I am completely hooked on “The Apprentice”....watching Sir Alan Sugar systematically deflate the massively overblown egos of the wannabe employees provides me with great amusement. Each week, contestants are faced with a fairly substantial task, and thanks to some clever editing by the BBC, you are left guessing till almost the end of the show just which of the two teams is going to fail and will have to face the infamous Board Room grilling.
"You're fired!"
The show inspired me to look back over the jobs I’ve had in my career so far, and the bosses I’ve encountered. I am very happy in my current job... I have a fantastic boss, great team mates (I suppose working from home and only dealing with them by telephone and email, with bimonthly office visits does help keep the relationships friendly), a peaceful working environment that’s conducive to concentrating on what I do (writing medical reports for the pharmaceutical industry)...plus there’s the added bonus of not commuting and always being home for deliveries and tradesmen calling.
But, I’ve not always been so lucky...
My very first ‘job’ entailed working for my dad's printing company during my school holidays, from about the ages of 12 to 15...don’t be fooled into thinking that he was an easy boss - no ways! My dad is a perfectionist and a real taskmaster.... he fired my older brother from the same job as he was considered to be slacking and disrespectful! Horrible, eye-straining, back-breaking work, bent over a light table ‘spotting’ imperfections (light spots) in the negatives used to typeset books back in the ‘80s and covering said spots with opaque paint using a fine brush to prevent black smudges appearing on the printed pages.
Once I got to about 16, my mom found me holiday work in her office... typically answering phones, filing, making tea for the sales department and fielding lost souls who wandered into the office looking to buy VERY expensive farming machinery....this was back in the days when Zimbabwe had a functioning farming sector, an economy and a currency that was not riding on the back of 100000000% inflation. As a job, it was a very cushy number, well paid and not too demanding...and everyone in the office treated me like a princess, as they were terrified of my mom!
I also did a few stints as a receptionist in my dad’s office (by then he was working for a publishing house), including a highly lucrative 2-month stretch during my first long varsity vacation, as well as a month in data capture for an insurance company - they used to pay me weekly and on one Friday overpaid me by 100%. Tempted as I was to hang onto the extra cash, my conscience won over greed and I reported it to the boss first thing Monday morning. He was astounded by my honesty... kind of makes you wonder what type of fly-by-nights he’s encountered previously....and later, when the work dried up at the insurers, found me another data entry post at his mate’s office.
At the end of my second year at varsity, I was summoned to fulfil a 3-month work experience attachment in the food industry section of the corporation that was funding part of my undergraduate degree. In fact, I was supposed to be bonded to that company after graduating, something I’d reluctantly resigned myself to as it was the only way I could afford to go to university. I managed to avoid the placement as long as possible by going on to study at postgraduate level, self-funded...and in the interim, the company fell victim to the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy. The day they informed me that, with regret, they could not afford to employ me was one of the happiest of my life, albeit a bit selfish given the dire economic state my homeland was now facing. At the time of my attachment, however, the company was still doing quite well... the food factory made breakfast cereals, extruded snacks (puffy-cheesy-corn things), potato crisps and dog food...and they had a coffee processing plant, run by a chap who laid eyes on me and immediately thought I was his future Mrs. This made things a bit uncomfortable, as the feeling was most definitely not mutual. In fact the whole experience was as awkward as being the only woman in the midst of 3000 male factory workers can be.... but I did learn a lot, got to test funky food samples and the factory workers hands for microbial contamination, to work out if the salt content in the crisps’ flavour was correct, to try and come up with a new breakfast cereal taste sensation... and to eat an unlimited supply of extruded corn snacks.
Once I got to postgraduate level, I was offered the chance to fund my studies by working part-time on my university’s commercial clinical trials team. I started at entry level, as a ‘runner’... it was my job to ferry the blood samples from the hospital ward as quickly as possible back to the lab in a box of ice. Given the distance between the two buildings, the reliability of the lifts in the hospital and our lab building (the ward and the lab were both on the top floor of their respective buildings) and the frequency of the blood sampling (every 15 minutes for the first few hours), this was a task that did wonders for my leg muscles. I ‘ran’ my way up the trial career ladder to ‘sample handler’... this involved measuring the volumes of piss passed by the volunteers (often very stinky thanks to the drugs they were taking), and decanting a small sample for the labs to analyse.
