The red button
Sooner or later I have a decision to make. Do I go nuclear or not?
I have of course, been forced into this position. But I hesitate against destroying someone’s life.
Firstly, it’s a career tank, for him. I have been the victim of people trying to tank your career. Its not nice and it has an impact on your mental health. I also don’t want to have to live with the fact that I destroyed someone’s life.
Next it makes you radioactive. People feel they can’t joke around you because they feel they’ll be misconstrued. Goodbye congenial office culture.
Next there is the second guessing. I’ve never been a confident person. I’m fairly articulate and honest but I don’t want to worry about if people will believe me.
So to lay it out in the open. I am laying out my history of bullying, both as bully and bullied.
1. Bully.
My cousin Sam and I went to the same primary school. We never really got along as kids and as an adult he doesn’t speak to me. He was, as I can see now the victim of some neglect. However as a child I didn’t know that the fact that he was going to school with his hair not combed and his legs not creamed was not his fault. I used to tease him, as did many of the other people in the class (not to excuse my actions) it clearly left a mark, for which I am sorry. One joke might have been harmless, but it became a reoccurring joke and it went on for too long. It wasn’t meant to be malicious, and I didn’t reserve my venom only for him. But he is the only one I feel I actually hurt.
2. Bullied- Secondary school.
I moved secondary school to start year 9 in hell. i.e. Southampton. I went to St Annes Catholic school and there a girl called Jasmine would make my life hell. Say unkind words pick on me. I remember going to my head of year in tears. There was another girl called Alice, who would jump on my back whist I was carrying my bookbag on my back. It has caused permanent damage to my back. No one believed me back then because she was on the Oxbridge track. Yet I have spent hundreds on my back and will do so for the rest of my life.
3. Bullied- Job 1.
Job 1 was my favourite place to work, and maybe I should have stayed there. However the reason I left was a woman called Jo. Jo was my boss’ boss and was 3 rungs ahead of me on the corporate ladder. When she started she wanted to meet all of us. In our first meeting, within 5 minutes I told her of all the things I was doing and how I planned to help people. I also told her that I was an ACCA student looking to complete my practical experience requirement. She immediately turned around and said. “you can’t get your PER signed off, you are a C3” C3 referred to my rank as a graduate position. Because of various restructure I was doing work of a C5 which was a qualified accountant. That alone was enough to scare me if she then didn’t say “I won’t have you signed off” i.e. I won’t let my boss sign off on my experience requirement. Someone who had met me less than 10 minutes ago was playing God with my future. So I walked out of that meeting and chatted to my mentor, the guy who was coaching me through it. He said “she can’t say that and she definitely can’t enforce it” I wasn’t about to find out. I went out to job agencies, I applied for every internal job out there. I tried to get out of non-food finance so that she could no longer hurt me. Then something awful happened. Her dad had an accident not long after we met on holiday, and he subsequently passed away. She took 3 months off. I didn’t meet her again until my last day at Sainsbury’s, I worked up my most Christian smile to greet her after the horrendous thing she’d said to me. But it wasn’t a big smile.
4. Bullied-Jub 2
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. I left Job 1 to go to the Job 2 where I met Sonia. Sonia was a Karen who was American-Indian. She used both nationalities to justify her loud, brash rude presence. I was 23 and starting a new high profile role. It was clear from the get go she didn’t like me. But I handled her quite well. Until the second budget of my time there (and last) Her boss, at the last minute before the upload, upped her sales target. He informed me, and I put it into the budget. He also informed her… months later. I had the whole thing on email, it was something he wanted to do for a long time and then he pressed “go” on it. Then when the budgets were published and she found out her new budget was actually her old sales target and to achieve her targets she’d have to literally work twice as hard (its not that I didn’t feel for her) She came after me. She was part of the amalgamated directorate that included literally all my business partners, and she told every single one of them that I had “fiddled” her budget. In fact I actually heard it second hand from another colleague who was my business partner what she’d done. I immediately called and emailed her to tell her this was untrue. She went on for weeks about it. Eventually a meeting needed to be called between my boss (head of finance, her, her boss, Executive Director of Business Development, the Sales Director, (one of the first people she told and the person who’d told me) and my Executive Director. I wasn’t present even though they were discussing my conduct and my future. I was exonerated. It was a short meeting where her boss told her what he’d done and why he’d done it and then everyone went back to their business. To be clear, what she accused me of was an offence that could have gotten me disbarred. It was serious. All my Executive director or my boss would have needed to do was inform my accounting body of what I was being accused of and they would have been forced to launch their own investigation. Therefore she was playing around with my entire career. Afterwards I asked my boss to make her apologise, she’d made my position untenable. My boss said no, “it would upset her and it would harm business relations with finance” Sonia still felt Finance was to blame for her boss upping her target and she was sore, and was still telling everyone, because she was louder than me and had been there first. I had to go. So I did.
