Who's the Boss?
I remember my introduction to work very clearly. Not including my part-time job in high school as a cashier at a big-chain pharmacy (to this day, the one where I was happiest, for reasons I would later learn to appreciate), this was an internship at a prestigious Wall Street investment firm while a junior in college. It was at JP Morgan.
Having that name on my resume, I admit, opened so many doors for me in those early years. It’s amazing what name-dropping does in this society. I ultimately (and very quickly) left it all for something entirely different, but the impressions made on that job stayed with me forever.
Once I got past the fancy front door, security, and first floor marble decor (honestly, that made it all look like a mental institution), the elevator door opened and I was introduced to my department. It was one that handled some pretty confidential information - executive stock bonuses - and everyone (including yours truly) had some kind of role in its accounting and reporting.
I was introduced to my cubicle (grey cloth and mahogany wood), my supervisor, Mike, who adored me (in my performance review, he described me as a “quietly confident” employee), and his underling Michelle, an equally boisterous but less attractive Bridget Jones look-alike. Before I could get to work, though, I had to hunker down. There was tension abound, and everyone was huddled in their cubicles, staying with their own herd (division).
It would appear I had just walked into an exercise in active-shooter preparation, but instead, over on the other side of the floor, another intern was experiencing one of many human nightmares - getting one’s finger stuck in a three-hole punch. Martina was a tall, affable, black woman, surrounded by pasty-skinned white folk, trying, very successfully, to rescue her fingers without any bloodshed or loss of a part of her hand.
I wanted to go over and offer my support, but it was very clear that this was not acceptable behavior. I was part of another division, and we stayed with our own.
That was not my first experience with insecure, fear-based, groupthink adult behavior that made me question the sanity of so-called authority figures (I already was seasoned by parents, teachers, priests, and other adults), and there have been so many other examples since.
Today, I hear adults refer to their supervisors as their “bosses,” and utter words such as “I had to do it for my job.” Where did this complicity originate? Why do we normalize enslavement? (I later learned why, it has to do with our origins as a species and alien DNA manipulation - but that’s for another blog).
Who’s your boss? Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it feels different than any other. Humanity is in a battle for our basic rights. But how many of us will remember our Divine sovereignty? That we are masters of our own destiny, with the keys to break the chains that (we think) bind us?
Stay tuned for 2022 and beyond (and, by the way, Martina’s fingers were saved from the three-punch hole).
