Good Boss Bad Boss

 

 

My first professional boss out of university was what I called a professional father. I was a copywriter for a standards organization, although I told HR that I preferred to be call a word goddess.

He taught me so much, allowing me to test my ideas (his always out pulled mine), to think in terms of the recipient of the direct mail piece including if it were a two-page letter never end page one with a period. 

He also pointed out that white type on black is hard to read and there should be a balance between font, size and line length. I learned about six-station inserters. 

It was my first experience in corporate life. The married PR director got a staff member pregnant. He left his wife for her and she left him for her girl friend after the baby was born.

A woman went screaming out of accounting. The department head considered breast feels came under the job description under duties as assigned. He was fired and in the pre-feminist times this was good.

Many secretaries replaced their bosses who left for various reasons, but at a pittance of their bosses salaries. They had done most of the work of those bosses.

I left for salary reasons. The organization bought me a very expensive furniture set but couldn't give me a $5 monthly raise.

In one sense, I almost should have paid tuition to my boss. 

He loved plants, had his own syndicated gardening column. For Christmas he gave me an amaryllis plant. It too was a lesson. The plant had two ugly leaves sticking up, but than it blossomed into something magnificent.

The $2,000 raise at the stamp company carried another lesson. My new boss was everything my other boss wasn't. The company was owned by a giant corporation. 

We used a time clock even the top executives. Whereas my old boss had me going to professional meeting and lectures and he went with me because there is always something to learn, the new boss told me he already knew everything there was to know. 

I began dreading Mondays on Thursdays. The building had no windows. Everyone scuttled around in fear of him. When he threw a waste paper basket at me, I quit and worked temp until I ended up as PR Director of Polaroid's Credit Union which was the lead-in to the rest of my career. 

Since then I have loved amaryllis flowers. There were lessons in pre-judgement hidden in its red petals. 

Tomorrow's blog will return to the serialization of the novel Lexington: Anatomy of a Novel.