Betty Ann was a screamer. I heard her long before I met her. She yelled at everyone, and we all covered our ears and hid under our desks. Thankfully, she wasn’t in the office everyday. If you ever worked for a screamer, I hope you were as lucky.
The lay of the land…
It was 1977 and the summer between my junior and senior year in college. On the recommendation of Butler University’s journalism department head, Professor Art Levin, Curtis Publishing hired me as a paid intern for Trap & Field, the official magazine of the Amateur Trapshooting Association and a sister publication to the better-known but somewhat past-its-glory Saturday Evening Post.
Trapshooting is similar to skeet-shooting—neither of which I knew anything about when I showed up for work, but it didn’t matter. The associate editor and a full-time staff writer took me in hand. They were great to work with, though they warned me about the big boss and her peers.
Apparently at Curtis, screaming bosses were de rigueur. Their angry diatribes often filtered from their inner-office suites into shared hallways, and on my way to the lunch room and back I sympathized with the employees at whom they directed their ire.
The plot thickens…
Editor-in-chief Betty Ann mostly worked from home in Columbus, IN, (about an hour’s drive south), so when she was in the office I tiptoed around, not wanting to wind up in the crosshairs of her trap gun.
That worked until mid-August.
One of my duties included preparing packets of copy and corrected proofs to send to the printer. This was before the age of personal computers, Internet and digital publishing, so the procedure was to stamp a consecutive number on each and every page, log all into a record book by number, and take the packet to the bus station in downtown Indianapolis for overnight transport to a printer in Louisville, KY.
The eve of Armageddon dawned busy but deceptively calm. We were on deadline for the September issue, and I prepared the packet as always and left for the bus station. Next day, the printer said he didn’t receive the packet, and that’s when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, all rolled up into Betty Ann, attacked full force.
Without any interrogatory, she decided it was MY fault the packet was missing and pounced on me like I was “Satan’s Lie” and she was God Almighty, taking me down verbally in front of the staff. I showed her the record book and the bus receipt, calmly told her I did everything I was supposed to, and refused to concede fault.
That wasn’t the answer she wanted.
“You should be chagrined you caused so many people so much wasted time,” she said, insisting I own up to my mistake and produce the missing packet. If she hadn’t cowed me so with her shouting, I might have laughed, since there were so many other, more logical things that could have gone wrong that didn’t involve me.
Like maybe the bus company lost the package? Or the printer mislaid it?
I stood by my innocence, but she was so abusive that before I left for the day I told the associate editor, Joan, I wouldn’t be back. Classes at Butler resumed in a couple weeks anyway. Joan, of course, tried to talk me out of it, saying Betty Ann would be furious (and probably yell at her over it).
The aftermath
Sure enough, Betty Ann called me at home next day and told me the printer found the package.
Duh.
Whoever received it didn’t get it to the right person in a timely fashion, she said, and she wanted me to come back. She did NOT, however, apologize for blaming me and being such a bitch, so I told her no, that I wasn’t working anywhere where anyone talked to me like that.
Clearly, no one had ever refused to bend to her will before. Her mildly conciliatory tone at the conversation’s start shifted quickly back to demanding and loud. I held the phone away from my ear so my eardrums wouldn’t pop and so my mom, standing nearby, could hear the wrath of hell pour forth.
If I didn’t come back immediately and help them get out the September issue, Betty Ann threatened to give me a bad reference. “I’ll make sure you never work in the journalism industry anywhere ever,” were her precise words.
I told her that blackballing was against the law, so she better not try it. That shut her up, and I took the opportunity of her stunned silence to hang up.
But Betty Ann wasn’t done. She immediately called Dr. Levin, and told him I just “up and quit.” He, of course, called me right away to find out what really happened and got a big chuckle out of how I handled it. What she wanted from him was a replacement. “Someone really good, just like Susan,” she said, which gave both Art and I a laugh.
Postscript & revelation
I still don’t know where I got the nerve to stand up to her the way I did. My dad’s training maybe? I always was a mouthy kid, and I got my sense of justice from him.
To be honest, the only reason I could walk out on that job was because I still lived with my folks and would return to school in a few weeks for my senior year. Later, when I had my own place and bills to pay, I would react differently to bosses behaving badly.
I’ll share some of those experiences in future posts tagged, generously, “Bosses Not at Their Best” (BN@TB). Please share similar experiences you’ve had and how you handled them in the comments.
& {sometimes} WHY 
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