The absolute worst

I mentioned yesterday that the venture capital fund from hell warranted its own entry, so here goes:

I interviewed for the job with the bitch of an investment manager (Let's call her Michelle). I don't think she smiled once during the entire interview, and I don't much recall the interview itself. After speaking with me she took me in to speak with the CEO, and again I don't recall much of what was said, but my impression of him was that he was tough and demanding, but fair. BZZZZZT. At any rate, before I had even managed to get back to my office (the interview was early in the morning and I still had a full day of work at the software start-up to go), she called me to offer me the job, foregoing a reference check. I arrived at my office, gave my two weeks' notice, and continued merrily with my life.

Two weeks later I arrived for my first day. I was introduced to everyone, including the CEO's secretary, who had only started working there about two months before (we'll name her "Kay"). I didn't know this at the time, but the girl who was training me was asked to leave, pending the hiring of a replacement. In retrospect, the reason for her dismissal became all too clear. My full week of training with her consisted of a lot of sitting around, watching her lean her chin on her hand while staring blankly into space. Kay remained relatively silent during this week, excluding explanations regarding the CEO's preferences.

When the chick I replaced finally departed, Kay and I had about two days to work together and to get the real training started, before she became sick and stayed home for a week. Thus began my week of Initiation by Fire, and my first inkling that not all was well with this place.

I was never a secretary before, so I'm not sure if this is common in North America, but in Israel, managers don't dial their own phone. "Get me so-and-so" is a fairly standard request, with the process being me calling so-and-so's secretary, and both of us transfering the call. It sounds fairly simple, but alas, the whole exercise stems from Israel's military system, where military secretaries connect between officers, and thus, rank plays a function.
For example, if I were an officer of X rank, and needed to speak to an officer at the rank above me, my secretary would call his secretary to see that he was free, and if so, my secretary would transfer me to his secretary, who would then transfer me to her officer. Conversely, if I needed to speak to a lower rank, the lower rank would be tranferred to me. Stupid, but given Israel's militaristic society, the practice was bound to permeate corporate ranks.

Allow me to regress a bit before describing the incident. CEO had his special phone line - known in militaristic terms as the "Red Phone" - that had to be answered ahead of all other things. Office on fire? Answer the red phone if it rings. Seven lines going at the same time? Answer the red phone if it rings.

During that week, CEO asked me to get him someone. Being new to the secretarial scene and utterly unaware of this whole ranking game, I got the person's secretary on the line, who'd said she'd tranfer her boss, so I transfered the call to CEO and got off the line. Almost immediately I saw that the call light was no longer lit and simultaneously, the red phone rang. I picked it up and asked "Did the call get disconnected?" to which CEO replied "I don't speak with secretaries", hanging up immediately thereafter. I stared at the phone in utter disbelief, rather uncertain of what had just transpired. It hadn't even occurred to me to point out that *I* was a secretary. I rang the person's office again, this time got the person that CEO wanted to speak with on the line, and transferred him to CEO myself.

That little scene pretty much defined my entire working relationship with CEO, who turned out to be an arrogant asshole of magnificent proportions. Luckily Kay was his secretary and I only ever acted as back-up.

I mentioned that Michelle seemed rather a humourless witch. I wasn't entirely correct, as she did have a cynical sense of humour. Ok, that's not true. I'm cynical - she was plain mean. For the most part, however, we got along.

The other investment manager wasn't too bad, but as I'd mentioned, he had some sort of speech impediment that made him impossible to understand, and rather than ask the same questions over and over, and receive the same unintelligible answers, I preferred to guess what it was that he wanted for me. It worked most of the time, but there were a few resultant skirmishes - though none tragic enough for me to really worry about. He was also fairly self-sufficient, often-times dialling his own phone, so I didn't really need to do that much for him. Ironically, he was much higher ranked than CEO in the military, but lacked any of the arrogant-asshole mannerisms.

The accountant, whom we'll refer to as Tanya, was very capable professionally, but not quite right in the head otherwise. She seemed to derive pleasure out of treating people like shit, and particularly yelling at them at the top of her lungs. I, for the most part, was spared her wrath, but it had more to do with the fact that I tried to avoid irritating her as much as possible, anticipating the outcome. The woman essentially spent 90% of her time screaming at someone - her mother, her brother, the bookkeeper, suppliers, portfolio company CEOs, etc. I particularly remember the day she yelled at the people who installed a toilet in her house, since there was a board meeting taking place in the conference room, and none other than our CEO got up to close the door so as to block the screeching out.

