Dear Former Colleague/Friend:
I say this with all the compassion I can muster:
You need help. Immediately.
I can understand being bitter about a past job experience. My last job wasn’t what I expected, so I got a new one.
I can understand not getting along with or respecting a boss. There’s one former boss I wouldn’t pee on if she were on fire. (Ok, that’s crude, and maybe I would.)
I can understand wishing you could force change to make the place better. It’s depressing to me to think about how great my last place could have been if only they had done some things differently.
What I cannot understand is basically trying to burn the whole place down with people you claim to like and care about inside it.
You know how many publicly pissy posts I have written about a former workplace, colleague or boss? One. And you can’t even tell which workplace or person.
Your vendetta against your former boss has to stop. You need to seek therapy.
It’s not healthy to write post after post about him and your experience.
Or contact our accreditors.
Or our board of trustees.
It’s not healthy for you, and it is actively harming us, the people who still work there. We have to do extra work because of you. You also are hurting our reputation, and that isn’t cool, Friend.
I think you think you are some kind of crusader — speaking for all employees who are all, in your mind, victims. You have a savior complex.
I will not minimize or negate your experience, but yours is not universal. I do not have the same view of my colleague that you do. People on my team have not had the same experience you have. People on HIS team disagree with your characterization.
I’m not going to address your wild email to the board that you have copied and pasted in its entirety where you detail every negative interaction you had with your boss.
You say that you knew that what you had written was “unhinged.”
Accurate.
(And then you complain you didn’t get a response. Would YOU respond to you?)
I’m going to address the other parts of your post that left me stupefied.
You said that executives (including me), “work exactly 8-5” then spend our evenings “drinking expensive wine with expensive people for ‘networking.’”
So when I’m at my desk at 7:30 p.m. trying to catch up on emails I didn’t get to during the day because of all the meetings, I’m actually NOT AT MY DESK but out drinking and networking and have been since 5? When I was at a first-generation student dinner until 8:30 p.m. last night, I should have demanded wine and told them they were fancy? That working all day last Saturday and every night last week was a figment of my imagination? And I guess taking my laptop to work on a big proposal while I was supposed to be on vacation didn’t actually happen. What the FUCK? As my former friend, you have personally witnessed some of the above. What’s wrong with you?
You characterize our board members as being people who “see the literal bottom line from a distance” — people “not in touch with the reality of the working-class … living with the decisions of out-of-touch boards.”
Um. Most of our board members are alumni who work full-time jobs. They also donate their time on several projects throughout the year, working closely with faculty and staff. They donate money to scholarships, faculty awards, staff awards, etc. They aren’t trust-fund babies jetting around with Daddy to China.
You assert that the board and the leadership team — of which I’m a part — operate from a playbook “comprised of ego, power, money and status.”
You have about two years of experience in higher education, and suddenly you are the expert? And this is genuinely what you think of me too?
Fuck. OFF.
I think this David vs. Goliath/The Poors vs. Richie Rich/Sad Little Underdog story sounded good to you, and you just went ham.
Too bad it’s not true.
“It was not the type of thing I ever advise anyone to send.”
Girl. Take your own damn advice.
And again, with the compassion I have left, I implore you to get help to MOVE ON.
Get a GD hobby, honey.
And though I have a modicum of compassion, I have no respect for you. Not now. Please don’t ever ask me for a reference.
Sincerely,
Beth
P.S. I did sleep on it before posting. Only changed a couple of words. Have no regrets. You still feeling good about yours? I hope your former boss sues you for defamation.
Observe and report 