Chapter 1 miss Orientation
If you only knew what nobody bothered to tell you âŚ
Useful Terms: What We Mean When We Say âŚ
Girlogic What makes sense to us: play nice
Guylogic What makes sense to them: win at all costs
PMS Political Misery Syndrome, a work-induced condition
Nah-Nah-Nah-Nah-Goo-Goo Iâve got a great gig and you donât
Once upon a time, there was a bright, wide-eyed girl from Long Island named M, who was working as a potted plant outside some big mucky-muck advertising executiveâs office making approximately two cents per hour. Why would a college graduate (magna cum laude, thank you very much) be a secretary for a man who did so little he clearly didnât need one? The answer was obvious: it was all because she couldnât type.
All the âgoodâ jobs for womenâthose fantastic opportunities listed in the New York Timesârequired 50 wpm on the typing test.
Around the same time, Mâs high school friend and two-time prom date Frank, who was walking around with a similarly useless liberal arts degree (OK, so it was from Harvard), didnât have to take a single typing test and, through a contact from his old neighborhood, got a job with an actual livable $$$alary trading foreign debt at a big old bank. Frankie couldnât type either and had never so much as balanced a checkbook.
Hmmmmmmm âŚ
Meanwhile, there was a bright, blue-eyed girl from Buffalo named J who came to the Big City and also got a job at an advertising agency making two and one-half cents an hour. J, who could find a Q on a keyboard, was an assistant to a woman who mentored her in the ways of Madison Avenueâinstructing J that her main objective was to keep the pencils sharpened at all times.
J moved to New York City to seek her fortune with her college boyfriend, Keith, and he, like Mâs friend Frank, got a job in foreign trading at a big old bank, making big-old-bank buck$$$.
Double hmmmmmmm.
Why would J, a college graduate, be working as an assistant for an obsessive-compulsive with a pencil fetish? Because unless you were Someoneâs Daughter, it seemed that the only jobs available right out of school were as Someoneâs Assistant.
Surrendering to the Pink
In those first few years of working in those brain-optional âpinkcollar-ghettoâ jobs, each of us remembers thinking: âOh my God, I canât believe this is my life. I am nothing.â
Not only did we have nothing jobs (while it seemed that everyone else had interesting, exciting careers) making nothing $$$, but our coworkers seemed stupid and petty, and the only time they paid attention to the fact that we were even alive was when we did something wrong or when our skirts were too short. To add insult to insanity, we were treated as if feeding paper into the fax machine was probably more responsibility than we could handle.
Things were Very Wrong.
What we really wanted was one of those âgoodâ entry-level jobs, where you might actually learn something and get a smidgen of R-E-S-P-E-C-T. But those jobs, the ones with the word assistant at the beginning of the title rather than at the end, seemed to go either to those who knew someoneâs fatherâs brotherâs sonâs boss or to the genetically challenged of our species, who happen to be missing fallopian tubes.
We were mortified. We thought we were losers. We couldnât fathom why in the heck weâd gone deep into tuition debt and sat through four-plus years of communications classes simply so we could type tabs for hanging folders and feel dumber than doorbells. Dingdong.
Kate Hudson Never Had These Problems
What was the difference, we wondered, between us and Dawn the account exec, who was only a year or two older than us but making the big $$$, wearing the designer clothes, and living a sassy single life in the doorman building, unlike the dumps we lived in with our neurotic, diet-obsessed roommates? And why oh why was it that Dawn didnât seem to let anything ever get to her personally?
Did Dawn know something we didnât? âNah, couldnât be,â we thought. It was less painful for us to assume that Dawn had a daddy who made her life easy, which, granted, was unfair of us, but occasionally absolutely accurate.
And as long as we were bitching, we also wondered why our male friends werenât feeling as tortured as we were.
In the heat of those moments, we just couldnât figure it out. We thought that our lives would remain in the below-average category for all eternity because we didnât happen to have Ivy League upbringings, well-connected relatives, or the ability to use a urinal.
Bitter? Party of two?
Hard Knock. Whoâs There? You. You Who? Precisely.
