Bullies

I

f my heart belongs to Top Chef, my mind belongs to Mad Men.  An intelligent, contemplative, multi-layered cast of characters inhabit the world of early ’60s advertising, and while much has changed in the work place, some things remain the same.

Like adult bullies.

I’ve grown to love Joanie, I truly have, and her marriage exposes all of the flaws and gender bias of the Eisenhower era.  She may sport the gloss of Jackie Kennedy, but she’s as much a post-war woman as Betty Draper.  In the first season, she was the woman I loved to hate. Peggy was so me in my first years in the corporate world (and it doesn’t help that my mom’s name is Peggy).  Eager to please, full of trust, Peggy and I were ripe for women like Joan, rapacious and almost sociopathic in her need to dominate and terrorize the other women who worked with and for her.

I met Joan when I worked in the newly formed Employee Benefits division at AEtna in San Diego.  Her name was Marcia, she owned a parrot named Pakalolo (it was the 80s) and a condo on the water with her husband. Her two daughters were just as terrorized as those of us in her office; on the rare occasion they stopped by, you could see how they both tried to fold in upon themselves to become as small as possible to avoid her notice.  I may have been a Junior Account Executive (aka a Senior Account Executive’s indentured slave), but I cowered in fear every time Marcia stopped by for a “talk”.  Those TPS Reports bandied about in Office Space hit a bit too close to home for me.  In my AEtna days, Marcia collected all of the sales reports, and loath be the employee who didn’t prepare his or her data to company specs on the newly purchased IBM Displaywriter!

Fast forward to my days as the Marketing Director for a local engineering firm.  Joan was the Accounting Manager.  We were on the same rung of the management ladder, and we got along quite well being newly married with our first born children on the way.  I was lucky that time; the adult bully set her sights on other women, most notably a newly hired mechanical engineer with few social skills and painfully lacking in any sense of style.  The other women in the office (myself included) did our best to run interference for this victim, but we were no match for Joan, and that young engineer quickly left the firm.

Every workplace has a bully, or at least that’s been my experience.  In recent years, our society has spent a significant amount of time and money addressing the issue of childhood bullying.  As a teacher, I’ve been to numerous training sessions about bullying, what it is and how to respond, but I’ve never received any information, training, or support regarding adult bullying.  In Adult Bullying: Perpetrators and Victims, author Peter Randall states:

Adams (1992) has made the point that bullying at work is one of the greatest sources of stress put upon employees and that organisations in general have been slow to recognise this.  Managers have suggested to me that one of the reasons for this is that bullying is not accepted as a credible label for the kind of abuse that people experience at work or in the community at large.  It may be that the term bullying carries with it too strong an association with childhood and difficulties victims experience at school or on the way to school.  This leads to it being denied as a stressful circumstance within the realities of adult life.  ’It may happen to children but it doesn’t hapen to grownups’ could well be the underpinning attitude. Indeed, Adams (1992) also makes the point that victims are often not dealt with in a suppportive fashion; instead of being assisted in freeing themselves of the attention of the bully they are often expected to ‘pull themselves together’ and ‘not take any nonsense’.  What to a victim may seem to be a horrendous, stressful form of persecution may to the observer be nothing more than two or more people who do not get on together.

I don’t remember any experiences with a bully in my public school years, but I met Joan in various incarnations throughout my adult life in the workplace.  As the seasons go by on Mad Men, we understand what motivates Joan, and she becomes much more empathetic and sympathetic.  However, when you are confronted with Joan (or Pete Campbell) in a workplace devoid of Don Draper and Bert Cooper, it’s infinitely worse than cowering before a bully on the playground.

At work, there’s no teacher fresh from a bullying inservice to try their hand at defusing the situation.  All the victim can do is fold in upon themselves to become as small as possible to avoid her notice.