5. Bullied-Job 4
There weren’t bullies per say in RCGP, my next organisation. Just a lot of nasty people. I’m not going to single any one person out for abuse. But Job 4 I will. I got Job 4 during the darkest period of my life. I was unemployed, I had left RCGP because my mental health was so poor I couldn’t even get up in the morning. I was a mess. A charity case. Thank God for Melania who took up my case and got me a settlement. I was being abused by my ex husband to such an extent I told him I wanted a divorce. I only filed for divorce on the day they confirmed I got Job 4 because I needed to know where “lawyer money” was coming from. My appointment was a whirlwind. I was interviewed by the Financial controller at the time. Andy. This was on the Thursday. He was let go on the Friday. On the Friday the CFO telephone interviewed me instead of face to face because something urgent came up. That should have been my first red flag. I was to start the next working day, but Christmas was in the way so I started on the 27th December. I met the CFO early on the 27th. He took an instant dislike to me. Herein started a campaign of bullying and belittlement that meant by February, I couldn’t eat or sleep. Bearing in mind I’d just left an abusive relationship and a toxic workplace where I was being scapegoated for the failings of an entire company (a company that continues to fail) and you can see why his treatment made me a nervous wreck. Eventually I was left, it was that or I’d have walked in front of a train, single best thing that could happen to me because the alternative was quite literally death. I’d begun to become suicidal again.
6. Bullied-Job 6.
I got this job that I’m currently in after a long period of hell. After Job 4, I got a job at Portsmouth Diocese. I took a couple of months out first. There I learnt that you don’t need to be a bully to treat someone badly. Toxic work culture and literally hell. So as my dad was dying I made the move to a small charity in the health and social care space. So scarred was I about my experience in Portsmouth I nearly didn’t take the job. I’m glad I did. What Portsmouth was serving up, I wasn’t eating. My first day I stepped into a world I wish could be different.
My first day I was informed that my boss’ father had passed away suddenly and that my predecessor was going to take me through some bits to get my feet wet. I was numb. My own father was on his deathbed. It’s a miracle I was alive for that time. That was Monday. Wednesday was a board meeting in London, face to face. My dad deteriorated massively whilst we were enjoying after work drinks and my mum told me to race to come see him. So I left a sunny afternoon with normal people to go back to my own world of personal hell. I made it in time and kissed my dad goodbye one last time. I said "wait for me” He couldn’t and he didn’t. That was at 9pm. He passed away the next morning at 3am. I took a week compassionate leave as well as one day for the funeral. Then a state of numbness ensued. I did my best to fight it, but during that time I made a mistake on companies house. I didn’t notice it for 6 whole months until a man called Joe came into my life.
The man didn’t like me from the get go. He’d speak very rudely to me, and then go into meetings all “sunny boy” like a sociopath. He tried to pressure me the very first week into doing something immoral and that was my first red flag. Then he did something really bad. He swept it under the carpet. Next he hauled me up to London because “He didn’t understand what I do” then he belittled me in front of trustees when I was trying to do my job. He has blamed me for something another colleague has done in front of the chairman. Finally, he found the mistake I made in October and gleefully and jubilantly pointed it out to me. He made no solutions as to correct it. He just enjoyed his moment in the sun of “nailing me.” I hope it was worth it for him, because for me there is also no confusion around the action I must take. I must have courage. I must push the red button.
Grace and Courage
Annetta Mother-Smith