All of the talk about how reporting a supervisor’s behavior can pay off later even if it seems as if it goes nowhere at the time (for example, if another employee mentions the same problem later, their complaint may be taken more seriously because of the previous complaint) has reminded me of a satisfying story from earlier in my working life.

I was in my very early twenties, working for a plant nursery. I was taken on as a general-helper employee who could be sent to help with any task that needed it that day, and I did very well. In a job that pays minimum wage with no benefits, an employee only has to show up reliably and not slack off to “do very well,” but also I was cheerful, and interested in what I was doing, and I did well at the work itself, and I was soon a preferred/requested helper for tasks. In less than the usual amount of time (which probably contributed to the problems I’m about to describe), I was promoted and assigned to a particular greenhouse, which meant being responsible for more of my own workday: more figuring out what needed to be done, rather than waiting to be told what to do.

The trouble was, there was another employee assigned part-time to the same greenhouse where I was working full-time. And Doris and I turned out not to be a good fit. It seemed to me that the problem was entirely HER, but of course it WOULD feel that way to me. But I was coming in to work and doing a good job, and she was constantly pecking at me and criticizing me. It felt territorial: I was on her turf and she didn’t like it. But it was hard to tell for sure if that was what was going on, because surely MANY people doing a bad job feel as if they’re doing a good job. Maybe I WAS doing a bad job, and just didn’t have the experience yet to know it? A lot of the tasks were judgment-call tasks (“Does this plant need water or is it okay for another day?,” for example, or “Should these be transferred to bigger pots this week or wait until next week?”) rather than clear tasks (“This must be done every Tuesday,” for example), so maybe I was regularly making poor judgment calls and couldn’t tell. But as month after month went by, and I was promoted again, and the supervisor kept checking and praising my work, and as I gained more and more experience until I no longer felt as if I were in the learning phase of the job, it was harder and harder to feel as if the problem was with me.

An example. One of my jobs was to figure out each morning which plants in the greenhouse needed watering. If I watered them, Doris would tell me they shouldn’t have been watered, and she would tell me the information on over-watering I’d already been told many, many times. If I didn’t water them, or hadn’t watered them YET, she would draw my attention to them needing water, and alert me to all the same old information about under-watering. She would say it as if it was my first day: “See how if you stick your finger into the soil it feels dry?” But it was still hard to figure out, because what if I WAS IN FACT making the wrong decision each day? The only hard clue that my impressions may have been correct: one day I didn’t water a section of plants, and she said I should have watered them; so I watered them, and later that SAME DAY she came and told me I shouldn’t have watered them. Still, I was not sure if I was just being too sensitive, especially because she periodically informed me that I was “the sensitive type.” (In general, by the way, I have found that when someone likes to tell you who you are, it is not a good sign.)

Other little clues that something was amiss: the previous person in my position, a mellow/chill/easygoing woman, had left in large part because she hadn’t wanted to work with Doris anymore; Doris frequently complained that her grown daughters thought she was being pushy/interfering/bossy when she was just trying to help / would always be their mother.

I tried to deal with it myself. I had already tried listening to her and taking her advice and so forth: when I was newer to the job, I had followed her instructions completely. But when I had gone way beyond learning every single thing that needed to be done (and it was not super-complicated stuff) and she was still treating me exactly like a new hire, I started speaking up. I tried jokey responses and firm responses and respectful responses and THANK YOU I’VE GOT IT responses, but nothing worked. She would follow me around, or go behind me checking my work—and neither of those things were her job to do. She was not in charge of me or my work. And I was not yet comfortable enough (especially with our age gap) to say, “Doris, you are not in charge of my work.”

Finally I went to my immediate supervisor about it. I was calm, but my basic message was that this arrangement was not working out either for Doris or for me, and maybe I should be placed in a different greenhouse. That is when I learned that my co-worker had repeatedly gone to our immediate supervisor about me. It was not pleasing. But what WAS pleasing is that because of my co-worker’s complaints, my supervisor had been keeping a close eye on my work—and she said I WAS doing it right. In fact, she said I was doing too good a job for her to want to move me to another greenhouse: she wanted me to stay where I was. This was gratifying at the time, and less gratifying looking back on it: it was a “sorry, no, this is better/easier for us even though it sucks for you,” couched as if it were praise. My supervisor suggested I let the criticisms roll off me, and not worry about it.

