"I heard the editing team is pretty bogged down," I said to Lindz as we walked back to my place after dinner downtown. "I banged through a lot of campaigns and now they're stuck with them."
"Oh! That reminds me." We crossed a street. "My Team Lead asked your Team Lead how the interviews were going, you know, they're trying to fill your position, and she kind of mumbled, 'We're not going to find another Suz.'"
My brain immediately went to the negative. "And thank heavens for that," I said. Quiet, polite Suz went out as quite a hellraiser. Obviously they were trying to cess out potential rebels in the interview stage now.
"No, that wasn't how she meant it. She meant it like...they aren't going to find a replacement that easily. It was a good thing." She paused. "Well, not good for them."
I was quiet for a little while after that. "I hate that the woman finally compliments me when I'm gone."
I should clarify: I don't have a problem with my former supervisor as an individual. She's actually a very, very nice girl, though I haven't painted her in the best of light here. Her management style (micromanagement) frustrated the hell out of me. All of our campaigns had to pass under her watchful eyes. She always sent mine back, often with subjective changes ("I don't like how this sentence looks") rather than genuine mistakes...yes, she did catch genuine mistakes, and I don't begrudge her that, but it was everything else--and I started doubting everything I did. Everything. I didn't know why I was in the field. I wondered why they didn't just fire me if I sucked that much.
Potato felt that way, too, after two years there, so it's not just me.
Some logical part of my brain knew I wasn't awful. If I were a truly terrible copy editor, I'd have been fired long ago. But no one ever really praises the editors; we only get called out on our mistakes. I've heard "You missed a comma here," never "Wow, that semicolon is in exactly the right place!" I get that; it's sort of the nature of the job. You don't think about the editors until they miss something, or until they're not there at all anymore. But lack of praise to offset the criticism makes it a damned painful gig at times, at least for me. I edited a dozen issues of one of the biker mags before the editor came in and pointed out a mistake I'd missed.
One error, one disapproving stare in light of all I did. Dude, I was crushed.
That same logical part of my brain, by the way, knows I was a damned good girlfriend. But that part of the brain gets buried under criticism and self-doubt, the quiet voice that whispers should I have done more? and all those little red-flag emails that pile up from the Team Lead, pointing out all I do wrong rather than everything I did right.
Logically, I know I did a lot right. And that team did a hell of a lot right. The volume we had to push out, the company's impossible-to-achieve zero percent error rating (I still don't know if that's the company policy, or something Team Lead pushed on us)...our group did damn well, and still does, but apparently they're slower, now that I'm gone.
I didn't halfass my job at any time. Yeah, my productivity dropped at the end, but I was still the fastest worker there. So I guess it's good to get kudos for that, even if it's too late to make a real difference for me.
It's acknowledgment, at least.
I was there, I did good work, I was fast...
...and I'll be difficult to replace.
That'll do, pig, that'll do.
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