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It was 2018, so I had just graduated with my master's in urban and regional planning, and I was very excited to start a job just anywhere.
I was recently divorced and just like ready to be out of my parents' house because at the time I was living with my parents for the final semester of grad school just so that I could get through it.
This is Birdie. After living with her parents while she earned her master's degree, she was ready to set out on her own and kickstart her career.
I saw a position open up for an executive assistant for a council member, which seemed like, oh, cool, I'll be working in government.
At the time, it looked really good and very stable and like a responsible choice to make.
I can just create my own planning department in this lower parish rural government because they don't have a planning department.
And I'll just like swoop in and save the day.
Birdie had big aspirations for this councilman's office.
She felt her knowledge and determination would be of great value, and she wasn't wrong.
She would become an asset to this councilman, but at the expense of her health and well-being.
My name's Carly, and this is Toxic Workplace, a podcast that gives the platform to those who have survived highly toxic work experiences only to come out with newfound wisdom and a renewed sense of self.
A toxic workplace is more than just the daily grind.
It's a soul crushing experience that will chip away at your sanity until you're about to lose your mind.
It's an abusive relationship that's hard to leave.
And the longer you stay, the more you lose sight of who you set out to be.
Honestly, like it was a good choice on paper.
Like I had benefits and I had regular income coming in.
It was like the first job I'd had where I'd had health insurance because I had lost my health insurance.
For a lot of reasons, it was a good decision.
But like, you know, hindsight being 20-20.
The council member that I interviewed with, he was actually my age, and he was just like a lower parish guy.
Like went to the little local high school.
In retrospect, it was suspiciously casual.
At the time, I was like, oh, this is a really fun, interesting guy.
He's very casual.
Like he wants somebody who is competent in the role.
He was like, I really like that you have masters.
You're going to be able to use this to do this, this and this.
He kind of like oversold how much I would be able to accomplish within the role.
And then also kind of like led me to believe that he was doing a lot more than what he actually was doing within the parish.
Just to kind of make himself feel like a little bit more impressive.
At one point when he was much younger and I didn't realize how much younger, he was involved in some sort of tree planting thing.
But he like made it out that this was a thing that was like ongoing that he was continuing to do.
But it was like something he volunteered and did once.
He was just like fibbing to make himself seem a little bit more impressive.
He definitely like from the jump kind of had like an insecure thing where like he was weird about the fact that I had more education than him.
He would bring it up like repeatedly.
It was weird.
He wasn't like cagey about being intimidated.
Like he came right out with it where it was just like, oh, you know, you think you're smarter than me.
You have this or that.
When I first started the job, he seemed really cool.
He seemed like a fun, interesting, kind of wacky guy that like drove a boat and like was kind of just a little out there, like in a fun way.
You know, he just didn't know how to have an employee.
He's just like one of those guys that like had never managed a team, never managed a person and like didn't know how to interact in like a respectful way.
And he had really poor boundaries.
The laid back and casual nature of the councilman was appealing to Bertie.
She felt comfortable in his presence.
But his demeanor would quickly change for the worst when things weren't going his way.
And his lack of boundaries would become increasingly questionable.
He used his casualness as a mechanism to blur the lines between professionalism and inappropriateness.
By establishing a more casual work relationship, he was able to win Bertie over quickly.
The work relationship felt friendly, but real friends don't use friends as a scapegoat for failure.
So he ran, got his seat, realized he was kind of in over his head as far as like executive function goes.
He ran, assuming that someone else would win.
I think that was part of the problem.
At the time, he was dating this woman whose family was like a long term kind of political family in Louisiana.
And I think he was like trying to impress them by running for office.
And I think he didn't get completely through to like the prospect of actually winning and then actually having to like fulfill the role of being a council member.
He needed someone in the office because he's a young guy and so he was still working.
A lot of the council members are retirement age.
It's not a full time paid position.
I think you make like $15,000 stipend a year.
So like if you're not retired, you have to have a job.
So all of the council members that were not retirement age had full time jobs.
