My typist and I recently fell out after a profitable and amicable 7 year relationship. Was this because of irreconcilable differences? No. It was because of niceness.
My typist had a grandson coming to stay over the summer, just as I asked her to proofread DANNY 3/1. She didn’t want to do this because her grandson is 17 years old and she knew she would never be able to hide a book like DANNY from him. She was afraid he would see it on her computer and, assumably, discover his granny was a pervert. Or a hypocrite.
Instead of telling me she couldn’t do the proofreading, or finding a way to hide the book from her grandson, she wrote to me and told me categorically “yes, to the work”. Unfortunately, she then followed this up by telling me she was going password lock it because “I don’t want him to see reading material like that on MY computer”. Block capitals hers.
I wrote back to her and said I found this kind of comment hurtful and offensive, and that if she wanted to censor her grandson’s reading material she should just do it and not share her attitudes with me.
She wrote back to me and blamed me for not liking password locked documents (true; they cause problems in formatting during printing). She then said she was sick and stressed – something that had not been mentioned before – and now she couldn’t do the work.
In the course of three e-mails we had gone from “Yes, to the work” to “I no longer want to do this work”. Huffing was being huffed and sulking was being sulked. And it was all my fault.
I wrote back and told her I assumed she no longer wanted to work for me, now or in the future, and thanked her for all her hard work over the years. I even, foolishly, signed it “Love, Chancery”. Never sign an e-mail to an employee “Love” anything.
Very surprisingly, she sent me another e-mail, a terse one-liner telling me she “wouldn’t say never, just not at present”. With no love. And notably no apology. She had never made an apology, because, of course, it was all my fault for putting her in a bind like this, offering her work when it was inconvenient.
The e-mail she got back was long enough to constitute a work of non-fiction. It finished with the words “You are contemptible”
But really the whole ‘fight’ – if it can be graced with such a word, since no-one raised their voice till the bitter end – was due to niceness.
She was far too nice to tell me that she didn’t want to type my filthy book in her grandson’s presence. Just as she was too nice to tell her grandson that she had been typing my filthy books for seven years. Lying to both of us was easier.
When I was not nice and told her she hurt my feelings, she blamed me for being far too controlling in not wanting my books password locked. And in a backhand way she was right. For, in actual fact, when she first sent the e-mail telling me she was going to password lock the document, I should have reminded her, forcefully, she was going to do nothing of the kind – if she wanted to continue working for me. Instead, I was nice and said only that she’d hurt me, expecting her to be apologetic and placatory.
When, instead, she blamed me for her position, and suddenly announced she was too stressed and sick, she was lying once again, when she should havebitten the bullet and told me it was password locking or nothing. And when I answered her, I didn’t just say “Fine, gotta let you go” I tried to end our relationship nicely and thanked her for all her work.
This may seem a good thing, but in actuality I showered her with praise every single time she worked for me. I told her she was great, reassured her; in short, convinced her she was invaluable and irreplaceable, which she wasn’t. When we went ‘bankrupt’, I paid her less to do work on two books, and apologised to her profusely and repeatedly, even although I was paying her money we couldn’t spare; and even although she had earned thousands of pounds from me during the years before. I believe this led to her feeling it was okay to tell me what she was going to do, and led to her thinking she could dictate terms. Hence her final e-mail, trying to have her cake and eat it too.
That last e-mail looks (is?) profoundly stupid, in retrospect, but why shouldn’t she think she can tell me she’ll maybe work for me some time in the future, if she feels like it? I had thanked her for being a bad employee. I had convinced her over many years that she could do no wrong. Niceness came back and bit me in the ass. Like it bit her, for that matter.
Niceness is a female affliction and it does us no good whatsoever. For any reason, at any time. Nice girls lose their typists, and their typists lose their first rate employers. Learn from this. Because one of us should, and I certainly didn’t.
Buy DANNY by Chancery Stone. She is poor and has no typist. But feels curiously free……..
“Niceness is a female affliction and it does us no good whatsoever.”
I’d say that the greatest female affliction is insecurity. One putters along quite happily with women with whom one has (one assumes) a fairly decent professional or personal relationship, and then The Wrong Thing Is Said, and the next thing one knows, the relationship is Over. Gone. Just like that.
I’ve had it done to me; I say something unwise and the affronted woman not only drops me like a hot potato, they tell other people Their Version Of What I Said in an attempt to garner even more hatred against me. More crucially, I’ve done it to other women myself: if I detect anything that looks like contempt my instinct is to cut the relationship dead right then and there, before I *really* get hurt.
In my experience men don’t seem to possess this mutual distrust, this expectation that “other people are going to hurt you, it’s just a question of when”. Male friends of mine chat cheerfully about guys of their acquaintance who’ve bitched, backstabbed and generally done things that would destroy a female friendship past all repairing… And they treat such behaviour as a JOKE. (“Of course I still talk to him! Why shouldn’t I?” I remember one guy saying cheerfully of the bloke who tried to steal his girlfriend.)
