Can’t Win for Lose

I liked my boss.  He was a refreshing change from the man I had to deal with six months prior.  Oh, my previous boss, before Mac Daddy, had it in for me from day one.  Since I can’t name names, we’ll refer to him as Mr. Charlie.  Mr. Charlie couldn’t stand me.  I didn’t know if it was because I was black or because I was a woman in a predominately man’s role: project manager of a construction site.  Didn’t know shit about construction, but I knew how to schedule work and make sure it got done on time and under budget.  And because I looked cute in Levis and Timberlands, the guys always worked extra hard.  It didn’t matter that I was getting bonds released, Mr. Charlie would send me nasty-grams via email at three and four o’clock in the morning.  By what he said and the way he said it… unable to string a coherent sentence together, I knew he was lit up.  When I asked him about his emails, he’d start yelling, cussing and turning beet red.  He told me that I made him feel unworthy.  When I politely told him that I can’t make him feel like shit; that he made himself feel that way, I got called into HR.  Never mind he cussed me out for five minutes beforehand.  But HR always had my back and ended up reprimanding him.  They finally got rid of Mr. Charlie, or actually, he got rid of himself, coming in the office red-eyed and liquored up as if he had no damn sense.  They replaced him with Mac Daddy.

Oh, Mac Daddy, was the five foot four, Vanilla Ice of the office.  He was married to Mary Poppins, but everyone knew he liked to drink his coffee black.  If there was a sistah in sight, Mac Daddy was not too far behind.  At first we got along well.  He respected the fact that I could do my job without a construction background, and he actually started teaching me about land development.  But then he got too comfortable and started asking me about my personal life.  Why I didn’t have a boyfriend?  If I liked women?  And as he’d ask me these questions, he looked at me like I was pork chops with gravy and extra soft buttery biscuits.  I told him that the topic was unprofessional and made me uncomfortable, but that only seemed to turn him on all the more.  And then one day, like a kid in the eighth grade, he said to another co-worker right in front of me, “she likes to play with her own team”.  I wanted to get undignified and stoop down to an unbearable level.  That’s when I knew, it was time to go.  Oh, there’s more to this story than this, but I’d better stop here.  Bottom line, can’t win for lose.