He did a lot of like showing up to events like in a button down suit and like acting very important.
And like he's the boss of things and getting things done.
I mean, he was a politician, but like not a very good one, you know.
But he was doing the politician thing.
I want to clarify that Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. divided by parishes.
Most of the other states are divided by counties.
So a parish is essentially Louisiana's term for county.
The qualifications to run for council member are pretty basic.
You must be over 18 and reside within the parish.
Like most elections, it's a popularity contest and about who you know.
And Bertie's boss knew the right people.
The job itself, an executive assistant for council member, is usually quite simple.
You generally are answering the phones.
You're handling all the correspondence in and out of that office.
So like their emails will go to you and you will answer emails as if you are them.
But it's not that demanding of a job. It's a very boring job.
That particular office was located all the way at the lower end of the parish.
I wound up having to drive an hour and 15 minutes to get down there each way.
And so that was not something that I was adequately prepared for.
I was not prepared also for just the way office politics works in local government in rural Louisiana.
They immediately like sniffed me out as like not one of us.
And there were like a lot of weird like rumors circulating that I was like offering people drugs or like whatever.
Like I don't know, just like weird stuff.
It was upsetting at the time.
But I realize now that they were just stirring the pot for like having something to do.
So they would like gossip about each other, gossip about other people.
It was totally a Potemkin village.
Like I don't know if you're familiar with the term Potemkin village.
But Potemkin village is like it was a real thing that happened in Russia where like the economic woes were just too great for this particular administration.
And so what would happen was any time the ruler was passing through an area and that area knew that the ruler was passing through,
they would set it up as if everything was fine just for a while they were passing through to make it look like much more lush and verdant and amazing than it actually was.
And then as soon as they were out of the picture, everything went back to normal.
Like you go back to shoveling filth or whatever you were doing before or just like staring at your phone.
And so like council meeting days were definitely like there was a lot of hustle and bustle and a lot of people walking around with clipboards with like blank pages.
Just people looking very busy like in like the background of an episode of Star Trek kind of way.
Like whether just pressing buttons that are painted on the wall arbitrarily to look like they're doing something.
And so it was it was very comical to me because like I do notice things like that.
Like I might not notice like the subtleties of like a conversation or like somebody's like minute facial expressions.
I may not catch that, but like I do catch somebody walking around with a blank clipboard and like feel deeply the absurdity of that as like what a concept.
You need to look busy or you're carrying a tray of coffees.
Behind the illusion of productivity, these staff members passed the time with gossip.
There was little direction from the top because, as Bertie mentioned earlier, all of the council members had other jobs or were retired,
leaving their assistants to run their day how they saw fit.
Government productivity lags private sector.
A McKinsey report states that the Bureau of Labor Statistics used to measure government productivity up until 1994
when they must have realized it wasn't a good look for the government sector
because their findings proved that the private sector far exceeds the productivity of the public sector.
When a sense of urgency and productivity are missing within an organization,
you can be sure employees will get comfortable doing the bare minimum.
And too much free time at work is a seed for gossip culture.
There was also like a lot of weird sexual harassment going on that didn't, it didn't really happen to me so much as it was just sort of like a culture of casual misogyny in the office.
There was this one council member who he had had an affair with his assistant who was then so distraught by the whole situation that she wound up quitting
because she found out that he was also having an affair with another council member's assistant at the same time.
All the while this man has a wife who is pregnant at home.
It was sort of like being just immediately immersed in a surreal and strange nonsensical environment where it's just instantly hostile.
You either reject the environment immediately and you're like suffering the whole time or you just sort of drink the Kool-Aid and get used to it.
So I kind of just got used to it. Like I was like, oh, it's fine. I didn't even mind going all the way down to my remote office.
Nobody was going to bother me down there. There was hardly anyone in the building,
which, you know, obviously was very isolating and very strange.
So I spent a lot of time with this boss who like progressively over time became less and less inhibited with how he interacted with me to the point where it was just extremely casual.
He would get upset about things because he was the youngest person on the council at the time.
