Op-Ed column published in The Republican-American (Waterford, CT)
December 28, 2005

It was a year ago exactly, and I was on the phone to my friend Marlene. In the thirty-three years I had known her, I had never heard her sound so out-of-it. She was trying to get some sleep, she said, but nothing was helping. She had mixed a couple of sleeping pills, nothing lethal, but enough to make her sound loopy. I tried to calm her down. In a few days, she was back sounding like her old self, rational, apologetic she had caused anyone to worry. She was upset about her job, a job she loved from which she feared she might be fired. Marlene worked as the Monument Manager for the Carrizo Plain National Monument in California, under the Bureau of Land Management. She loved her job, but her boss was making life a nightmare.

She was about to serve a five-day, unpaid suspension, over the Christmas holidays, and as much as she hated serving that suspension, she dreaded going back to work even more. Marlene was suspended because she sent an email to colleagues correcting a factual error her boss had made. She had neglected to copy him on the email and he thought his reputation had suffered unduly. Nevermind that she was right about the facts. She had embarrassed him.

Bad bosses are ubiquitous. We have all faced bosses with ill tempers. When I was young, getting screamed at by a boss was part of the price of having a job. I'd quit as soon as I could. Later, as I became a professional, I witnessed many of my friends lose jobs, usually because they were college professors who did not get tenure. The news always came in December. All of them were in mid-life having to start over after dedicating so much to their chosen professions. Marlene was 46 years old, and starting over seemed impossible. But as with so many of my friends, I knew she'd find a way. She was brilliant, talented, remarkable. She'd get over the injustice, the despair. Except she didn't. On May 2, 2005, Marlene put a bullet in her brain.

Just today in the New York Times I read an article about a photo-journalist who hanged himself, because he had been suspended for publishing a photograph of himself with Tom Selleck, against his guild's rules. For that photograph, he was paid $50. For that, and for taking some beer from a party, his peers decided he might justifiably never work again. He was 40.

Marlene's fear was that after 13 years of spotless federal service, without a reference from the boss who hated her, she would never work in her chosen profession again. She would lose her home, not just the building but the ability to live in that place on earth where she felt she belonged.

Marlene was the victim of intimidation through procedural bullying, and her employment situation was far from unique. Marlene was one of the most rational, hard-working people I have ever known. She worked in the Arctic as a hydrologist, in the Nevada desert in mining territory, and lastly, on an isolated plain with dozens of endangered species. In a note she left me, she said she had lived a full and good life. She wanted to reclaim her destiny and take it away from her boss. He had made her life "unbearable." She did not want to be forced to leave her home. She'd leave on her own terms.

I often try to imagine the steady nerves it must have taken to raise that barrel to her temple. The resolve. The acceptance of finality. And I try to imagine what element of humanity deserted her boss when he tried to ruin her life without pause. She sent an email at 9:10 am shortly before she pulled the trigger. Her boss was alerted at 9:30 am that she might commit suicide. He did not call 911. He did not call the Bureau of Land Management fire department 10 minutes away from where she lived. He told two of his employees to drive out there and check it out. It was a 2-hour drive. She was breathing reflexively when the men got there. There was nothing they could do now, so they took her BLM-issued computer and her BLM-issued truck while the helicopter airlifted her body to a hospital on the California coast. And someone called me.

She put me in charge of her affairs. Yet I find myself entrusted with more than her estate. I have been hearing from people all over the country about their bully bosses.

An article in The Los Angeles Times about Marlene's death made its way onto blogs, and suddenly there were people writing, from BLM, from other agencies, from ordinary jobs, telling me how close they were to doing what Marlene had done. Some said they still might kill themselves. They hadn't decided for sure. One woman who had survived her only child's death is worried her job will prove the end of her. A woman in a small town was fired from a resort and no other place will hire her. She is in her fifties. Her life expectancy is 30 years more. When she looks at the three decades ahead of her and tries to imagine feeding and clothing herself, the picture is grim.

If there is anything I wish for 2006, it is that people will listen. I am not sure I was really listening when Marlene told me of her despair. I was too busy trying to be optimistic, telling her she would find another job, a better job, that it would all be OK.

For all the talk workplaces offer now about being "families," there is too little concern for the human costs that accompany the loss of a job or even the fear of being unemployed. A year ago, my friend was trying to find someone to listen to her pain. How could life be this unfair? There was no answer. What we all need to know is, when life is cruel, how can we make it bearable?

Katherine Hermes, of Torrington, is associate professor of history and co-coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Central Connecticut State University.

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