Godzilla Has Landed in Midtown East

There are a lot of different reasons why people like their jobs. I would think that the most common things are the great pay, work/life balance or great benefits.  Rarely people start off by saying how great their boss is.  Some do, and I was lucky enough to be one of them.  I had been blessed with the best boss in literally the entire world while working in HR at the law firm.  In fact, if she read that statement, she would yell at me because she never liked me referring to her as a "boss."  My boss, let's call her The Boss from now on, was the right balance of caring about you and caring about you doing your job. She wanted me to learn from her and grow in my career professionally.  Trust me, if there was anyone you would want for your boss, she was it.

However, being that my saint of a boss had recently moved, she would no longer be supervising the NYC office of my firm.  Shortly after this news, the interview process began for a new supervisor.  I was very upset that someone would be replacing Denise and honestly, I was a bit scared too. Already knowing that I had such a wonderful supervisor and mentor, I was pretty worried about the new person coming in. I tried to stay positive and The Boss assured me that we would make sure this person was the right fit for the job and the right fit to supervise me. This did put me at ease, so when the new supervisor started, let's refer to her as Newbie, I was less apprehensive and more exciting to have a new person with new ideas in the department.

During Newbie's first week, The Boss and I were heavily involved with training her. It became very obvious from day 1 that Newbie had a listening problem. She was always starting her sentences off with, "well at my old firm we did this..." I am certainly junior in my career, but I sense that this is the wrong way to start off a new job. At the end of the week, Newbie had scared several of our secretaries, frustrated The Boss to no end and made me question my judgment when choosing her as my number 1 out of all the other candidates.

Over the next few weeks, I kept my head down and my mouth shut, unless Newbie needed my help.  It seemed that anything I said or did, Newbie took the wrong way.  I pride myself on the ability to get along with a variety of people, but for some reason, Newbie and I couldn’t seem to make our working relationship work. Things began to get pretty bad (which I will elaborate on in my next post.) I decided I needed to talk to someone who would 100% understand where I am coming from.  I called The Boss and before I could say anything she says, “Nicole, is everything ok there? How is Newbie treating you?” And well since she asked, I filled her in on some reason developments.  The Boss simply replied, “ You are not alone in feeling that way. Nicole, I have personally nicknamed her Godzilla."