And so all the old timers would give him a hard time in meetings, which would stress him out.
And he'd be in a really foul mood and he'd come into my office and just yell and rant and rave about.
Somehow I hadn't adequately prepared him for this meeting that he went into where he got ripped a new one.
And him just not understanding that that's just the nature of how politics works down there.
And there was nothing I could have better prepared that he would that would have not happened and that it would have not been stressful.
At one point, I remember he forgot his laptop in his truck.
He was convinced that I had left it in the office and that I had forgotten his laptop.
But I knew that it was not in the office and I was like, councilman, your laptop is not in the office.
You took it with you on Thursday and you don't have your laptop.
But he would be just absolutely convinced that I had it.
He ordered me back to the office to go and find it.
Well, it's not there, of course.
And I will text him and was like, hey, it's really not here.
I need you to get in the back of your truck and look in your truck.
And of course, it was in the back seat of his truck blending in with the black back seat of his truck because it's a black laptop.
And I was like, the next time this happens, I need you to just go look in your truck because that's probably where it is.
You know, sort of making me drive all the way.
Like it was like 45 minutes because the office that we were at that was like a courthouse that was on the east bank of the river.
So you had to take a ferry to get across.
He really made me get in my car, go across with the ferry and go to the office and look around for his laptop when he could have just gone out to the parking lot and gone and gotten it.
When he was embarrassed, that was the worst part.
So he would get embarrassed and then he would react worse because he was embarrassed.
It's just a very nervous, sort of hand wringy, insecure, anxious, kind of volatile, but not to the not to people higher up than him,
because he was very obsequious with people who he perceived to be in more power than him.
But the power dynamic being what it was with our relationship, he felt safe enough to rant and rave and yell at me, use me as kind of a sounding board for his anxiety.
I was like a human stress ball, basically.
I was his PR person.
I was always trying to keep him off Facebook because he was really bad about arguing with people on Facebook.
And I was like, my guy, you've got to stop doing this.
And he's like, don't tell me what to do.
And I'm like, I'm not telling you what to do.
You do you.
However, it looks bad.
It has your name on it.
And you're arguing with little old ladies on Facebook.
It's just not a good look.
Even if they're wrong, even if they're stupid, it doesn't matter.
You don't need to be arguing with them.
It's beneath you.
It's beneath anybody.
And it's a waste of time.
Like, I've got a bunch of documents I need you to review and you're arguing with some old lady on Facebook.
Bertie was this councilman scapegoat for his shame and shortcomings.
Being the only person on the team, all of his frustrations were carried out on her.
Although this was stressful for Bertie, she has a long fuse and doesn't get deterred easily.
So she just dealt with it.
When she would discuss the situation with another administrative assistant, she was encouraged to just let him get over it and not make a big deal out of his behavior.
I'm conflict avoidant.
I don't like to argue with people.
Having worked in government, I'm very diplomatic.
I'm very good at getting along with groups of people.
I'm good at getting along with people I don't like.
I'm good at getting along with people that I disagree with.
So I was able most of the time to kind of talk him down off the ledge.
But it was just this ongoing thing that I always had to do.
It was like just it was just part of the job.
There was this other assistant who I actually she was the assistant for the entire council.
And she and I were like pals immediately.
She knew where all the bodies were buried.
Let's just say hypothetical body.
She knew everything.
She'd been there for like over 20 years.
And so she wasn't messing around and nothing fazed her like period.
And so she and I were friends and I'd be like, oh, you know, like he's on a tear again.
And she's like, you know, he gets like that.
Just let him putter himself out.
It was very anxiety inducing because it was my first, quote unquote, big girl job.
Just being fresh out of all of the situations that I had just gotten out of.
It was very tough to be constantly told that I was doing a terrible job and that I was inept.
That was a favorite word of his.
It's like, oh, you're inept. You're trash.
You're doing this and that and blah, blah, blah.
At the same time, I was rewriting legislation.
I was writing new legislation.
I was trying to save the mosquito control department because they didn't want to have a millage to save the mosquito control department.