Time went by and the situation escalated to the point where I felt like I was going crazy. I KNEW I was doing the job right, but she was continually telling me I was doing it wrong. It didn’t seem to matter how I responded. And in between criticisms, she was being confusingly nice. I felt like I’d get all happy and “Hey, this is WORKING now!” and then she’d sucker-punch me with a smile on her face. She’d “encourage” me by saying not to worry, I’d figure the work out eventually. I kept thinking I must be imagining things, or being too sensitive, or doing it wrong, or SOMETHING. I had a regularly-scheduled review with my supervisor’s supervisor; she’d been filled in by my immediate supervisor on what was happening, so I told her the situation was continuing. She re-asserted that I WAS doing a good job, and that she would address the issue again with the co-worker.

The day came when I was doing my work, my I’m-pretty-sure-it-was-GOOD work, and the co-worker was standing over me ranting that she didn’t UNDERSTAND why I wouldn’t LISTEN to her; that SHE had listened to HER superiors when SHE first started, and so on. I couldn’t even respond anymore. I HAD listened to her when I “first started,” and had CONTINUED listening to her, but now I was WELL AND FULLY TRAINED, and in fact WELL BEYOND well and fully trained, and she was criticizing no matter WHAT I did, and she was NOT IN CHARGE OF ME. She had told me a thousand times that I was doing a Very Simple Task TOTALLY WRONG, and now was condescendingly re-explaining the absolutely clear reasons for how to do things the way I was already doing them. Tears were running down my face and I was just so discouraged I couldn’t even answer her or look at her anymore. I went to the office, told them I was sick and needed to go home. That night I came back after everyone was gone, and left a letter explaining why I was not coming back. I said I knew I should be giving notice, and I was sorry that they were being punished for this situation by having to scramble to find someone to do my work, but that I had let it go on longer than I should have and at this point couldn’t stand even one more minute. I described the scene that had been the final straw as well as summarizing what had happened over the past year.

I had a good relationship with another co-worker, Beth, and she stopped by my apartment after work the next day, all like “DUDE.” She said that she had asked my supervisor what HAPPENED, why Swistle had quit, and my supervisor, my nice, chill, zero-gossip, nothing-bad-to-say-about-anyone supervisor had replied: “Doris rode her back until she fled.” I still CHERISH those words. Rode her back. Until she fled. It shows that although my supervisor couldn’t/wouldn’t figure out how to fix the situation, she SAW it and BELIEVED me.

A second very satisfying thing happened a few months later. Beth told me they’d put someone else in that greenhouse in my place. This time they chose someone quite a bit older (Doris was older) and also someone significantly less sensitive and non-confrontational: a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, confident employee with lots of experience, who also was friends with the owners. After a couple of weeks, that person came into the office and said, “Doris is impossible to work with” and explained why, saying the same things I’d said, with “relentlessly, unreasonably critical” topping the list and “won’t get off my back” following as a close second. AND THE COMPANY ASKED DORIS TO QUIT RATHER THAN BE FIRED. AND DORIS DID.

Really, I am not sure anything so satisfying has ever happened to me. It’s too bad they didn’t ask her to leave when she was tormenting me—but I wasn’t going to be staying there long anyway, so it actually worked out better the way it happened.

And also, it doesn’t in the end feel good to think of her being asked to leave. I mean, it sort of does, of course. Affirmation! Consequences! Justice! But imagining a woman in her late sixties being asked to leave a job she loved and was good at—well, it is too bad she couldn’t have been moved to a greenhouse where she could have been the only one in charge. Looking back on it, she is reminding me of a cat who can’t live with other cats: they can be GREAT cats, but only as an ONLY cat. Doris had serious problems working with others, but I believe she would have been a great worker as an only cat. A supervisor who could have made that happen would have kept two good employees.