Two years ago today I started The-Job-That-Wasn’t. The casual observer probably finds it ridiculous that I mention The-Job-That-Wasn’t so often. Everyone has had a bad job or a bad boss – usually more than one. What is it about my experience that is any different?

That is, in part, what I have been trying to write about for the better part of the year – because I never wrote about it when it was actually happening.

 The working title of the essay is “The Problem of Replacing [Pamie]” (not her real name) and I’m trying to capture what it was like to try and replace someone, who was, in everyone else’s estimation, perfect. Every single day when I would walk into Important-Boss’s office with the morning report, he would glance up, with withering disappointment that it was me, not her standing there. As if she had disappeared instead of been promoted. 

It occured to me recently that maybe I could throw a love affair into the equation; I mean, the man moped around as if someone had stolen his girlfriend away. I was a poor man’s Pamie. An inadequate substitute. Pamie was now four desks away from him instead of just one, and my mere existence made this my fault. And she in turn, no longer had as many reasons to visit his office, and one could imagine her gazing longingly from her new position down the hall.

But alas, there was no actual affair and what was going on with that job is, I think more interesting than any torrid tryst. It’s just not fitting neatly into paragraphs right now. There is so much I want to write, and it is so hard to get this one without sounding like a whine about the terminally unique way I was wronged at work. 

I have said multiple times that the seven months I spent at The-Job-That-Wasn’t were some of the worst of my life. The job was a macrocosm for everything else that was going wrong in my life and all the negatives just fed on each other. I was deeply unhappy and not being able to find any worth in my work, an area that had always been my touchstone, was devastating. Being held up for comparison to someone else, and failing miserably every day was exhausting. Trying to convince myself that the job was okay and that I was okay just added to the exhaustion. 

I have never denied that I was terrible at my job, that I sunk instead of swam, etc, etc. I have never denied that I did not work as hard as I could have to try and learn a job that I was clearly not qualified for in the first place (the job listing had it dressed up as something else entriely). I screwed up big time on several occasions (so much so that my one friend on the job gently asked me if it was possible I was sub-consciously trying to sabotage myself). But I contend that I was never properly trained nor treated fairly. I was never even given the possibility to be anything but not-good-enough.

Because at the end of the day, I was not Pamie. I couldn’t have known it then, but I walked into that job a hated woman. And not just by my boss either, but by everyone in that godforsaken place. And while I was by no means the only person who had problems with The Important Boss, he saved up all his frustrations, all his anger, all his negative for me. I would stand in front of his desk in his office, the seconds painfully ticking away while I waited for a response or further instructions on a document I’d just given him.  

He had gotten under my skin, and he knew it, and I wish I could write about how I feel like he purposefully tried to trip me up without coming across as paranoid, or refusing to take responsibility. 

A torrid love affair would be easier to write about. But it’s been 18 months since I lost that job, and I am have been grateful every single day that I do not have to work there. There are days when my utter gratitude over the fact that I got out of that job overwhelms me, because while I hated going to work every morning, I didn’t realize how bad it was until months after I left.  Every day that job stole whatever bits of self-worth I had managed to squirrel away from the previous day.

That job shredded me into little tiny pieces and made every day feel like the worst of my life. I didn’t truly understand the depths of “I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning” until that job. It was not the only thing wrong with my life, but work is where we spend so much of our time. I spent the time between waking up & starting work in dread and the hours between finishing work and falling asleep in recovery.

Someone, I have to make that sound more interesting that a torrid love affair.