1987 - 1988
Bully: Sharon "Susan twirley hair" Smiley
Food chain position: Risk Management Central Office Director over 12 healthcare facilities
Achilles Heel: Shallow personality.
Modus Operandi: She thought she was the cat's meow with her condescending facade packaged in a "I'm just like you" approach.
Profile: She carried a slumped over 5' 1" nothing body frame which exuded no confidence what so ever. She always made everyone who visited her office wait, even people with appointments. She had no personality (I know I said that before). Her staff hated her with a passion, while they presented a "All Hail to Sharon" welcome, to her visitors.
Food chain: JB (premo project manager, while supporting her team) along with DL, RW and myself all worked in another department called Patient Care Systems. We were an internal service provider, for the same central office, to Ms. Thang's department of Risk Management.
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Fast forward: We were tasked with developing (the computer field, now called IT for Information Technology, used to call it programming) a software package for Risk Management to track lawsuits against the company's healthcare facilties. Ms. Smiley's lead project manager, Susan, had a nervous breakdown half way through our project. At first, Susan appeared to be normal and on our side during the beginning stages of the project. Sharon caught wind of Susan's allegiance to us as normail people and proceeded to mentally pound Susan into the freaking dirt. This was done off-line to our meetings. At a halfway mark project meeting, Susan began twirling her hair for no apparent reason. Susan had obviously lost it. This gives you a good indication of the diabolical creature we only sometimes had to interact with. Unfortunately, Susan had to deal with Sharon everyday.
Rewind: Despite Sharon our project was an overwhelming success. JB had put a great team together. We were family for the few seconds in the millenium of life and very collaborative in looking out for each other. Our comradre help us get through this project while enduring internal departmental growing pains. Our department got bounced around from downtown New York City to moving multiple times within an uptown ofice building. We had lost our senior vice president, who was the guardian angel of our corporate "red headed step child" department. But we persevered through this project, despite Sharon's futile bullying. JB kept her at bay and out of our hair.
While JB fended off Sharon and we wound down the Risk management project, we began to ramp up for our next adventure. Without going in to details, but learning from previous bully experiences, we were the 1st team to spearhead local area networks into our corporation. Yup. This was a milestone marker, because the corporation was computer mainframe based, until we made the presentation and received "buy in" from senior management. I still place this accomplishment on my resume.
Moral of the Story?
People who seem to be your friend by seemly attempting to talk about things that inerest you, are not your freaking friends. Find out what really makes them tick when they are trying to be the sincerest of people.
Fear feeds people a steady diet of mediocrity. You are what you eat.
Copyright (c) C. E. Reid 2005
