Food In Your Teeth

Perhaps you’ve sensed that before my life as “stay-at-home Dog mom” and owner of my company, I spent most of my career in corporate America. We’ve all experienced this during our working lifetime…that one monumental moment that initially humiliates you and then subsequently haunts you for the rest of your life.

At my last position, I worked for an abusive, power-mongering, workaholic at a very large company (see my earlier posts about not fitting in). This woman had it out for me the minute she joined our department. Once, she flat out told me, “you don’t act like an executive…” What did that MEAN!? I spent months trying to learn exactly how an executive acts.

Toward the end my tenure at this company, she filed a full blown performance complaint to Human Resources. It was based on not on actual transgressions, but generalized things she didn’t like, such as not managing meetings well (forgot the bagels one day) or not knowing how to yell at the legal department, so out of order, right?

The HR complaint set into motion 2 weeks of agony to try to remedy the situation…according to her, I had one month to “improve” or I could be let go. That in and of itself was mortifying, I’d never been reported to HR for my performance, and I didn’t really understand that once a Sr. person does something like this in a large company, you have absolutely no recourse.

So I decided to resign. On the day that I packed up all of my teeny belongings, she told me not to leave the building just yet, there was one last meeting. When I entered the room, all of my colleagues yelled “SURPRISE”. This moron, who had made my life a living hell was giving me a good bye cake, with a signed card no less. That meant that some poor assistant had to give up her lunch and organize this fiasco.

I wanted to crawl into the earth and cry…I was so embarrassed. I left the building, walked up town and had many cocktails that evening. For the next several months I did nothing but beat up on myself, obsessing over what had happened and why.

To this day, even with The Pet Set up and running, those memories still hurt…not because of my boss’s actions, but because I was too incompetent to avoid the situation in the first place…now THAT’S humiliating: allowing someone else to define who I am and then obsessing.