My Boss Screamed at Me Tonight

Define "old." As someone closing in on the big 6-0, I might resemble that remark. Oh, and to keep on-topic, I've found that the older you get, the less you tend to get yelled at. Funny how that works. Yelling at me would be like yelling at Grandpa Walton.

 

The only person at my office that I've ever yelled at is my publisher.

A few minutes after that, he actually marveled because it was the first time I screamed at anyone in the office.

A few minutes after that he unknowingly did something that diffused the situation anyway.

 

Your shop is no fun. Mine has had some knock-down, drag-out, in-your face scream fests — and we're talking giving AND taking — after deadline between editors and paginators over the events of the night. Nobody got canned and at the end they were adult enough to try to turn it something positive.

Of course, I wouldn't recommend that to everybody...

But I would like to think that editors are thick-skinned enough to accept being confronted about something, so long as it's respectful and everybody walks away on the same page. Also, I'd like to know if the poster had communicated with the ME throughout the night what the situation was with this ballgame. If the ME says "we're not waiting," then you're not waiting. If the ME said "get it in as fast as you can" then she needs to get the hell out of the way and let the paginator do his job. If it was never brought up, shame on the sports slot.

 

Deskers yell about 100X more than writers.

As they should, on a night-to-night basis, their jobs are about 1,000X more stressful than ours are.

 

Point taken. But the best editor I've ever worked with yelled the most.

He cared that much. He stressed that much. It wasn't healthy.

 

Emphasis added is mine.

Look, the image he put out there is a shrew screaming at him non-stop, not just a "Hey, are you close yet?" but just LAYING INTO HIM consistently for about five minutes while he puttered away, deep in work. Leaning over him, calling him every name under the sun, threatening him, etc., on a non-stop loop.

I've NEVER seen that. I can't imagine anyone would.

 

I can understand venting about bosses. Hell, I did it, and had the thread deleted at the advice of IJAG.

However, two wrongs don't make a right, NightOwl. Your boss being unprofessional does not give you the license to be unprofessional. When you get in, talk to her about her blow up last night. Be prepared to take it the next step in the protocols if you have to.

I had a manager yell at me on the floor in front of other call center representatives. The way I handled it was to meet with our manager. She called him in for a closed-door meeting. He once sent me a nasty response to an e-mail query I had. He made the mistake of CC'ing our manager.

She called me in, apologized for his tone, assured me it wouldn't happen again, told me she'd address it with him and she answered my question. A few minutes later, I saw him in her office with the door closed. I could tell she was not having a good day, so I'm pretty sure she ripped him a new one in private.

As a boss now, I find I usually get my point across more effectively by talking in an even tone than I would by screaming. When it's one of my student writers, I'll send a detailed e-mail outlining what needs to improve. If a story's so bad I need to spike it, I do it and I explain why it needed to be spiked.

 

I've been at my place for more than a year. Never witnessed a shouting match, and our staff is pretty big. The closest I came was a news-side desker and an editor raising their voices and droning on for 10 minutes over the proper name of a local hotel. We joked about it for at least a week afterward.

 

I've seen it! Many times.

And I don't think I've been to many dysfunctional shops. It's just deadline pressure meets the pressure to get important shit in the paper and that's a volatile cocktail. Inevitably, the desk person is going to want to "do the job right" and the editor is going to want to get it in at the time that may have been heavily emphasized at the meeting with the publisher earlier in the week — a drop dead x o'clock deadline so the press crew can start by x o'clock.

So what's the major problem here? To me, this sounds like a scenario that should have been resolved at 3 p.m. not midnight. You walk out of your afternoon meeting knowing the flexibility of your deadlines that night. If you didn't have that kind of meeting, you dial the ME's extension at 8:30 and say "Hey, we have a late local ballgame tonight that could push us to deadline. What's the gameplan?" And if the answer is "go in without it for the first," then go in without it. If the answer is "get a generic in for the first and a re-write for the second," then the ME needs to shut up and let that happen.

This sounds like a classic case of no communication in the office.