I have always been very fond of Marla; she was one of the few summer interns that I ever actually offered a permanent job to, and for the five years that we worked together I never regretted hiring her. This is why recently, when she gave notice because she had been offered her dream job , I was truly happy for her. “I’m going to miss you,” I said sincerely on her last day.
“I’ll miss you too,” she said. “I will always remember how you color code your file folders. Crazy!” Then she gave me a hug and was gone.
After Marla left I was a little surprised that after working together for 40 hours a week for five years that the main thing she was going to remember about me was my color coded file system, which admittedly is a wildly complex system that makes sense to no one except me — and even I can’t always remember how it works.
After Marla left I got to thinking about what I remembered about the many bosses I have had. I remembered that my very first job in high school was as a stockboy and I recalled that my boss, Marvin, would eat a tin of sardines for lunch every day and that for the entire afternoon his breath was toxic.
I had an assortment of memorable bosses while I worked at Jordan Marsh during college, including Barry who was a clean freak: Barry would hide tiny scraps of crumpled paper on the shelves of the housewares department and if the paper was still there at the end of the shift there was hell to pay.
During grad school I waited tables at Houston’s Restaurant and Heidi, my manager, would go berserk if she saw a drink that did not have a cocktail napkin beneath it. She was replaced by Brett who would spot check the collars of his wait staff’s shirts: He demanded 100% cotton; if you wore a cotton/poly blend he would send you home to change.
Brett was not my only boss obsessed with attire: I remembered Cindy, my boss at the Pan Am flight academy, who insisted that her female employees wore shoes that showed off the “cleavage” between their first and second toes and — I am not making this up– had an ironclad “No boxer shorts” policy for her male employees, which she enforced.
After Pan Am went belly up I went to work for the County and for several years I worked for Jacob, the world’s stupidest man; I spent several years protecting him and covering for him because he was so clearly preferable to a boss who may have had some ambition and initiative and knew what he was doing. I must have done a fine job because Jacob eventually got promoted; today he is a very highly placed County Manager in a small county upstate.
So many bosses, so few memories of each. At the phone company I worked indirectly for Lisa, the Executive Vice-president, who I remember, had a full size sofa, with blankets and bed pillows, in her office. “Does she take naps at work?” I innocently asked one of my coworkers, Tameka, on my first day.
Tameka laughed out loud. “She don’t use it for napping,” she said succinctly, adding, “ Lisa puts the “vice” in ‘vice-president.’”
And how could I forget Colleen who kept a ferret in her office or Eve who, when provoked, would stick pins into miniature effigies of whoever annoyed her?
I can back to the present with a jolt. “I guess remembering my color-coded file system is not so bad after all,” I said to myself, then I chuckled, thanking God that Marla never discovered my habit of reading her emails every night.