After about a year, I became a salaried trial administration staff member, which meant I got to help with the organisation of the trials as well as working on the actual trial days. In the run-up period to the trials, this meant keeping contact with the volunteers (largely medical students from my campus), arranging catering for the trial days, making beds, setting up medical supplies, sending samples to the pathology labs and keeping data records. On the trial days, I was timekeeper for the blood sampling, stand-in phlebotomist (blood taker) and general dogsbody. Very, very long days - often a 6 am start and pretty much on the go till after 9 pm - but it was a well paid job by student standards and there was stiff competition to try and get on the so-called ‘Phat Pharm’ team (“not coz we 'was' rotund but coz we 'was' so cool”) headed up by our very own 'Iron Lady'. I have very good memories from those days....lots of laughs, some chaotic and frightening episodes of volunteers reacting badly to the drugs, but all good experience that would come in handy later in my career.
Tough Boss
After graduation, B and I moved to the UK, and I soon began my first ‘proper job’, as a ‘Formulation Development Scientist’ at a contract research company that was a spin-off of a London university. The first woman to join the company... and boy, what a chauvinistic one it was! My boss was an appalling man...aggressive and downright rude, with a fondness for a particular word that rhymes with ‘muck’ - no sentence was complete without it. A diabetic, he would regularly fly into hypoglycaemic-induced rages, telling us all how completely useless we all were and asking why he has to tolerate such a bunch of morons.... only that’s the watered-down version of what he would normally have to say. Formulation development involves a lot of work with skin... human skin....harvested from the blubbery remains of the plastic surgery industry, typically tummy tucks. In an attempt to break my spirit, my boss put me in charge of the infamous skin freezer. Fit to adorn the kitchen of any budding Hannibal Lector, it was stocked full of lumps of frozen flash awaiting boiling and then skimming to harvest the top layers of the skin, that were then stretched out on cork boards awaiting experimentation. Lovely! I bided my time and stuck it out for 2 years, just long enough to get a bit of real experience on my CV and work out that I wanted out of the lab! And away from the stench of boiling flesh...
Medical writing is not really something anyone really sets out to do... you kind of end up in it when you’re fed up with working in a lab but still want to use your science background...and if you enjoy writing. Seemed like a good option for me...but getting into it was not easy. Potential employers want you to have the experience but in order to get that experience you need a job...the never-ending circle. After many applications, several writing tests and a lot of rejections, I finally got my foot in the door at a smallish data management and statistics company that was looking to expand into medical writing. For a while it was a great job... a young, enthusiastic crowd, great manager and the chance to set up a new department. We took on our second writer about 15 months after I’d started and were gradually building up a client base. Boss was a bit creepy... fond of dipping his....er...toe...into the extramarital pond and was completely devoid of tact, but thankfully my dealings with him were minimal.
Then things started to go awry when, under tragic circumstances, we lost our business development manager...she’s been raking in the work and had the drive and enthusiasm needed to grow the company. The work slowly stopped coming in, staff turnover in all departments trebled... people who’d started long after me were upping sticks.... and then, most devastatingly to me, my manager left after 7 years’ service. Her replacement was a disaster. She spread herself way too thin, professionally and personally, and the ensuing chaos made office life very difficult. With no solid work flowing in, us writers were shunted onto any odd job....from ordering stationery to typing company letters (coz medical writers are "really just typists, don't cha know?!") I’m not averse to helping out as needed, but when that’s all you do, you soon realise your career is not going anywhere fast. The final straw came in my third year at the company, when my boss, angling for a piece of work with a Big Nob client, suggested that we could cut costs and outsource the writing aspect to India, as ‘after all, any one can do it’.... not sure if that was more insulting to the population of India or medical writers...cringe, cringe, cringe...
The Cringe Factor
My expectations of my next company were fairly low to be honest....it was a very large, global version of the previous company, but I figured it would bring me much needed writing experience as the work would be aplenty. And it was! No shortage of writing work there.... it was just the most horrendous place to work in with the boss from hell! There are bitches, there are mega bitches (
beeeeiatches is the technical term, I think) and then there’s the fiend that I had the misfortune to call my boss for a year. She was the ultimate control-freak, yet failed to provide any managerial support in any way, shape or form. She’d avoid you for days, refuse to answer your emails... then when you were forced to make decisions beyond your remit, she’d jump into action to reprimand you for stepping over the line, fire off emails to all and sundry to
apologise on your behalf for your unacceptable behaviour....and summon you to her office to explain why you did not “respect her authority”! Clearly she’d had a difficult childhood....
My health was taking serious strain....the stress of the workload coupled with an unsupportive manager gave me the beginnings of a stomach ulcer, constant sinus infections and migraine headaches. I was working very long hours and many weekends, without so much as a 'thank you' from my charming manager. Luckily, however, I had an escape route planned...soon after I’d left the previous company, my fellow writer chucked it in there too....only she’s wisely gone to a small, specialist writing consultancy company and was loving her new job and new boss. Hearing how miserable I was, she put in a word for me, and before long I was interviewed, tested and offered the job. It gave me great pleasure to inform the
Beeeeiatch that I would no longer be tolerating her tantrums....
