The Ugly Incident

[George Mena <George -dot- Mena -at- ESSTECH -dot- COM>]

Some thoughts on the ugly job incident posted anonymously:

1) Never Believe Oral Reassurances:  The vice president who verbally told
this poster he would be the manager of documentation and training never put
it in writing.  The poster is best served by remaining skeptical of such
well-intentioned verbalizations.  If it's not written down, it never
happened.  Recently, one of the top execs here called me into his office to
offer his personal thanks to me for going above and beyond the proverbial
call of duty and wanted to reward me financially.  I left that subject open,
partly because it was rather unexpected.  If I do end up being rewarded for
a job well done, fine.  But I'm not going to waste my time waiting for
something that may never come.  I've still got a job to do.  That's reward
enough because I like getting paid regularly.

2) Avoid Male-Female Co-Worker Confrontations Like The Plague:  This is one
issue men will never win 200 times out of 100, guaranteed, even if, somehow,
the men are "right."  The best way to deal with a loudmouth woman is to have
absolutely nothing to do with her.  Period.  Loudmouth women are nothing but
trouble.  They are to be avoided whenever possible.

Having even one male-female workplace confrontation is one too many if
you're a man.

Having more than one -- as in several -- is just plain stupid. Why paint a
bull's eye between the eyes?

If a man has one, he should make sure it's the LAST one he ever has with
her.  The man needs to be the adult in this situation and should start
looking for another job someplace else.  In the interim, the man needs to
start thinking of ways to avoid contact with the female abuser whenever
possible.

In this case, the poster also missed a big red flag:  his abuser became his
boss and his enemy.  Right then and there, he should have flat-out quit,
because she clearly intended to be punitive towards him with her newfound
hiring and firing powers, especially over him.  The minute she told him to
shut up was definitely the time to leave, right then and there.  Let her
have her way; she'll get hers eventually and she'll have earned the scorn.
Life's too short to try and placate an asshole like her.

If the man goes out of his way to avoid the female abuser and she winds up
really getting in his face anyway despite his best efforts to avoid her,
then the man has the advantage when he goes to HR to complain about her
harassment.  She's the one creating the hostile work environment at this
point, and the company HAS to discipline her at that point.  The HR world is
starting to address the issue of verbal bullying in the workplace, according
to some recent articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury
News.  It's an issue that's been too long overlooked in the workplace.

Loudmouths of both sexes are abusive and toxic individuals. Nobody needs
such people in their lives.  Ever.  If the poster must work for an abuser
ever again, he should at least make sure the abuser is male.  Coping
strategies for men dealing with verbally abusive males exist by seeing the
abusive male supervisor as a tyrannical drill instructor in the military.
The idea:  a man can deal with a hard-assed male drill sergeant a lot easier
than he can a shrieking banshee of a woman who lashes out at every little
slight, both real and otherwise erroneously perceived, because he at least
understands the rules of the game the abusive male's playing: basic
training.

3)  Personal Files? On a File Server? :  This is insanity and stupidity.
I'll take it as a given that the anonymous poster doesn't sleep on the
freeway.  Why leave personal files on the server where anyone and everyone
can read them, including the female abuser?  These belong on floppy disks
with password protection and 10 layers of PGP encryption invoked. Trust no
one, especially the abusive female supervisor who's out to get a man she
doesn't like.

The story about the female abuser having the IT manager look through the
network drive and the local hard drives tells me this was clearly an
individual looking for damning evidence to be used in firing the anonymous
poster, something she was going to do anyway.  This suspicion is further
confirmed by the account of the female abuser having the poster's office
searched with someone from HR present -- to keep the witch hunt on the
proverbial "up and up", which is total bullshit in my book.

Female abusers are dishonest people that were brutally abused themselves.
This one found a perfect scapegoat to abuse in the anonymous poster and got
away with it because of the reorganization and because she was now part of
the management structure.  She will, of course, do everything in her power
to deny severance pay be disbursed to the poster.  How successful she is in
attaining that punitive action directly depends on how stupid the rest of
the management structure is.  If the "powers that be" are sharp, they'll see
her as a vindictive bitch and at least cut the severance check.  John
Posada's advice about kissing the money goodbye is probably advice best
taken, however.

====

Moving on to the rest of the questions:

A) Was the poster wrong to delete notes and edited documents?  If the
documents were outdated, no.  They were outdated and Document Control should
have backups of them.  Notes, depends on the nature of the notes.  Notes of
a personal nature, definitely not. Notes of a business nature, depends on
the relevance to the projects underway.  Notes on current projects should be
retained.  Notes on completed and outdated projects, dump them.  They're
clutter.

B) Legal recourse and defamation of character:  Unless the poster has been
keeping a logbook of notes on what happened at work every day -- keep this
at HOME! -- it's very unlikely legal recourse is possible because it's VERY
hard to prove in court.  If it's not written down, it never happened.  Any
attorney, should the poster elect to hire one, will tell him at least that
much.  Similarly, having earned awards and letters of commendation from the
company for outstanding performance very much qualify as compelling evidence
the attorney (and the court) must and will take into account when
considering the merits of filing or hearing a wrongful termination lawsuit.


If the poster is interested, he should get a copy of the trial record of
Kimbrell vs. Malrite, a wrongful termination suit heard in San Francisco
Superior Court in the January - February 1994 time frame, so he can read the
record of what a successful wrongful termination lawsuit looks like.  I
served as a trial juror in this civil case.  The plaintiff, Ms. Kimbrell,
wound up being awarded $1.1 million against Malrite Communications, the
former owners of KSAN 94.5, then a country - western music station in San
Francisco, for her wrongful termination.

This decision wound up being regarded as a landmark decision in the radio
industry, one that made a lot of stations across America clean up their
slipshod HR practices, according to Ms. Kimbrell in a letter she sent to me
a few weeks after the trial ended.  Her supervisor: an abusive female who
undercut her at every turn imaginable and then some.  When the female abuser
took the stand, the station's legal counsel had to soon call a 10 minute
recess so he could "confer with his client."

What he did was chew her ass out!  The first minutes of the abuser's
testimony included carefully-worded apologetic remarks directed to the
jurors, something the lawyer told her to stop doing immediately.  When
testimony resumed, she was acting like someone "making the tough business
decisions", to use her own words.  When we jurors entered deliberation, we
asked ourselves "Did anyone NOT see the change in her attitude?"  This is
what most folks call a no-brainer.  Justice was decidedly served that day,
right after lunch.  We deliberated for four hours only because we wanted
lunch on the city's tab. :D

In closing, if the poster's interested in talking to me some more off-list,
I'm more than interested in talking to him. :D

George Mena, Tech Writing Consultant
(with special thanks and prayers of gratitude to Lew Jr., Art Jr., Brian,
Charlie, Don, Loran, Dewey and Catfish, wherever you are.)

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=