So I like drafted an ordinance for that.
I created an online public works request tracking system that like worked with ArcGIS and then showed different dots on the map for like where the problem spots were.
So it was like I was doing a lot of work at the same time that this person is yelling at me and telling me that I'm stupid and that I'm inept and that he doesn't know how I got in this job and that I'm not qualified because I'm an idiot or whatever.
I'm like, dude, if you really are this unsatisfied with my performance, please fire me.
If Bertie was so inept at what she was doing, then why did the councilman continue to pile up her workload?
The answer is because he didn't actually think she was inept.
She could handle a lot.
Bertie's boss is trying to make her feel insecure because he's insecure.
It's a tactic used by insecure people in positions of power to try and hold you back so that you feel inadequate and you stay in your position working for them because you don't think you can do any better.
And if Bertie was doing such a poor job, then the way to handle it isn't to consistently devalue her work.
Rather, he should be mentoring her and explaining in a professional way what is expected next time and how it could improve.
But that just wasn't the case.
This guy was insecure and wanted to keep Bertie as his doormat.
I remember at one point he and I had to go to it was like a meeting of fishermen.
And so I asked him, I was like, what's the vibe for this meeting?
How should I dress for this meeting?
And he deadass this like adult man who's supposed to be my boss says, oh, I don't know, where's something low cut to distract them from yelling at me so much?
I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that.
And I'm going to repeat the question and don't say that again.
And it's funny now because it's like I feel like he genuinely thought he was being funny.
You're my boss.
Please can you like maintain some semblance of professionalism in this dynamic?
For the love of God, like I beg of you.
He definitely was kind of flirty in a like haha JK and less kind of way.
He was fishing to see how I'd react.
He just wanted everything to be casual and hunky dory except, except when he was very angry and then everything was like, oh, well, you're not professional enough.
It's just it was very much like damned if you do and damned if you don't.
I always regretted being casual with him.
He would kind of be very chill for like a short period of time and then kind of come out of nowhere with these very weird and like out there and over the top demands unrealistic ideas of how quickly things can be written and how quickly I can put together just a big, big presentation for a meeting.
It's like you had this meeting today that you've known about for two weeks and you did not put it on the calendar and you did not tell me and you want a PowerPoint presentation and you want me to write you up a script.
The councilman's mood changed drastically and could be unpredictable.
One minute he was complimentary of Bernie's knowledge and abilities only to tear her down the next.
One minute he was laid back and casual only to be heated and irrational when things didn't go his way.
It left Bernie constantly guessing which side of him she would get each day.
But when she got his nice side, he was endearing, charming and adventurous.
This was the side that got Bernie to hang around longer than she knew she should have.
He would sometimes shit would be really boring in the office and he knew I was slogging away at some big thing.
And he would kind of just show up and he'd be like, hey, let's go do something.
One time he did this. He came and picked me up and he didn't tell me what we were going to go do.
And I was like, am I about to get murdered by my boss and some like backwoods like nowhere land where my body is eaten by alligators and no one will ever find me?
It's possible. You know, like, I don't know.
Anyway, so we drive, we drive, we drive into the middle of nowhere, middle of nowhere, and we drive out to this field and there's a little teeny tiny plane.
It's like a 1980s Volkswagen station wagon with wings.
Basically, he can fly a seaplane and he's like, we're going to go for a ride.
And I was like, OK.
And so we get in this plane.
And at the time I was dating this woman from New Zealand and he was joking.
He's like, oh, we can fly this plane to New Zealand.
And I was like, I don't think this plane could make it to New Iberia.
And we had a really nice, interesting day and like everything was fine.
It was very disconcerting when he would go from being friendly and interacting with me and being very collaborative and fun to like just having a bad day where somebody humiliated him in public and he would come into the office and scream and yell at me.
I would just be prepared if he had come out of a meeting that I was pretty sure he got made fun of.
I knew he was going to come into the office and I was just very prepared. Like I had all my ducks in a row that day because I was like, oh, no, you know, that's here.
