Bum's rush

Occasionally I do a Google or Yahoo search for an old boss of mine. When I say old, I presume I may be looking for an obituary, because when I worked for him in '72 and '73 he was close to 50 or even in his mid-fifties. He had an unusual last name, and in my searches I find other people with the name, but not him. It's not too surprising, really. He was a crook and would want to lie low, not get in the public record. If that was his goal, then at least for the purposes of the mighty Internet search engines, he succeeded.

After my Labor Day rant on bosses (see the posting right below this one), I got to thinking about people I've worked for who have been the most difficult. Lou was definitely the worst. I worked for him in '72 and '73, as an artist for a franchising firm. It was my idea to present a product that people wanted to buy, and Lou had the same idea, only he never planned to back it up with anything. He wanted the money and after that the customers could just go to hell.

I was hired by a young woman who I worked for until she fell in love with the general manager. They took off; left their respective spouses and moved out, leaving a note. I was put in charge of the department, which was my first clue I wasn't meant for management, not meant to be a supervisor.

Lou was a person with an extremely hot head. His Mount St. Helens-style blowups were terrible. When he erupted you wanted to get out of the way of the molten lava, but when he blew up on you it was impossible. That happened to me a couple of times.

Lou's most famous line, repeated endlessly by all of us, was, "I don't care how you do it, just get it done." With no real directions it caused a lot of the employees--including me--to flail away in futility, unable to complete the tasks, which incurred more of Lou's wrath.

Lou was a sexual harasser. No woman in the office was safe. He may have been in his fifties, but he liked girls young. His long-suffering girlfriend, Doris, who usually worked out of her home, set up an office near Lou's because of that particular aspect of his personality. One day Margie, a young secretary and new mom, walked by Lou. He reached out and cupped one of her breasts. "Those tits got big after you had your baby!" She threw the paperwork she was carrying on the floor, then walked out the door. Lou went into his office and started to drink. We heard later he wailed to Doris, "She's younger than my own daughter!"

Believe it or not, Margie came back, but he never assaulted her again. That wasn't true of Liz, a woman I hired for the art department, who was as I found out, had fragile health and even more fragile psychology. Lou picked right up on her weaknesses and it was no time before he was having an affair with her. She started having seizures during the day while sitting at her desk, and she had to quit, which made Lou happy. He'd gotten what he wanted.

After awhile I had enough, but at that point in my life I was young and stupid about the procedure. I went into a major spiral of depression and rather than talk about it or get any help, I just put my resignation on his desk and walked out. That was a BIG MISTAKE. A BIGGER MISTAKE came the next week on payday. I went to the office to collect my check. When I walked in and saw the accountant I asked him for my check, and just then Lou walked up behind me. "WELL! LOOK WHO'S HERE!" he said. In my totally naive way I said, "Oh, hi, Lou."

I think I thought at that point he'd say, "Oh, please come back! Please, pleasepleaseplease..." I didn't want to go back, but that wasn't what Lou had in mind for me. What he did was grab me by my collar and my belt and start marching me to the door. Lou had been a boxer during his Navy career in WWII. He was still strong and could handle himself and others physically. "NOBODY WALKS OUT ON ME! NOBODY!" Still with his grip on me we went past the secretaries in the front office, who looked at the scene with shock. Lou literally pushed me out of the front door onto the sidewalk and yelled, "WE'LL MAIL YOU YOUR GODDAM CHECK. GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE AND NEVER COME BACK."

So much for begging me to come back!

I went home and went to bed, and I spent most of the summer of 1973 in bed, in a depression so profound I'm still unable to remember most of it. I worked my way out of it, and twenty years later I went on medication to control depression, but long before that I learned a few valuable lessons about avoiding the same pitfall: get another job before quitting the old one. Give proper notice of intent to resign. Keep out of the boss's line of sight. Simple stuff, but I learned the hard way.

It took years before I actually told the incident to anyone. The girls in the office saw it, but I didn't tell my wife until decades later. It was easily the most embarrassing and humiliating thing that ever happened to me, and I walked right into it. Lou was a real jerk, but that time it was my fault: I was the stupid guy who brought it out in him.