You're not the boss of me!

As you may all know, I love my job. I finally found a place where I'm comfortable with the work and the people and the fact that we are helping people who are in need. However, just recently my direct boss is a new person. She lives in Atlanta and she's got a super thick accent. She seems nice and I guess I like her, I'm just hoping she's just a nice and fair as my other boss was.

Weeks go by and she finally showed her true colors. First off, she's the type that will cut you off regardless if you are asking a question or answering hers. Secondly she's very aggressive. I get super turned off by people who are too aggressive. Life's too short to be fighting because they are say the sky is pink when it's really blue. And thirdly, she'll fight you to the bone on issues where she thinks she's right when in reality she's totally wrong.

A problem arose to where it seemed I wasn't giving the account team the information that they needed. The real problem was I was waiting on more information from this account person so I couldn't move forward with the request. I'm in a conference call meeting and after the call was finished I stepped out of the meeting room and someone is running down the hall yelling, "Dude, you are getting paged like crazy. You need to call the receptionist now." What the heck is going on? I jet down to my cube when my Production Assistant tells me that my boss has been paging me numerous times and she needs me to call her immediately. Great, just what I want to do, call my boss and have her run me over so fast I don't even feel the pain.

I dial her number and she answers on the first ring. She tells me she has to conference in Babra, my old boss. So she conferences her in and she starts asking me, "Why haven't you sent this out for pricing and why would you have a meeting with out the creative team because you are not supposed to have a creative meeting without the team there and why didn't you tell anyone that you were taking longer than expected? Raquel, this doesn't look good and the President knows you are not performing your duties". Whatever happened to, let's hear your side of the story? I start to answer her questions and she continually keeps cutting me off. And because she's cutting me off she saying something that is not true so I try to correct her and my justifications of why I did what I did and again she cuts me off. And it's not that she starts to talk over me she cuts me off by saying, "No no no no" in a very demaning tone. I literally had to raise my voice so she could stop talking over me so she could FINALLY hear my side. After all the yelling, she finally calmed down and realized what I had done was right.

After losing 50 lbs of sweat, I'm left in my cube shaking, nervous, upset, angry and frustrated. Then I thought, who the hell is she to be talking to me like that?!?!?!? My own mother doesn't speak to me like that and neither does my husband. So why is it ok for her to speak to me in that manner and tone? Just because she's my boss she has every right to do this? She doesn't own me and she's not my mother! As my thoughts keep progressing, I'm getting more and more angry. And finally I thought, just because the company pays my bills does that give them the right to treat me like a 5 year old?

As the days pass, the more and more I'm starting to get peeved by my boss. She's so rude, so arrogant, so blunt, why does she continue to do this? Then one day, we had a conference call and she was making some points that were not right for the team. And it seemed like she wasn't understanding the full circle so I put my two cents in and boy I wish I hadn't. About 15 minutes after the conference call she calls me and says, "When you're in a meeting with your boss you are not to disagree with me at all. You must be supportive at all times even if you feel the issue is wrong. Then after the meeting you can call me and we can discuss it amongst ourselves." This blew my top but I understood where she was coming from. However, here's my argument: If you are going to have a "brainstorming" meeting, tell me that I'm not open to brainstorm with the team and then if I see any issues, I'll bring it up to her attention. But since it was a brainstorming meeting and she didn't tell me her expectations I thought it was an open discussion with everyone. So of course I tried to tell her this and again that annoying "No no no no" cutoff line came up again.

I give up, I'm just going to let her run the show and I'll sit back and take it. I guess I have to right? What are my rights at this company? Because you know what will happen; if I complain about her to HR, later on, I'll be fired. I've seen it happen and it's not pretty. So here's my other question, what gives the right to someone to treat you like crap but you cannot point it out or defend yourself? Corporate America SUCKS!

I'm not alone. There must be a reason why mean bosses are mean. You're not born with this mean attitude. Something triggered this behavior. I just wonder if I'll ever know what caused her to be so mean.