We couldnât possibly have known then what we know now. Why not? âCause nobody bothered to tell us. There wasnât anyone.
We had no savvy, smart-mouthed older sister to set us straight. Neither one of us had parents who worked for a real company (one orthodontist, three teachers). We had no mentors to tell us what we might be Doing Right and what we were definitely Doing Wrong.
But we know now. Boy, do we know. How did we learn? Ah, dear little sister, the ever-so-hard wayâNOT a strategy we recommend. They say you have to be burned to learn, and letâs just say we were torched like campfire marshmallows.
Now we know how it goes: it all starts with a handshake, a smile, and a âWelcome aboard.â The next thing you know, you are sobbing in the ladiesâ room because you canât figure out why Sally in marketing Hates Your Guts and why Jeff in sales is Always Trying To Make You Look Bad. âWhat did I do?â you sob. âWhy are they all sooo mean?â
Any of this sound familiar?
At some point in the beginning of your working life, it probably dawned on you that things were WAY harder than you thought they would be. But, you know, youâre not alone. We too used to think it was just us, but over the years weâve discovered that countless women (and, OK, a handful of guys)âeven females pretty far up the food chainâsuffer in many of the same ways.
What most of us didnât realize is that the instant we started working for any corporation, we were transported to an alternative reality on an alien planet known as Officepoliticus, where all the rules about fairness, achievement, success, and rewards are dramatically different from everything we were ever taught.
Yesterday All Your Troubles Were So Far Away âŚ
Over all those years you spent at school, you learned that if you did the work, you would get all the credit that was due you. The harder you worked, the more credit you gotâmaybe even bonus points.
Basically, if you did pretty much what you were supposed to doâno matter what you looked like, no matter how you dressed, no matter how fabulous or stinky your attitude, no matter what your gender or orientation, no matter if you asked a zillion questions or not oneâyou were promoted to the next grade and were eventually rewarded with a lovely diploma that even had your name spelled correctly. Mom and Pop threw a party and people mailed you money.
So far, so good. Then you got your first real job.
It Starts with Those Painful Periods âŚ
When you first arrive at a new job it can be truly perplexing because it all looks and feels so familiarâso innocent and tidy, with grown-ups going about their Business. When you get there, things seem normal enough. You think you understand whatâs going on.
Then you start to notice the weird stuff. The things that defy logic. Girlogic, that is. Ironically, the qualities that make us girls such great human beings can totally trip us up at work. We work hard. We try to play fair. Most of us try to make sure everyone feels good and equal. We try to make everyone happy because life is better when everyone is happy.
Problem is, for the most part, kill-the-guy-with-the-ball Guylogic still drives the prevailing system, and Guylogic is all about winning. And, frankly, most guys donât care as much as we do if they make a mess while trying to score points.
If your own sense of fairness is disrupted frequently enough, youâll end up stupefied like we did, with an acute case of work-induced Political Misery Syndrome (PMS)âan epidemic disorder of the mind most frequently found in the female population of Officepoliticus.
What Cramps Your Style
Women (and, OK, some men) develop Political Misery Syndrome because they are not aware that every single thing they do or donât do at work is being observed and interpreted.
Everything.
Just as it is with politicians on the campaign trail, everything you say (or donât say) in the office, how you say it, to whom you say it, whom you eat lunch with, who your friends are, how you deal with officemates, when you show up and when you leave, etc., can determine how you are treated, how quickly you are promoted, and how much license someone will take in hassling you.
Unfortunately, in the office, the most innocent of actions can be perceived as sinister or manipulative; the most manipulative maneuvers can be perceived as sincere and appropriate gestures. Most of The Girls Who Call Us completely resist any behavior that could possibly be construed as âpolitical.â Girlogic: âIâm just not a political person; Iâm not manipulative. Why canât I just be myself?â
Answer: Because itâs all political anyway.
You donât have to like it, but you do have to live with it. What counts in the office has virtually nothing to do with the truth; what matters is the perception of the truth. Your personal reality is about as relevant as your shoe size. Until you recognize this fact, you are at risk for a case of Political Misery Syndrome that all the Midol in the world canât fix.
