Right after law school, I drifted a little. I had turned down recruiting offers because after doing some summer placements I knew that I didn’t want to work in a law firm. While I was figuring out what to do with my life, I took a job as a “program administrator” for a small charity. The offices were in a drab and dingy loft above a warehouse where they stored food for a food bank and who knows what else. But the program was run and staffed by ministers and was affiliated with a bunch of churches so I naively assumed that it’d all be on the up and up. Despite being offered a pittance of salary (not in any way commensurate with my education, work experience or the requirements of the position) I took the job.
After six weeks, I’d come to the realization that the charity was essentially a big sham. Their raison d’etre was housing, but they weren’t providing housing or housing referrals or working on projects to build housing or doing anything related to housing that I could see in the day to day operations or find reference to in the files. And the files were a mess, an absolutely bloody mess. I couldn’t find 90% of what I was asked to deal with, and never found anything that would sufficiently explain what was being done with the money that was being pumped into the organization from the affiliated churches.
Worse, I couldn’t ever get a straight answer out of the director as to what we were working on at the moment or what I was to be doing. On any given day I could be do secretarial work, be a courier, crawl around the warehouse doing inventory or take minutes in a meeting where nothing of substance was discussed. I met with “clients” doing “instakes” for programs that only seemed to exist on paper. I took phone calls from people who had been told that we provided emergency housing help, and had to tell them all that we didn’t. One day, a lady asked, angrily, “Well, what DO you do, then?” and it was all I could do to say “Lady, I wish I knew!”
The Monday of Week Seven of Job from Hell, I woke up with a massive migraine headache. I called in and told the “outreach administrator” (I’m not sure what he did, exactly, but he was the only one in the office) that I wouldn’t be in, that I had an awful migraine and I needed to simply sleep in a cool, dark, silent place. He said he’d tell the Director and said his wife got migraines monthly and he knew how bad they were, and he’d pray for my recovery. (Ministers, remember – the janitor and I were the only unordained staffers.) I thanked him, closed the blinds, turned off the phone in my bedroom and tried to sleep.
Over the course of that day, the Director called me and called me and called me, first to bitch about my not being there, then to tell me that I needed to call him about this, that and all the other including a pointed screed about the “illegitimacy” of migraines and another about how inappropriate and unprofessional it was for me to take a day off so soon after I was hired. I could hear it every time the other phones in the house rang and then I could hear him screaming on my answering machine. I just couldn’t muster myself to get out of bed to turn the thing off.
When Mr. tlw came home that evening, he listened to the machine and was livid. When I had recuperated from my headache later that evening, I was too. The next day, I went in and got in the Director’s face. I told him that the charity was a fraud, and a joke, and that he was an unethical and morally bankrupt as anyone I’d ever met. I told him that he may as well quit calling himself Reverend because there was nothing about him worth revering and all he revered was power and ill-gotten money. I also included a long screed of my own about the “illegitimacy” of questioning other people’s medical woes and how inappropriate and unprofessional it was to call an employee at home when they were sick and harangue them via answering machine once. When it happened eleven times over the course of 7 hours, it crossed the line into harassment. Then I turned on a heel and walked out.
It took four months to get my last paycheck, and that only happened after I sicced my lawyer on them. That job was the single biggest mistake I have ever made in my entire life.
