Chapter 107
Store Debt Recovery Department, Thirty Thirty Cullerton Drive, Franklin Park, Illinois. The department recovered funds on bad checks written in Osco Drugs Stores.
Talk about your clichés. I was the living embodiment of the cliché – caught between a rock and a hard place.
Yes, “The Voices/Stalkers’ followed me to this new job as I thought they would. And yes, they proceeded to put on their usual freak slash mind reading show at my expense or at least that was the way I interpreted back then. It would take a few more years and a few more jobs before I realized that it was not me that all this screaming was aimed at. (One of the psychiatrists I’d see in later years caught on to this right away.) The screaming was their way of manipulating all the people around me!
As a result, the girls of the Store Debt Recovery Department went out of their way to get rid of me. (I’m going to be honest here and preface that last sentence with some information that I found out during my exit interview. And it’s this, that one of girls who comprises ‘The Voices/Stalkers’ had gotten a job at this facility years earlier and had made a lot of friends in the organization. This girl then told the girls in my department and upper management that I was the one stalking her and had done some very bad things to her family. Or has my interviewer said, they thought they were defending a friend. Truth be told, it didn’t make it any better.)
The girls – women actually – of the Store Debt Recovery Department were just plain outright vicious and catty towards one another on a daily basis. From what I saw while there, they hardly ever co-operated with one another on anything. But I’d say that getting rid of me was in my opinion, the first and only thing they’d ever done as a team. And it was truly a team effort.
While I hated them for being so cruel, another part of me understood completely. As a woman, you don’t make it into your thirties and forties without having done something that you’d rather not have shared with the outside world. And I had brought with me, into their secure work place, something that threatened to expose all their hidden secrets. So consequently, these women wanted me gone.
According to them, I couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t batch checks right, I couldn’t type fast enough, I made too many errors, and I couldn’t answer the phone correctly. I was even scrutinized on my breaks. Seems I couldn’t do that right either.
The harassment got so bad I resorted to taking my breaks sitting in my car in the company parking lot. And there were times, when I had to take the car out of the lot just to have a few minutes of peace. I found that if I let my guard down for even a moment, I usually ended up on a three-day suspension.
For example, the girls got a hold of the new novel I’d started, Flight 404. Admittedly, through my own carelessness and reported it to Human Resources. The girls said they were highly offended by its dark and sinister overtones. After that, Human Resources restricted my computer use. I had to agree not to use any company computer, even on my fee time, (i.e. breaks and lunches) to work on my novel. I’d simply use pen and paper. That was quickly halted after one of the girls saw me writing away during my break. She said the whole idea of someone writing about killing people was enough to bother her.
So now, not only couldn’t I use the computer, I couldn’t use my own pen and paper, on company property, either. They went so far as to tell me that if I were caught even having the novel in my possession, I could be put on suspension. Under direst, I agreed to that. After all, the guy who’d written The House of Sand and Fog, I told myself, had written his novel sitting in the car during lunch breaks.
I signed more negative evaluations, or bad paper as they put it, in that place than I did in the entire length of all my previous working years and that includes, Florsheim, Helene Curtis, Associates Leasing, Zenith, Exxon, Apex/Whitlock/GMG Partners.
Another lesson learned — there are no Civil Rights for the mentally ill and that working for someone else is ‘at will’ only.
So there I was, caught between ‘The Voices/Stalkers’ and the girls of Osco Drugs Store Debt Recovery Department.
By the time I fired on April 16, 2001, I was actually glad or more like relieved.
STALKEDBYVOICES 