Patricia (Pat) Tollens’ first week in Boghadair had begun less than smoothly. Her first encounter with her new supervisor could best be described as a train wreck. Tanner Carrero had encountered her when she attempted to hike in the mountains. But instead, he had to rescue her from a marauding grizzly bear that she had incited by leaving her bear transponder in her car. Things had started poorly. And then they got worse.
From her point of view Tanner was a hopeless throwback to the stone-age patriarchy that no longer existed in her world. Back at UC Berkeley if he had yelled at her the way he did on that trail, she would have had him brought up on charges; verbal assault, hate speech, and any number of micro-aggressions. In fact, he pretended that she was the one at fault.
And now she had to work for this caveman. She called up her advisor at Berkeley and requested that a grievance be opened up against Carrero by the school. But she was advised that Typhon Industries didn’t work that way. In fact, they didn’t even have an HR department. They had something called “Personnel” and basically, they handled payroll and insurance paperwork and handed complaints over to local management. If she wanted to lodge a protest, she’d have to talk to Carrero’s manager. When she attempted this, she found an even older, more sexist man than Carrero who told her to stop making trouble or she’d be sent back to California by the next plane. And just to make things completely transparent she was cc’d on an e-mail from his boss to Carrero telling him what she had done and recommending he straighten her out right away or send her packing. Pretty bad.
So, on her first day of work she showed up at the small frame building that housed the survey team. There was an office list and she found Tanner’s name and walked down the corridor to that room and saw him setting at one of the desks and approached with the bleakest expression that her face could produce short of actually being caught by a grizzly bear.
Tanner was sitting working on a spreadsheet but caught sight of Pat as she approached his cubicle. His expression turned to a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment. He had never liked “supervising” people. He was an “individual contributor” down to his boots. There was nothing he hated more than “onboarding” employees. And now he had a problem that threatened to drag him into a world of paperwork. Terminating an intern sounded like a nightmare of paperwork and he would avoid it by almost any means possible.
Tanner had booked a conference room for her first day to allow her to come up quickly to speed on the project by working one-on-one with him. He asked her to follow him to the conference room and they sat down opposite each other at a small conference table.
Tanner coughed nervously and started, “Ms. Tollens, we’ve started off badly but we can move past the problems we’ve had if we concentrate on the work at hand. My boss is sort of upset. He’s probably more upset with me than with you but we have to show him that we can work together efficiently and hit our deliverables on the schedule. If you think we can work together then I’m going to meet you in the middle. But if you feel that I’m as bad a person as you indicated in your grievance then we should end this today and not waste any more of your time or this company’s.”
He stopped talking and waited for her reply. Pat had listened with interest to his words. Apparently, he wasn’t the monster she had assumed. He sounded almost reasonable; confused but almost reasonable. She thought, “Maybe this won’t be horrible.” She wanted badly to get Typhon Industries on her resume. Everyone in the mining industry knew they were light-years ahead of the competition. She had heard they weren’t a progressive company but this Carrero guy might be honestly trying to work with her. She decided to give it a try. She said, “I think we can work together.”
Tanner let out a sigh and managed a half smile, “Good. I’d like to have you go over our field work manual today and we can break that up by having you begin to attend the project meetings so you can meet the team and become familiar with the way we work. In the afternoon I’ll meet back here with you to go over a field study I have planned for tomorrow. I’ll provide you with the itinerary and also the gear you’ll need. We’ll take three other interns along to get them trained too. They’ll be at the meeting today so you can get to know them too. The four of you may find some benefit to spending some time together to help acclimate yourselves to a new locale together.” Pat nodded her head and said, “That sounds good. Is there a laptop I’ll be using? I’d like to take notes on the manual and figure out your e-mail system and other onboarding tasks.” He said, “Sure, it’s the one on that side of the table. There’s a folder with the onboarding information, including initial passwords and other IS gobbledygook.” She looked a little anxious when he used the term gobbledygook but she didn’t say anything.
And so, they began. Maybe not a ball of fire, not “Astaire and Rogers” but no one had been brought up on charges and neither of them had raised their voices a decibel over cubicle normal. A new beginning!