Tyrant in the 80's

The early 1980's were good to me... unfortunately, I can't say the same for everyone around me. I knew it all - Really! I was not one of those geniuses that graduated from college at age 13 who went on to take the physics world by storm. No, I was one of those people that had the annoying ability to remember random facts especially if I read them; while I didn't have a photographic memory,  if I read it, I remembered it. Not exact wording, but the essence of the written word. Okay, not so annoying yet, right? But then, I could pull the book [for example] off the shelf and open it to about the right page (or at least reference the chapter) and remember approximately how far down the page my quoted reference was; then I could happily point it out to the person I was [usually] correcting. I was rarely wrong. Now THAT was annoying.

I started my first job when I was 17 as a bookkeeper. I have never been an accountant (although I have done "accounting" during my careers), realizing right away that I prefer the input and balancing of paperwork... financial statements were boring. I guess I wanted to do work I could control rather than bog my mind down in analysis of numbers that came from sources I didn't input myself. Control freak? Me? When I was in my early 20's (coincidentally in the early 1980's), I realized I had a head for patterns. I was really good at looking at something and knowing it was "off". So started my interest in auditing... usually auditing if there was a suspected problem. If the pattern looked "off" I could follow paperwork back to the hotel employee that was mis-posting cash receipts onto Comp ledgers (and pocketing the cash, of course). Or there was the audit I did on a casino in Carson City where I uncovered a keno runner and a supervisor paying out [to themselves I imagine] on losing keno tickets... the keno auditor I was temping for had been in on the scam too. These flashes of brilliance brought me to the attention of management. They were impressed with my technically ability and decided to make me a supervisor. How stupid is that?

I am lucky to have survived my early management career without being taken out by a sniper in a dark parking garage (please refer to paragraph 1 and my annoying habit of being right). All the smarts in  the world can never make up for lack of people skills. To this day, I still laugh at myself because the one class that dropped my A.A.degree GPA was Sociology (I got a C, can you imagine?). I was thinking "easy A" everyone says so. I studied. Cracked the spine on the textbook and actually did the homework. I didn't get it. People's behavior isn't logical. Sure, we do studies of why people do the things they do... but there is no logic to a lot of it - social behavior is based on a lot of emotional responses. Ohhh, shiny - I digress.

I was on paper the perfect person to be a supervisor. I excelled at my job [exceeds expectations], I could create a schedule, I could tell people what to do based on policies and procedures already put in place, I could enforce the rules and regulations with the full knowledge that I held an authority that comes with being right. When you walk into a job fully believing its "my way or the highway" without looking at people as people, you set yourself up for failure. Luckily for me, and the people that were working as my subordinates, my stint was short-lived. Until the next job, were it started all over again. The Peter Principle - promoted to my level of failure. Back in the 80's, there wasn't the same emphasis on employee satisfaction that we see in businesses today. Customer Service didn't really begin to be valued above speed and efficiency until the 1990's or so. Working for corporate America was brutal, and I was one of the brutes.