I’ve had a varied and somewhat eclectic collection of jobs in my life. With that collection of jobs comes a collection of stories I’ll call once upon a job. This is my first installment.

The first day of a bookkeeping job, my boss told me he hated clock-watchers, and he didn’t want to see that I was showing up exactly at eight and leaving exactly at five. He expected me to come early and leave late. Never mind that everyone else, including my direct supervisor, showed up at eight and left at five. I was always the first to arrive and last to leave.

Boss was a vice-president, responsible for company finances. Even though I was a bookkeeper, he also used me as a personal assistant. He would call me on the intercom and ask me to come to his office, which was on the second floor of the building. My office was on the first floor. So, I’d go upstairs to his office, only to have him ask me to do something he could have asked me to do over the intercom. It was usually something that required me to go back down to my office and return again to his office. I got to be pretty good friends with a couple of the women who worked on the second floor, because I was up there so often.

One day he called me up to his office to reprimand me for talking to the women on his floor when I should be downstairs in my own office. Another time he called me into his office to ask me if I was drinking a lot of water. Huh? No more than usual. Then he asked if maybe I was pregnant, because he noticed I went to the bathroom a lot. Seriously.

He had me organize an office party, planning catering, decorating, and invitations. I hear it was a great party. I was asked to stay in the serving area to make sure the food was taken care of. Even when my husband showed up (it was an after hours party with spouses invited) boss kept asking me to run errands and take care of stupid details.

It was like that for seven painful months, then came the final day. It was secretary’s day. For me, it should have been like any other day, because I was a bookkeeper, not a secretary. But when Boss placed the order for flowers, he ordered an extra vase with a single carnation for me. It seemed like a nice gesture.

It was also payroll day. Back in those days, we spent most of the morning entering the payroll information into the computer. Then most of the afternoon was spent babysitting a long string of checks running through a dot-matrix printer. If there was a jam, we could pause the printer and realign the checks, but any mangled check would have to be handwritten later, since the program didn’t allow us to go back and print a single check out of order.

I don’t know who chose the accounting software, but it was stupid. The payroll process had to be complete before you could post the information. That included printing all of the checks. Once the checks printed, you could save and post. I guess that’s fine if you’re printing five or six checks, we were printing close to 50.

It was almost quitting time, and the checks were nearly done running, when the accountant closed our office door and said he needed to talk to me. Boss decided he didn’t need me anymore, and I was to collect my things when I left and not come back.

Really? If he seriously didn’t need me, why did he have the accountant wait until payroll was nearly posted before giving me the boot? I felt my blood boil right up into my ears!

I looked over at the printer. The accountant must have read my mind. He was still across the room by the door, “Don’t do it,” he said calmly. But he started moving toward me quickly. Not quickly enough. I hit the rocker-switch on the power strip, killing the printer and the computer at the same time. Ha! Data lost.

I thumbed through the stack of checks that had already printed and found my own, ripped it out at the perforations, and stuck it in my purse.

“I guess payroll will have to be entered all over again,” I said.

Now, I’m not proud of what I did that day, but I had been pushed to my limit and I just popped. I opened the drawer of employee payroll files, and tossed them one after another up in the air. The accountant just stood with his mouth open in a storm of fluttering paper.

I collected my things, including my vase and carnation. I marched up to boss’s office for the last time. His door was closed, but that didn’t deter me. I threw the door open so hard, the knob made a dent in the wall. Boss looked a little alarmed at my entrance. I whipped the carnation out of the vase and threw it on his office floor.

“You can keep your stupid flower,” I said, pouring the water out on his carpet. “But I’m keeping the vase.”

I high-tailed it out of there before anyone’s shock wore off enough to call the police on me.

At the time I felt fully justified in my behavior. Of course now, I know otherwise. That sort of performance has a way of following you. In my case, it caught up to me within a week. I thought I was safe listing that company on my resume, because the accountant was my direct supervisor. But in my very next job interview, the interviewer told me that boss was his next-door-neighbor. What were the chances he didn’t have a conversation about me with boss before the interview?

I took a gamble and told him I hadn’t left on good terms with boss. The interviewer said that was a brave thing for me to admit in a job interview. He then told me it didn’t surprise him, since boss was a bit of a jerk. Whew!

I got the new job, but I learned a valuable lesson. I’ve only behaved like that one other time at work. But I’ll save that for another story.