I’m not trying to condemn either you or your typist here: I’m just saying I recognize this as a typical “female-pattern” break-up. It’s very sad when it happens, but I suspect it would take a few generations of complete gender equality before the problem vanishes altogether. Kudos to you for being open about it: not enough people have the strength to discuss that kind of painful situation.
Can you type it yourself? I hope so. Best of luck!
Hi Laurie, your “I’m not trying to condemn either you or your typist here: I’m just saying I recognize this as a typical “female-pattern” break-up” proves my point exactly. Here you are being nice.
Why NOT condemn me and/or my typist? After all, I did. If you were a man you wouldn’t think twice about passing judgement on us, or stating your opinion without a saver and a self-belittling “I’m just saying”.
And I’m not sure I would agree that “they tell other people Their Version Of What I Said in an attempt to garner even more hatred against me” is a sign of insecurity, or indeed any part of insecurity. I’d say it was more indicative of passive-aggression, more commonly known as back-stabbing. The “they” in question is trying to have you ostracised by the group as a (female) way of punishing you because it wouldn’t be nice to punch you in the mouth. Which is what she REALLY wants to do. Did she but have the guts to admit it.
Men distrust each other as much as women do. The difference between them is when something goes wrong between men they have the option of screaming abuse, and actual physical expression of anger, such as beating the shit out of someone. Women don’t have that luxury, in case someone thinks they’re not being nice, i.e. feminine and ladylike.
I don’t think any female/female problems are due to insecurity, unless you consider that being frightened of being ostracised is the root problem. The root problem is we don’t say what we mean to each other because someone, inevitably, will call us a bitch. And that wouldn’t do at all.
Women are chickenshit – plain and simple.
“Hi Laurie, your “I’m not trying to condemn either you or your typist here: I’m just saying I recognize this as a typical “female-pattern” break-up” proves my point exactly. Here you are being nice.”
Well, I was actually being honest there, rather than “nice”. “Nice” would have been to keep my thoughts to myself!
My kneejerk reaction was actually “Aha, hello mutual misunderstanding followed by irrevocable break-up of a long-term friendship, I recognize YOU!” and to wonder what this says about women in general.
To which you give a very reasonable answer – women don’t have the option of “losing it”. When men “lose it”, it’s seen as a natural masculine expression of extreme emotion, and quite likely to clear the air. When women “lose it”, it’s seen as hysterical whining and almost inevitably brings a loss of face. That fits with my experiences, I have to say.
“The root problem is we don’t say what we mean to each other”
Well, going back to the secretary, the whole root problem started when she was TOO honest about what she thought. What she said was insensitive at best and bloody rude at worst – but the point was, she said exactly what she meant. Maybe we as women don’t like it when people say exactly what they mean… whereas men take it as honesty, and are less likely to take offence?
“the whole root problem started when she was TOO honest about what she thought. What she said was insensitive at best and bloody rude at worst – but the point was, she said exactly what she meant.”
I agree it could look that way to an outsider, Laurie, but I don’t believe that’s true. Had she been telling the truth she would have said, “I’d love to do the work, but my family has no idea that I work with such filthy material. I can’t possibly let my grandson know I do stuff like this so you are going to have to let me password-lock this, because I won’t do it otherwise.”
That would have been so forthright she’d have been out on her arse and she didn’t want that – hence all the blame-shifting, and then the sulking when she got caught out. Trying to have her cake and eat it, like I said.
Plus there’s the whole other conversation on why her family had no idea she worked on a book with explicit sex in it – for SIX years. Niceness rears its ugly head once more.And that’s a particualrly disturbing ‘niceness’ when you consider she is the (sole) family elder and yet she felt obliged to lie to her children and her grandchildren.
I agree absolutely about the hysterical part of women ‘losing it’, but the whining, not so much. I think that’s what they actually DO rather than how they are perceived. I think if women actually roared abuse and kicked filing cabinets, instead of whining, something more than “hysterical” would be cited. It’s not a coincidence that “agressive” women often find themselves sectioned. “Crazy bitch” comes to mind. I know that one first hand, I get called it all the time. And that’s just for speaking out of turn, i.e. being honest. I rest my case.
You know, Laurie, after rereading the above post, other than the “I won’t do it otherwise”, her first e-mail actually almost was that, so I think you ARE right up to that point, re the honesty.
Where she really fell down was afterwards when she blamed everyone and anyone but herself and where she wouldn’t just say “You have to let me have my way or I’m not playing”. It was saying that part that was too forceful for her, and where she fell into the deep shit, not of ‘being nice’, but of trying to keep her nice image after she had well and truly lost it.
I’d agree with that assessment: it wasn’t the honesty of “I can’t do this with young kids around”, it was the face-saving tactic of “Oooh I feel ill” which was unacceptable.
(Also, the arrogance of that one-liner! If I had someone ready to say goodbye to me, I’d either fling my hand out and beg them to listen whilst I explained the misunderstanding/apologized for my error, or I’d be “Fine. Bye then.” That one-liner, however, is such a perfunctory attempt to maintain contact with the goose that lays the golden eggs that I’m not surprised you reacted with anger.)
So, yes, it was all down to the fact that she wouldn’t face up to the consequences of her own actions. Chickenshit, as you said.