Around the time I started working there, the company had hired an in-house counsel. This was a guy with little corporate law experience, but he did have two law degrees plus a masters in mathematics. In short - the guy wasn't low of IQ. However, on his first day there, he hadn't instinctively realized that the acronym BOD signified "Board Meeting" and asked Tanya what it meant. BIG MISTAKE. Tanya, being a bitter sow, resentful of the guy's higher salary (um, hello? He has FOUR DEGREES, bitch!) decided right then and there that the guy was a complete moron, and from that point forward made every attempt to trip him up. Since he was to take over many of the functions she had taken on in the absence of a lawyer (she was the most well-versed person there in all of the investment contracts), he should have made her life a bit easier, but her raging jealousy and hatred prevented her from seeing straight and instead of off-loading the info, she would not cooperate with him, leaving him to spend hours reading contracts. It took him months to catch up, all the while suffering abuse from her. The guy, who was nice enough, though not someone I became particularly friendly with (he was so tired of her that he mostly sat in his office with the door closed, so we didn't get to speak with him much, either) realized fairly quickly that he had met a dead end and wasn't going to get anywhere, so he decided to use his time with the company to study for the NY Bar exam, which the company was financing - in fact, it was written into his contract that they couldn't let him go for a year and were obligated to pay. Good for him, I say. As soon as he passed the bar, he was let go, but not before Tanya convinced the CEO to try and swindle the guy out of some compensation he had owing. Luckily, her blind range and lack of formal legal training meant that she had no ground to stand on and the guy got every last penny. It was awesome to see him get the better of her at the end.

I won't get too much into describing my interaction with Kay. It wasn't easy and there were many irritants, but eventually she and I became good friends, which made the irritants seem more like quirks. We've fallen out of touch, but I still admire her for staying in that hell-hole as long as she did - four years of working for that cast is less than a treat.

Now that I've described the cast of character, I'll describe my work and some of the incidents that are etched in my mind.

During my first week of training, the fired girl showed me where to get the mail. There were several envelopes that came from a particular investment company, which contained analysis reports. The girl told me that when they came in I was to put them in a particular cupboard (unopened). There were piles of them there. Not knowing what they were, I didn't really question the practice, and furthermore, no one ever asked me about them, so I continued chucking them in the closet.

Kay and I sat side by side behind a desk that had a raised counter - the kind you'd lean your arms on if you were standing up. Between the desk and the counter was a pile of filing that had to be tended to. Little did I know that this was the tip of a filing iceberg, and that the analyst reports above were only a small part of it! As soon as the girl had departed, Michelle and Tanya told me that we had to start putting things in order. They opened the various filing cabinets and showed me all the PILES AND PILES of paper. Apparently, the filing system up to this point was to pile things up between the desk and the counter, and once the pile reached counter height, it was dumped inside one of the cabinets. Really.

Tanya and I devised a filing system. Each portfolio company got a binder (or however many were necessary to accomodate the related paper-work), which were divided into the same sub-sections. From that point on, Kay and I spent about four months getting all the paper work in order. Luckily this was at the tail end of the internet bubble of 2000-2001, so we had plenty of free time to tend to it. Did I mention how much I detest filing? Yeah, anyway. As for the analyst reports, when I pointed them out to Michelle, she was shocked. She didn't even know we were getting them, and what's worse, we were paying to be on the mailing list. Since they hadn't really been in use, we ended up just cancelling the subscription. I weep for all the forests.

At the same time that we implemented this filing system for printed matter, we did the same in our computer directories, with the same set of main folders and sub-folders. There were about 6000 documents saved in our directories. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there were probably about 5000 file folders in them, too. The idiot who worked there before, and her sister, who had been the full-time secretary before her, were not particularly bright, and whenever they were asked to file something, they opened a new folder for it. We spent several months putting all that crap in order, too.

Once that was mostly finished, Kay and I pretty much sat and twiddled our thumbs all day. There was only so much filing you could do in a day without wanting to slit your wrists, but on the flip side, there was no work, either. It got to the point that I brought translation work to the office and did it there. Nobody gave a shit. Kay and I weren't the only bored ones. Though Tanya would never admit it, we could totally hear from her angry, aggressive mouse clicks that she was playing mine-sweeper in whatever part of the day she had free of yelling at someone.

