Why I Ended My Career Early

 

When I retired from my corporate management job in 2000, I was 55 and far more exhausted than I even thought I was. It seems to have taken me a full eleven years to recover enough to see the humor in the years I put in at the funny farm.

This job I did was the envy of every new graduate of a journalism program who didn’t really want to be a journalist. “Going into public relations” seemed to be the solution to a lot of them. My company had a top drawer PR department and its reputation for being impossible to break into was the most accurate rumor in town. I worked for the company for seven years before I was finally admitted. I try to forget the fact that the only reason that happened was there was a hiring freeze in effect with an open stop time.

I have to admit I made the job look glamorous, if I do say so myself. Unlike my colleagues who worked in the media relations side of the house, my job required panache. Community relations people had to attend every breakfast, luncheon and banquet thrown in the community because that was the only way the hosting organizations had a prayer of getting any of the money I controlled for grants and sponsorships. Yes, I held the purse strings for millions of dollars just sitting and waiting for me to approve a small fraction of the hundreds of proposals that landed on my desk.

I come from a long line of clothes horses, so having the excuse to dress impressively was like a prescription for Viagra for a “challenged” but amorous gentleman. I was now justified in spending the insane amounts of money – money I’d give my dusty and probably moth-eaten fur coat to have back – I spent on skirted suits, sensible but sexy pumps, jewelry, scarves and pantyhose. Didn’t I have the responsibility of representing my company in the best possible light?

But by the time my retirement party came and went, I was very much “over it” all: the rubber chicken, the small talk at receptions before long and boring banquets; the longer and even more boring speeches that always followed. Sometimes I would have to be the one boring the crap out of a roomful of tired people just like me who would rather be doing just about anything else.

At first I basked in my sudden popularity in a brand new town that is well known for being difficult to settle into socially. Atlanta might be the most cliquish city I’ve ever seen. But give a newcomer the keys to the bank vault and she will be honored as one of the 100 Most Important Atlanta Women within two years, if she’s doing the job right. It was fun to walk into a room and have people rushing to greet me. Too bad I wasn’t delusional. If I were just a little less clear about what was making me such a magnet for schmoozing, I might have let it go to my head. But I was quite clear.

Whenever I needed a reality check, all I had to do was return to my office. I would be knocked off whatever pedestal I had climbed upon as soon as I rounded the corner into my office and saw my inbox. Dozens of those little pink phone message slips named While You Were Out sat atop the day's newly delivered mountain of proposals. Hours and hours worth of work I could only find time to do after the rest of the office went home for the day. Why?

The most challenging part of the job was surviving the drama in the office. Oh, yes, there was always an abundance of drama. How could there not be with the collection of personalities we had?

The vertically challenged clerk believed she was constantly dismissed as irrelevant because she was only about 4’9” tall. The truth was she was dismissed as annoying because she used her diminutive stature as an excuse for her nasty attitude and failure to perform. Guess who at one time was in charge of the clerical staff? Yep. I was the lucky one who had to try to find the magic motivator to get her to pull her weight.

The neurotic drama queen turned the art of one-upsmanship into her personal hobby. Have a headache? Hers is a migraine. Have marital problems? She never does. Her husband is perfect – except when he’s not. Then he is an asshole. It got to the point that she could clear a room simply by entering it.

The closeted just plain queen delighted in assessing the personal style or lack thereof of every woman in the office. His cloying cologne gave me a stuffy nose, a stinging face and sometimes an asthma attack. He refused to reduce his fragrance dousing; in fact, he switched to an even more noxious brand. He flounced around the office singing show tunes and daring anyone to assume he was gay. He didn’t want to run the risk of sabotaging his career. Oooookay.

The night-time alcoholic was a real challenge because he had become adept at disappearing to “answer a media call.” The word “media” in our office might as well have been spelled g-o-d. Nobody was to keep a reporter waiting. Some mornings our boy would come in reeking of whatever he had consumed the night before, only to find himself late for yet another staff meeting. He might poke his head in long enough to announce he was on a call with a reporter and had to leave soon for an editorial board meeting downtown. Once he showed up with a blood-red eye from a ruptured vessel he popped while tossing his cookies the night before. Drinking problem? It wasn’t a problem for him.

The bigoted quasi-liberal boss was the worst pretender I have ever seen, before or since. It was necessary to be perceived as a person who cared about economic development in “underprivileged” neighborhoods and quality education in inner-city public schools. That was his job as VP of PR. In reality, he was among the most conservative people I had been around. When I showed up at work one Monday after having been on a trip to Jamaica, my hair in beaded braids all over my head, I thought he was going to have a coronary on the spot. His red hair disappeared into the hue of his flushed face as he sputtered and spit looking for the politically correct thing to say to me. Mission accomplished, L. I just loved to mess with his phony majesty.

Yes, it is all pretty funny now, I suppose, but it was agonizing toward the end of my stint. I was sick and tired of smiling at the same old tired jokes told by the same old tired executives giving the same old tired (and phony) remarks at a podium. And I was finding it very hard to bite my tongue when the characters in the office would darken my doorway to whine, dish, and sometimes lie, while I glanced furtively at my watch, knowing it would be 8 p.m. yet again before I got out of that place for the night.

Was it all worth it? I think not. I was paid handsomely, which allowed me to live in a house I never had time to enjoy. But I didn’t know my neighbors. I was frequently going into the office on weekends to try to reduce the height of that pile of paper in my inbox. And I was constantly playing against type because I am an introverted loner by nature. The stress made itself known in a myriad of physical ways, even if I got so used to being stressed out, I thought I had licked it. No, it wasn’t worth it at all.