To see if you currently suffer from work-induced PMS, see if you have any (or all, God forbid) of the top ten symptoms:
1. Confusion. You lack perspective; all events are relatively equal in terms of their importance in your mind. Every single project or misunderstanding is a big fat hairy crisis, and you are too befuddled to see any humor in anything.
2. Oversensitivity. You allow office conflicts and slights to hurt you, stress you out, and adversely influence your behavior.
3. Obsessiveness & compulsiveness. You feel undervalued, so you work harder and harder, which makes you feel even more taken advantage of, undercompensated, and overworked.
4. Paranoia. You feel like you are being excluded. More days than not, you are afraid that you will get fired.
5. Boringness. Your primary topic of conversation, no matter what time of day or who your audience is, is your job.
6. Bitterness. You spend tons of time enumerating the countless reasons all the stuff you really want from your career is completely unattainable, and then get resentful when you see others achieve the exact wish you had in mind.
7. Major rage. You stew in a cauldron of negativity, looking for people to blame, sue, and be mad at. Your primary office skill becomes creating dramas and dragging others into them.
8. Denial. You ignore the fact that you think your job sucks, you make no plans, live exclusively for the moment, spend all your money on shoes and Champagne instead of paying your phone bill, and hope that somehow it will all magically straighten itself out down the road.
9. Relationship trashing. You drive away your boyfriend and other significant people with nonstop bitching about your sorry situation. J did this, more than once.
10. Stupidity. You crash your carâjust about total itâon the way to work, and still go and put in a full day anyway. M actually did this, but once was enough.
The Story of Oh âŚ
There is only one remedy for Political Misery Syndromeâand no, itâs not shopping. The one, repeat, one cure for chronic acute PMS (donât blink; youâll miss it) is:
Options.
Options are oxygen.
Without options, your company becomes your life-support system. You live in a state of paralyzed fear that your boss will pull the plug and that you donât have enough skills to get another job thatâs as good, or any job. So you work harder, become paranoid, enjoy less.
Taking Stock of Your Options
Most of the women we know think that Options are a luxury they just canât afford. We call this the Girl Option Paradox (GOP): women love when Options are offered to us, hence our great devotion to shoe shopping, yet because most of us are hard-wired to value commitment, many of us feel obligated to stay in the bad relationship that is our job. Girlogic: spending time creating Options seems like âcheating.â
Itâs different for most men. Some ancient directive from the Divine Boss drives guys to sow seeds hither and yon, constantly laying the groundwork for a more attractive position. Our Guy Spies tell us that pondering possible Exit Strategies begins before they take on any commitment. Guylogic: not having Options is not an option.
For women, though, monogamy is our default mode. If you have PMS or are potentially at risk for it, which, btw, we think almost all women are, the first thing we need to do is get in there and change the power management settings on your control panel.
Hereâs our tech support:
Step 1: Write down your new mantra. âI must have Options; they are an absolute necessity for the life and health of my career and for my sanity.â Repeat daily.
Step 2: You have to learn how to get them. The rest of this book will tell you everything you need to know. You will soon discover that Options are one of the most luxurious things in the world to have.
Step 3: You have to make the time to create Options. Youâll have to learn to be more selfish (yes, the S word!). If you are like most women, multitasking your head off, the things you need to do for yourself are usually at the bottom of the priority pileâif they make the list at all. Weâll fix that right up for you in Chapter 11, âY-O-U:The Ultimate Planning Machine.â
Honey, you have to believe that you, and you alone, can manufacture good Options for yourself, and not let anyone convince you that you canât. People in your lifeâwell-meaning and otherwiseâmight try to brainwash you into believing that you have no Options. Why? Because if you had choices, you might change, and people really donât like it when others change anything more significant than their underwear. Really. It drives them completely mental.
THE JUST-LIKE-THAT FACTOR
Even if you think that you donât need Options because you love, love, love your job, your boss, your commute, your colleages, and the soap in the ladiesâ room, you still must be out there building up Options. Why? because even...