Maya Bohnhoff
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

I had something similar to this happen at a company at which I’d worked for about seven years, moving up from the assembly line to define a position for myself as a records management and micrographics specialist. After the birth of my first child, I wanted to move to a different position and was given a choice of 20 hour week with no benefits working for a male manager that I knew and admired, and working a 35 hour week with benefits for an older female HR manager that I thought of as a friend (we both led company-sponsored aerobics classes).

Though the male manager really, really wanted me and promised he’d move heaven and earth to bump me up to 35 hours and then to full time, I felt I had to be realistic. I was the main breadwinner for the family. I took the job in HR. That was when I discovered that my “friend” was a Queen Bee. All the moxie that had gotten me my records management position and made me valuable to the engineering VP I’d worked for and the manufacturing VP who wanted me in his division were threatening to her. She systematically sabotaged me at every turn.

By way of example, when I realized that no one was using the mainframe software the company had installed for word processing and other tasks, I undertook to learn the system (I was already the company’s go to girl for desktop computer training and wrote a user-friendly software column for the company newspaper.) This did not, by the way, interfere with my regular work. BUT, at my first review, the QB discovered that I had left out a job description in a list of job postings I’d typed. She wrote me up for poor computer skills. She knew full well that was hitting me where I lived. I responded that it was a proofreading error, had only happened one time and was easy to fix. I also noted that I’d taught everyone in the office to use the new mainframe software.

Here’s what she said: “Well, you made the mistake on a computer, so it’s reflective of your computer skills. And you used company time to learn the system—you should have done it on your spare time. And because you’re still on probation as a new hire, I expect your work to be perfect.” (This because she knew the person she held up to me as an example of perfection regularly made errors.)

That was one example out of many, which I documented carefully. I understood early on that this was an attempt to force me to quit, which I refused to do, so she was eventually forced to fire me. I was young and such an emotional wreck at this point that I didn’t take all of the documentation I had on what she’d done to me to the labor board.

To add insult to injury, I discovered she’d taken a favorite album I used for aerobics cool-downs.

Weirdly happy ending, though. God or fate put this woman in a position to know about two of my career successes about a year later. I’d gotten a job at a software development startup and had gone down the street to buy coffee for our four person office, when who should I find breakfasting in the coffee roaster’s shop, but my ex-boss and her assistant (who later apologized for her part in my demise). Queen Bee told me I looked great and that I seemed very happy and I was able to report that I was fantastic because just before I’d left the office, my new boss had given me a promotion to software designer and a substantial raise.

Another six months or so passed. I burst into my mother-in-law’s lighting design shop to tell her that I had just gotten an agent for my writing. I was thrilled and squeeing all over the place. A woman popped out from behind a display and stared at me. It was my ex-boss, looking stunned. She mumbled congrats and left the shop.

I could not have engineered those two encounters any better if I had scripted them. Heck, if I’d put ’em in a story, my editor would call ‘foul!’ and protest that readers wouldn’t believe it.

Here’s my takeaway, though. I left that job feeling incompetent, but had an epiphany. I and my worth were not defined by that job or any other. I had an amazing husband and a beautiful, happy baby boy. I had writing, music and relationships with loving people and a relationship with God that put value on other things than how well I could type a letter, proofread a list or jump through someone’s hoops. If I was, indeed, incompetent at that job or any other, so what?

Then there’s this: there was nothing I could have done to avoid what happened except possibly to actually produce subpar work. The reality was that the better I did the job, and the more the other women working in the office looked to me for help, the more threatened my boss felt.

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    Maya Bohnhoff

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    I write, therefore, I am.