One day Kay got a call from one of the secretaries in the head office (the fund was a subsidiary of a huge high-tech company), asking bizarre questions about tranferring Michelle's phone line and email to their office/server. Kay was mystified, and it wasn't until that day that we discovered - quite accidentally, as it were - that Michelle was leaving to go work in another division - the following day! We didn't actually say anything to her, waiting to see if she'd say anything as she was leaving for the day. She did not. She walked out at the end of the day and never even bothered to say goodbye to us, or tell us what she'd be doing. I don't know about you, but that doesn't strike me as something that a sane person would do. Whatever, one bitch down.

One day our insurance agent came to the office unannounced. Well - she didn't arrange an appointment, she called a few minutes before arriving, saying that she wanted to meet with the CEO. I told him she was on her way and he snootily asked "Do I have an appointment with her?", to which I replied in the negative. He went into his office and closed the door. A few minutes later I let the insurance agent in, and she asked to see him. I looked down on the phone to call him to let him know she was there, and noticed his call light was on. I told her he was on the phone and in the meanwhile she went to speak with Tanya. At this point I turned to Kay and asked her if she'd transferred a call to CEO. She looked at the phone light, looked at me, and said "No". We were perplexed. As I'd already mentioned, the man NEVER dialled his own phone. The agent kept poking her head out to see if he was free, but the call light stayed on. She eventually left, at which point Kay decided to investigate. She knocked on his door and he called her in. She told him the agent was gone, at which point he picked up the phone receiver, which had been sitting off the hook, on his desk, and hung up the phone. When Kay came out and told me this, after I finished scraping my jaw off the floor, we both laughed for a good half-hour about how utterly ridiculous the man was. And it wasn't that he didn't need to speak with her - it was that she dared show up without his advance permission. Ass.

Another equally flabbergasting incident occurred not long before I left the company. CEO went out to lunch with the company (parent company) accountant (Tanya was the accountant for our subsidiary only), a man who is very well known in the finance industry, and a senior partner in one of the biggest accounting firms in the country. He also happened to be CEO's personal accountant. Unlike CEO, this man was lovely - sweet, affable, and generally a good guy. He had no problem dialling his own phone, either. We got a phone call from him after they had finished their lunch meeting, and he told us that they needed to schedule a follow up meeting. Given who this was (he was one of the few people who could call up CEO and be put through right away rather than being told he'd get a call back), we went ahead and scheduled the appointment. CEO came back to the office a few minutes later, and saw that we had scheduled the meeting through Outlook. He came out and asked us "What's this meeting?". Kay replied that Accountant had called to set it up. CEO then asked "Do you work for him or for me?", to which Kay tried to reply that she thought it was something they'd agreed upon during their lunch. She only got as far as "We thought that..." when he cut her off and said "I don't pay you to think. Cancel the meeting". He turned back to his office while Kay and I just stared at each other in silence for a few moments. "He sure pays us a lot not to think," I said, but we were both too shocked to actually laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

It wasn't long after that that I decided I'd had enough, and resigned. It wasn't this specific incident that made me quit - just general boredom with the job, coupled with utter desolation about the situation in Israel. There were suicide bombers going off left, right and centre. I didn't feel like the Prime Minister (Sharon) was leading the country anywhere but down, and there seemed to be no light at the end of the local tunnel.

One thing I can say with certainty is that this was a wasted year in my life, both professionally and personally. On a personal level, I was at the office 10 hours a day, plus a 1-2 hour commute daily, so I wasn't really doing a whole lot socially, and the company was too small and, well - NARSTY - for me to improve my social life. On a professional level, the only thing I took away was the affirmation of how much I detested filing, and that was hardly something new.

Funnily enough, a few months after I left, Kay told me that Tanya decided that the computer filing wasn't to her liking (even though there was a big mess before, she knew where everything was - she preferred to work by memory, rather than logic, evidently), and she made Kay put everything back to the way it was. Kay didn't argue, knowing it would get her nowhere, and just did as she was told.

Even though I did close to nothing there for many months, it hadn't occured to anyone that it wasn't necessary to replace me, and in my wake followed several replacements, none of whom were able to tolerate the place or deal with the lovely personalities in question. Had I not left, I could have still been working there today, I'm sure. Kay stayed on for a couple more years, the poor soul.

I'm sure people can top that, though it's a tall order. What was your worst experience?

Posted by raptorgirl at June 27, 2007 08:17 PM