seemed not to grasp that I might not like being micromanaged, redirected and admonished on a daily basis.  But I think also that employers are simply not used to employees who feel they have a choice.  People just take it, because they figure disrespect is built into their pay.  I don't do that so well.