Oh, here you go. Here's that document. And here's this and here's that.
And so and so called. And I took the notes and blah, blah, blah.
So he couldn't catch me slipping because that's what he would try to do when he was feeling like that.
There was a point where we were driving. And mind you, like this parish is very long.
And so there's one road in and out. So like you're driving on the same road, whichever direction you're going.
So we're driving down the road towards the lower end. So like down towards like the fingers of Louisiana.
He's just getting progressively more agitated while we're in the car.
And I'm just really wanting him to pull over, like stop. I'm not really 100 percent on where we were going at the time.
He wanted to drive around to take pictures of work requests that people had sent in because they wouldn't always send in a picture.
And I think that's what we were doing ostensibly.
But really, he was just driving his truck because it gave him something to do.
And we had me with him because he needed an emotional support animal slash punching bag.
And he's just getting progressively more agitated.
And it's just sort of like you need to justify your position.
Give me one reason why I shouldn't fire you. You don't even want this job.
You just took this job because you were desperate after graduating. And I'm like, all that's true.
You know, like, what do you want from me? And I did tell him that I was like, that's true.
I needed a job. We all need a job, man. Like, what do you want from me?
Like, I'm doing my best at this job. If you really were so unhappy with my performance, you should fire me so that I can collect unemployment.
Because it was still the enhanced unemployment during the pandemic.
I would literally be making more money on unemployment during this pandemic than listening to you scream and yell at me in your truck for no reason.
But he wouldn't fire me. And so I was like stuck because you can't get a job during the pandemic.
He desperately wanted me to want to stay. He was upset by the idea of me like no longer doing the mostest all the time.
I just was no longer engaging and acting afraid of him when he would go crazy on me.
I was no longer like, sir, yes, sir. Like that was no longer the vibe.
I mean, he still continued to have poor boundaries. Like he would call me after hours to just talk on the phone.
I would answer because, you know, I'm still doing my job. Like, hey, hey, boss, what's up? You know, OK, what do you need?
And then he was talking about like his personal business.
Like he was talking about like his fiance and how he was stressed out about getting married and and how like the timeline for his relationship with his fiance was kind of screwed up
because he apparently slept with someone where there was a little overlap and like don't tell anyone.
And I'm like, why are you telling me? It was just so strange that it was a strange place.
Like, I cannot stress enough how strange this place was.
Your boss or superior at work should never feel comfortable enough to call or text after hours to talk about their personal life.
Not only is this blurring the lines between professional and personal, but it's extremely inappropriate.
And I think that goes without saying.
It's a form of sexual harassment when someone of a higher work status confides in their direct report about their sex life.
If the councilman is comfortable enough to freely talk about his infidelities with Birdie, what else is he comfortable saying or doing around her?
This is a huge red flag.
The mind games, the blurred lines, the verbal abuse, the workload, it all started to take a toll on Birdie.
I was so tired just generally, like just my my body was so tired by the end of that job.
I felt like I was doing so much and I felt like I was just on like a treadmill and that nothing I did mattered.
If I did a good job, he took credit for it.
And if something didn't pan out the way he wanted it to pan out, I was blamed.
It felt very fruitless to work hard because it was like no matter how hard I work, I'm still going to get kind of shit on.
That was kind of my feeling towards the end of the job.
I was very apathetic. I was just kind of going through the motions and getting through the day.
And I had a health scare.
I wound up with a kidney stone, which everybody laughs.
Kidney stone is no joke, and I didn't know anything about kidney stones.
It was this was during the pandemic, like kind of right at the beginning.
So I had a high level of anxiety.
I was trying to manage working from home for government that wasn't set up for work from home.
Everybody was learning how to use Zoom.
I knew how to use Zoom, but like none of the council knew how to use Zoom.
There was a big learning curve.
And like for some reason, I was sort of the person that was teaching everyone how to use Zoom.
And we were doing council meetings on Zoom.
And I was just it was exhausting.
When I got my kidney stone, that was a big wake up call.
