Grievances and Parentheses

The beauty of having a Union is someone will stand up for you. Enough time has passed that I can describe this. The story begins at the first No Longer Virtual. Not that I have anything new to say about that game changing conference.

I took two days off work to go. Without pay. Men can justify anything to themselves and I worked enough at Christmas not to miss two days of pay. I thought they would be pleased not to have to pay my salary as they would save on hours.

Returning that Monday my supervisor acted like I played hooky. In school I skipped because of taunting and bullying. My father never understood that. Probably because he set the standard of taunting and bullying.

No wonder I never wanted children. Riding high from a great conference my supervisor lost his soul. History remembers him as Psycho Dave for two reasons. There were many Davids at the time and we gave all men with that name a distinction. The other reason was he was nice until he was not.

The show must go on and he would yell at me in the second quarter when we have to play all four. There were minor threats. Eventually he was fired for threatening employees. He was nice at first. Cannot say what sent him to the dark side.

The Building Supervisor was a jerk. He brought Psycho Dave to my section because he did not like the professional relationship I had with my supervisor. We had a good time as the work was completed. He acted like we were conspiring.

There is nothing more dangerous than a Black woman and a white man working together. It meant nothing to us: we worked together and I still see a lot of her. The Building Supervisor was strange. He liked certain drivers and certain People of Color. There was no rhyme or reason.

He hated that I was in a position of minor authority. Something happened and I filed a grievance. I file very few grievances. Most of them are monetary. He intercepted it. Remember when I said going to management was like reporting a rape on a college campus? He buried a lot of issues and sent me to another position.

It was grunt work which led to a toxic environment. Many people called me "Cracker." That is the weakest racial epithet. I told this supervisor about that and he acted like it was no big deal.

If someone called him the N word I'm pretty sure he would not have acted like it was an everyday occurrence. For six months I was stuck on a bad detail. I even said I was "Sentenced" to it and he became uppity and surprised.

Eventually I spoke with a Shop Steward. Describing everything I endured he said "It sounds like they trying to make you quit." He managed to have me put back in my original detail.

I helped out there at the end of the day. He happened to hear that supervisor single me out and yell in a way that anyone who knows the rules could create trouble for someone who got away with far too much. They moved people around and I was no longer doing an entry level position where I was called everything except a child of God.

When Dave the Shop Steward filed a grievance against that supervisor I was moved to a better place where my work could be appreciated. That Building Supervisor could have had Eddie Murphy doing stand up comedy and he preferred Eddie Murphy pursuing a singing career.

No accounting for taste. All of those employees are in the rear view. The Building Supervisor spent his last day on the job driving his new Mercedes Benz into the lot. He departed like helicopters pulling out of Saigon April 30, 1975. At least the active part of the war was over.

Bringing me to "Mental health days." I took two days off to visit Atlanta and all Hell broke loose. I have never taken a sick day and this was pre approved. It makes me think taking a day off will cause everything to crash around me. I used all my mental health days in high school.

Adults hated me for that. It wouldn't have surprised me if they called me pejorative slang terms for missing so much school. The mentally challenged word was still in common usage. Adults never cared about insensitive and inaccurate descriptions. They wanted me to feel small.

And yet I was supposed to go to college, get married and start a family. So why treat me like a piece of garbage? Another story, another article. Nothing was resolved with that six months in exile. It was with those supervisors I learned they don't care about employee retention. They made a lot of money and cultivated a legacy that teaches me how not to treat others. Some people are best in the rear view.