Dan Kempner
Editor
Legacy Magazine
“The Archangel Foster turned back to where he had been interrupted. Oh, yes, a poor soul temporally designated as ‘Alice Douglas.’ To be a Goad was a hard assignment at best and she had met it unflaggingly.”1
– Stranger in a Strange Land
For seven years I was bedeviled, berated, be-bothered, and irritated beyond belief by a woman who, according to the hiring rolls and the management, worked for me. “I don’t work for you,” she would point out virtually every time I asked her to do a task. “I work for the company.”
“You do,” I’d answer. “And so do I. The company hired me to manage this location and they gave me the title of manager and they told me there would be people reporting to me and that you would be one of them.”
“Nope,” she would answer. “I work for the company, not you.”
There were plots and secret meetings; and attempts to organize the rest of the staff – and even our customers – to overthrow my evil regime. Neither the customers nor the rest of the staff seemed interested.
And so we ‘worked together’ for seven long, grinding, painful years and though each had the regulation number of days they somehow seemed longer than those I’d known before.
I had been warned, when the higher-ups first interviewed me, that Donna would be a problem.
“You’ll need to find a way to get her out of here,” they said. “We’ll back you.”
Uh huh.
So I went to work on my first day. Smiling, I tapped on the glass door and she unlocked it for me.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m Dan.”
“Here are some things I think we need to change,” she replied immediately, handing me a clipboard with a neat, handwritten list of about 12 items.
“We need to change the schedule, like it says here. Oh, and there’s a dress code issue here, and this next one…”
This went on for a while as we stood just inside the doors. Finally, as the monologue ebbed, I said, “You’re Donna… right? Well, it’s nice to meet you. I’m going to hang up my coat in the back room and see if I can find the light switch in my office. Maybe I’ll drink a few sips of this coffee, and at some point I’ll gladly take a look at your list. From what you’ve told me, almost all of your requests go directly against policies the company just spent two weeks training me on. But we’ll talk it over and I’ll certainly do what I can… okay?”
Battle had been joined. She stayed the whole seven years and sent so many letters, made so many preemptive phone calls, emails, and texts to the company HR office and executives that, when the time came for them to ‘back me’ they threw up their collective hands.
Eventually, after years of suffering, the company closed that location and opened a new one nearby. She was expected by some to quit at that point but instead she followed me there to open the new office. This was, presumably, in order to make the experience as miserable as possible for me.
But her true role as my Goad was confirmed some months later for, when I transferred to a location in another part of the state, she immediately retired.
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“To be a goad was a hard assignment at best and she had met it unflaggingly. But her job was complete and now she would need rest and rehabilitation from the inescapable battle fatigue…”
– Stranger in a Strange Land
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She had been a Goad, and a good one. She pushed every button. She fought every useless, worthless fight. She attempted coup after coup, and enrolled others in her plots. She brought her shadow leadership to work every day and fought with all her guile and experience to poison the staff against me just as – so I had been briefed – she did for my predecessor, whom she chased out.
It was during this period that I began attending meetings with other men, delving into the whys and hows of human intrigue and interaction.
The fellow who first reeled me in had a question, one he pulled out when something painful was afoot. Someone had died, say, or a marriage was dissolving. A kid was very sick, a car smashed, or a fortune lost.
He would wait quietly while the sufferer went through the issues in detail. Then, as the advice and the processing and the inevitable comforting was winding down he’d look up and ask, “What’s great about this?” And the whole thing would slide into a new and far more powerful direction.
What’s great about your son being ill? Your relationship devolving? Your sister dying young? What’s great about this, you ask?
But without fail, there always was something great. Under examination, something could be found that elevated the experience, that offered a useful path away from self pity and towards gratitude.
And so, of course, when I whined to the Men about this woman, this thorn that I could not remove from my own paw, this Goad whose goal appeared to be making my workplace a street-level Hell, I waited with dread for the inevitable question.
Sure enough it came. We’d had breakfast, he and I, and even as he dropped me off I got out one last plaint about my colleague.
“Mmm,” he murmured, leaning against the door of my facility. “So, uh, I have to ask… what’s great about this? What’s in this for you? What was great about her?“
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“To be a goad was a hard assignment at best and she had met it unflaggingly. But her job was complete and now she would need rest and rehabilitation from the inescapable battle fatigue…“
– Stranger in a Strange Land
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Seeing my face he raised his hands, palms up, and continued, “hey, I’m just asking, man. Is there something valuable here?”
To the best of my belief I put my head in my hands. “There’s nothing. Nothing at all. I can’t relax for a second, I have to be on my toes all the time. I have to be absolutely on the top of my game just to make the whole thing work.”
“Mmmhhmm. And, that’s a bad thing?”
“Well, no.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Well… I’ve become deeply familiar with HR policy and procedure. Uh… I’ve had to change my style a number of times to avoid pitfalls, and to accomplish things she tried to get in the way of. “
“Good, good, anything else?”
“Well, I’ve maintained my integrity throughout. In other words, despite the dirty tricks going on around me, I’m not aware of a single instance where I have stooped to that level. I haven’t lied – even though that might have helped me – and I’ve kept my staff evaluations of her even-handed to a very high degree. She’s had high numbers on everything she does well and the rest has been thoughtful and evenhanded.
I’ve also trained a number of good, strong assistants who have now been promoted, despite her hatred of, and opposition to, all of them. And I have kept my own record clean while getting strong evaluations of my own.”
“Nice, he murmured. Is that all?”
“Well…” I said, “no, not all.”
“What else?”
“I, um. I have managed to go home every night and be a great husband and energetic dad to my little girl and managed not to get fired despite some truly epic provocation, so that my family could continue to have what they need. And I guess, in the end, I achieved a level of patience and the ability to work within a challenging framework that I never had before. In short,” I said, surprised to hear my own voice, “I’ve become mature. And that’s what’s great about this.”
“Got it,” my friend said and, patting me on the shoulder, headed out to his car.
- Heinlein, Robert A. 1987. Stranger in a Strange Land. Ace ed. New York: Berkley Pub. Group. ↩︎