Nothing kind of makes you reassess your entire life quite like being in excruciating pain,
not able to physically do all the things that you usually do.
It affected my commute.
I was having to drive down there while having these issues.
And that was when I was really rethinking my life.
I was like, this is actually miserable and I hate everything about this.
I was grateful to have the health insurance to deal with the situation.
But that is the only positive aspect of the job to me at that point.
And so that was when I really started in earnest to try to find something else.
I love the point that Bertie makes here, that you really start to assess your situation when you get sick or your body stops functioning properly.
This is the body's way of warning you to change your habits or your situation.
A toxic workplace can and will make you physically ill when you've been exposed for too long.
Bertie saw her kidney stone as a sign to leave.
The job that I found was not advertised and I didn't find it right then at that time.
I was just desperately looking and I put my feelers out to like my friends in my network.
I actually had a community of planners that were like, you hate your job? Cool. Let's find you another job.
Once I finally did it, it wasn't that big of a deal.
But a friend of mine found me a position at the company where she was working.
They interviewed me and hired me on as a planner and graphic designer.
And I put in my notice and took it as my two weeks vacation.
I just didn't come in to work on Monday. My notice was I'm not coming back on Monday.
He said, you know, I wish you the best of luck.
So he didn't like throw fit.
And then part of the reason he didn't want to fire me was because it was a lot of paperwork.
So he didn't have to fill out any paperwork. It was a weirdly like laid back transition.
For the longest time, I didn't even have the juice to look for jobs.
Like I hadn't been updating my resume. Like I was exhausted physically.
And then I had that health scare. Before I went to the emergency room, I thought I was like dying of like appendicitis or something.
You know, it was like it was stress. The reason I even got a kidney stone was I was biking every single day for miles and miles and miles in the summer.
And I probably wasn't drinking enough water. I was like getting really dehydrated.
And I was biking that much because I had so much anxiety that it was like I was like biking away from the feeling of being chased by this tiny weird man who just yells at me all the time.
And I remember visualizing like, oh, he's chasing me, you know, like while I'm biking, which somehow made me feel better because it's like, oh, he could never catch up with me.
Like I'm going so fast, which is like such a silly thought process to have while you're exercising and you're supposed to be relaxing.
I will say I learned so much about how that size government in these particular areas operates that I feel like it helps me a lot professionally.
I understand the dynamics and I can get along with those kinds of people.
I really enjoyed all of my constituents down there. People will respect you as much as you make them.
You have choices. Like if people are disrespectful to you, you are responsible to yourself and out of respect for yourself, you need to tell them that they're being disrespectful.
And that was a thing that I learned as soon as I started being a little bit more assertive with him.
The dynamic completely shifted and that was when he got really mopey and really sad.
And so it was like, oh, all I had to do was just be like, don't talk to me like that.
In a way, I got almost all of my like toxic workplace stuff done at the same place. It was like my one stop trauma shop.
I went and I got a little of this and a little of that. It was like a buffet of just like casual misogyny, sexual harassment, workplace bullying, workplace gossiping.
Workplace abuse. We've got a little of everything. What are you looking for? You're poison, you know.
Dealing with the verbally abusive boss on a daily basis took its toll on Bertie's health.
When you work in a toxic environment, your thoughts become consumed by the situation, whether on or off the clock.
Bertie was able to utilize her network to find a new job.
If you're dealing with a toxic work situation, listen to your body.
If anxious and stressful thoughts about work have consumed you and you don't feel like yourself, it's time to get your resume out there.
Tell your friends and family that you're open to new work.
Revamp your LinkedIn profile. Get the word out to those you trust and you may be surprised what comes your way.
Ultimately, you cannot stay in a workplace that is bad for your well-being.
Once you cross that bridge into a new healthy work environment, you'll find your voice like Bertie did.
Bertie gained confidence that has given her a stronger voice, a voice that can set boundaries and call things out when lines have been crossed.
She's made her way into a new position where her new employer sees her value and she can build the career she set out to build.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast.
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