she scares me. i’m utterly petrified by this woman at work who i am supposed to be supervising. which means i am her supervisor and i am completely terrified of her.  it’s not funny at all.

i may have written about her in another post, so i hope you’ll forgive any repetition.

or maybe i started to write a draft of a post about her that i never bothered to finish because i was terrified that she might find it somewhere, discover who wrote it,  and who knows what would happen after that? at least i have had the good sense to not reveal her name, other than to mention  that she shares it with a month that falls on April Fool’s Day.

it would be bad enough if we shared an office, but since neither of us has an office, we share a desk with less than one yard’s distance between our ergonomic chairs. she likes to look over my shoulder, at my computer, and make suggestions. she likes to instruct me on things that i already know and i must pretend to be receptive–and of course thank her profusely for guiding me to the correct information i would never have figured out in her absence. And in between, I freeze up, I clam up, dreading my next correction.

she likes to tell me how freezing it is in the room where the air always feels so stifling and suffocating to me. she turns the thermostat all the way up. i wait for her to leave the room so I can turn the thermostat back down… but then i’ll hear her returning footsteps and i run back to the thermostat to turn it back all of the way up.  Then I’ll say, “You’re right, it is really really cold in here. God, I wish they would do something about it,” in the hope that if I agree with her about the room temperature, she will be nicer to me, less ominous and foreboding.

i expend most of my workday energy trying to come up with new ways to corner her into being nicer to me, to leave her no choice. it’s pretty clear that being accommodating just isn’t good enough. Being worshipful is the next logical option, but it might be a bit too much. it might show my hand, so to speak.

Show my hand? Where did I get that from? The only card game I’ve ever played is Old Maid.