When it comes to Worst Boss, I’ve had a few who have been game enough to try for the title. A few were at the insurance claims office where I spent twenty-three years, and from which I finally retired. There was Benny, the world’s biggest cynic. If anyone had presented him with a glass and asked if it were half-full or half-empty, he would have pulled out a hammer, smashed it to pieces and said, “That settles that question.” But he was just hard to get along with.
Regina was a bigger problem. I was in charge of the supplies for the office at the time; she was my supervisor, and not doing too well in the company’s view. Neither was I, for that matter; the job had me stuck back in the stockroom all day, and I'm enough of a social person to need other people around if I'm to do my work well. Regina took advantage of this situation, and tried to pin her own failures on all the time she “had” to spend supervising me. She nearly got me fired with her manipulations, but a couple of others in the hierarchy knew that something wasn’t right with the scenario and got me transferred back to the file room where I had started.
For me, the change of environment was like switching on a light; everything fell back into place, from my attitude to my production. The situation didn’t work nearly as well for my replacement as stock clerk; Regina really did manage to get him fired. By this time, the stock clerk du jour was the only person she was supervising, the rest of her duties having been transferred to other, more capable hands, and Regina herself was regularly getting reports written on her performance. She did wrangle me back into the stock room one day, to help with some heavy lifting. The office bosses found out about this, took me aside, and told me quite firmly, “You are never to go in the stock room again, for any reason!” They definately had theirs.
A few weeks later, the ax fell, and she was terminated. The results were on the spectacular side. Upon receiving the news, she fainted and reportedly went into convulsions. An ambulance was required to take her to the hospital. Her attorneys filed a workers compensation lawsuit, of course, based on "stress and strain." And that would have been that, as far as I was concerned, except for an interesting encounter a year or so later.
Der Brucer and I had met after work that spring night at a gay bar and restaurant in Orange County called Ozz. It was a regular hangout of ours at the time, an easy place to get together before driving the rest of the way home. On this particular night, as we were heading to der Brucer’s car, a woman with short, curly blonde hair came up to me in the parking lot, asking “Don’t you recognize me?” It was Regina, with an addition of peroxide. She quickly informed me that she was meeting some friends for dinner inside, but that she was so glad to run into me. “You know, they really fired me because I’m a lesbian. That place is so homophobic! And we have to stick together, to fight this sort of thing.” I nodded, and excused myself as der Brucer was waiting impatiently by the car.
“Was that Regina,” he asked as we pulled out of the parking lot. I nodded yes.
The next morning, I did something I had never done intentionally before, and have never done since. I went to talk with the claims adjustor who was handling Regina’s case, and told her about the encounter. Dorothy, a long-time friend, raised her eyebrows. “Regina is gay?” she asked. There was nothing in the file about this; I was outing Regina in reporting the conversation. But, I told Dorothy, if the management of the office was indeed homophobic, it made no sense for them to keep me on staff, and fire the closeted Regina, since I had been out of the closet for years. Wouldn’t they have fired me first, as the obvious target? Dorothy made a note in the file, thanked me for the report, and that was the last I heard of the business.
But Regina was far from the worst boss I’ve ever had. That had happened years earlier, at the historic Alex Theater in Glendale. And that’s another story.
