I practically threatened the doctor in to signing me off
work again. The finance-cum-HR guy at work was badgering me via email; wanting
to know what I was doing and basically covering his own backside so he didn’t
get sued, or fired, or something.
Having been signed off for well over a month, and with less
than a week to go before my wedding – oh, yes, I was getting married too - he
would drop me an email saying that I was no longer entitled to take the time off.
I had been signed off due to illness and
therefore not accrued sufficient working hours to warrant two weeks off. This wasn’t some faceless HR person ticking
me off as a mere employee number in the cogs of a giant capitalist monster,
this was a guy in an office of no more than twenty people; I saw him every day.
More often than not, I sat with him in the tiny kitchen with three chairs in
and ate my lunch with him.
‘Andrew, due to your illness, you have not accrued enough working
hours with the company to entitle you to take the holiday booked in April. You
will therefore not be able to take the time off as planned’.
I fired an email back saying I would be taking the holiday
as planned. ‘Whilst I would very much like to return to the office during his
period,’ I began, ‘you will be aware that I have booked this time off for my
wedding, and I will take the time off as agreed two months ago’. I had been
planning the wedding for a year, and stressed the significant emotional input,
and financial outlay involved. ‘I do hope you understand my situation’ I
finished. I didn’t care if he understood my situation.
His treatment of me - this email in particular - made my
fiancée cry. And my fear and worry about my illness and my job turned in to a
visceral hatred for the man. I was used to feeling sad and ill, and feeling
like the world was going to end. But it was somehow survivable; I didn’t know
how I would do it, but I knew there must be a way. Seeing my already worried
fiancée crumple in to tears killed any bravery I was clinging too, and turned a
just barely bearable situation in to an awful black hole of hopelessness.
I never told him how he caused a nice enough chap struggling
with illness to worry himself sick that he was going to be fired for any reason
this clueless, heartless or just plain incompetent moron thought fitting. I
never told him how much worse he made everything with his pointless and
unhelpful email comments. I wanted him to feel half of what I was feeling – the
sickness, the dizziness, everything - and then I wanted to put the pressure on
him that he was putting on me. I wanted him to feel scared and hopeless, like
his whole world was about to come crashing down; like he would lose everything.
I tried to phone him countless times to discuss the
situation. I thought five minutes on the phone would serve us better than five
hundred emails. But he always refused my calls, and an hour or so later I would
receive an email from him badgering me about something else. I was angry, yet
oddly pacified by this; the thought of this weak little man feeling plenty
strong enough to write things in emails. It’s the easiest thing in the world to
sit at arm’s length and kick a man while he’s down.
I sort of got over it in the end. Mainly because I stopped
caring. The worst part was thinking that he would carry on in his £60k job doing
nothing very much except running out of the building when his phone rang, and
he would treat the next person exactly the same. He would make them feel
watched, judged, he would pressure them and make everything a hundred times
worse. And all the time he would sit in his cosy glass office driving his
expensive bright yellow sports car without a care in the world.
I sort of got over
it in the end. Some days I still want to go in to his stupid office and shake
him until he breaks down in tears, but I know it wouldn’t do any good. If only
there was another way I could make him see. If only I had a place where I could
call him by his name and present the fear and torment he caused, if only there
was an arena I could post his emails and let the whole world know his woeful
lack of intelligence, understanding and compassion in the face of someone
suffering horrible anxiety and panic attacks…
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