Scrooge

I continue to be fascinated by the incredibly wacky purchase suggestions Amazon tosses my way on Facebook. One day it was a $300 keychain from the Amazon luxury store. Another it was a procession of camping toilets (at that I made a mental note to stop verbalizing my desire to run away and live in a cold, dark cave on the edge of a magical forest).

I wasn’t sure what to think when I found myself scrolling through a surprisingly broad selection of cat muzzles.

The day I had a purchase suggestion for 10 pounds of dehydrated marshmallow bits (a’la’ Lucky Charms), I knew the algorithm had finally zeroed in on relevant content for me. Sure, it’s creepy when I merely think of an item and it appears in the advertisement lineup. But how would I have ever discovered there is such a thing as a Chinese takeout container filled entirely with gummy Chinese food without their unwanted, invasive surveillance?

I do have to say my favorite algorithm suggestion was for an automatic card shuffler and it is because of this advertisement I have brought you here today.

Reader, we are going to go on a little journey together. This isn’t a short story, but I am a neurodivergent country girl. Short stories aren’t in my blood. And you can handle a good ol’ fashioned yarn spinnin’, cain’t cha?

Well, in order to tell my tale, I have to take you back many years ago when baby Katie had her first real job out of college.

After (barely) graduating from undergrad at a small university in my home state of West Virginia with my cute little psychology degree I could do nothing with except go to grad school, I decided I would spend some time working a bonafide full-time grown-up job that didn’t involve selling watered-down shots to poor college kids, beer from a golf cart to stingy old white men, or overpriced goods from Express to people who couldn’t afford it.

I moved in with my best friend/cousin and she helped me get a job. In WV, your cousin is almost always your best friend and that is because everyone you live around is likely in some way related to you. Yes, that’s a stereotype. But it also happens to be true. Especially in small rural towns like where I grew up. Cousins are the best.

But let’s stay focused.

My cousin/bestie got me a job working at WV University Hospital in the radiology department where she worked as an x-ray tech. She had been working like a real adult for quite some time and everyone loved her, as they should, so I did my best to try and be professional and make her proud. But at that time I was an undiagnosed neurodivergent young woman with more skills at getting tips from drunks and mudding on backroads than wearing panty hose with my work attire, so I’m sorry to say I don’t think I did so great.

One day my boss, Nancy, God love her, came up to me at my desk and stood staring at me, mouth agape.

“What…are you wearing?”

The answer: Corduroy flares, a flannel (TUCKED IN THO!), and steel-toed boots.

“Please meet me in my office.”

I went back to Nancy’s office with the kind of attitude I can only describe as EXACTLY LIKE MY OLDEST CHILD.

Nancy was not well-liked in the radiology department. She wasn’t from “around here” so to speak. Nancy was from somewhere up North. It didn’t matter where. All that mattered was she wasn’t from WV. She had ideas about professionalism that many of us native country folk just didn’t take too kindly to.

“Katie, I believe in you. I can see through this tough, defiant attitude you portray towards authority and I can see your potential. You are smart and you can do this job. But if you are intent on not following the rules, you will not be working here much longer.”

Something happened in that moment. I wanted to respond with “kiss my ass”, but what came out instead surprised us both.

“I’m sorry. I know you’re right. I know this isn’t all I am and all I’ve got. I’m ready to try.”

My heart grew two sizes that day.

I came back the next day wearing PANTYHOSE* forgodsake.

*For all the young’ins out there reading this, pantyhose are these things that women used to be required to wear over their legs in professional settings that hid the fact that we had real human skin. They were made of nylon that never quite matched your skin tone and essentially squeezed the defiance, uniqueness, and joy from you until you were satisfied working for much less than your male co-workers.

From then on, I worked on being more professional and slightly less defiant. You can take the girl out of the steel-toed boots but you can’t take the steel-toed boots out of the girl, okay!?

Very quickly my co-workers and I became like a little family. All of us were truly a group of smart, hard-working delinquents, but we took great care of our patients and each other.

Nancy eventually moved on up and left the hospital.

But another worthy adversary had already taken her place.

One of the doctors I worked for, who I will call Dr. S, was like the final boss of horrible bosses. If we wanted to sit around and tell stories in our break room during lunch and let off a little steam, she would whip into the room and bah humbug at us, “Can you keep it DOWN?! Some people are trying to work!”

In the best of times she would try to “fit in” by making jokes, but it always backfired because in her efforts to mimic our sarcastic office banter she would inevitably end up saying something extremely offensive and hurtful all while laughing.

Sure, she didn’t sexually harass me like the male doctors I worked for did, but she relentless rode me and all my co-workers like lowly pack mules day in and day out.

Nothing was ever good enough. Nothing was ever right.

Dr. S was an enigma wrapped in a mystery covered in Prada (more on this later).

But as time went on I learned more and more about her.

On days when she wasn’t tirading about, she might let a little morsel about her life slip out. My coworkers who had worked with her many years prior to my arrival had already informed me of the puzzle pieces of her life they had already collected. And before I knew it, she went from being my mortal enemy to still being my mortal enemy, but also completely fascinating to me.

You see, Dr. S grew up Amish in Pennsylvania. At some point in her young adult life, she decided to leave and was shunned (at least temporarily, she reconnected with her family later in life). Not knowing what to do next, she floated around a bit until an opportunity to get out and see the world she had always been isolated from presented itself.

She became a long-haul trucker.

She sure did.

This is where she met her ex-husband. She didn’t talk much about him so we knew very little, but we knew he had also grown up Amish.

Marriage made long-haul trucking a challenge so Dr. S decided to find another career. This time she decided to give nursing school a try. According to a story she told us one day during one of her more jovial moments, a teacher in her nursing school told her she was “too smart to be a nurse” (they said this, NOT ME! Nurses are the best and the smartest and I love all of you sooooo much!) and encouraged her to go to medical school and become a doctor. Doing well in nursing school had given her the courage to go for it and she applied to medical school and got in.

She excelled in medical school and decided she wanted to enter a field where there weren’t many women: radiology. Dr. S told us many times that being the only woman in her radiology residency was really hard for her. She was constantly passed over and underestimated in favor of her male colleagues and this created in her a fire to prove them all wrong that never went away.

It was this fire ignited in her that cooled her marriage.

Dr. S said her husband couldn’t handle her success so she left him.

(Insert standing ovation here.)

She wasn’t stopping for anyone.

By the time I was working for her in the early 2000s she had made a name for herself not only at WVUH, but far and wide as someone who could treat uterine fibroids and perform other complicated interventional radiologic procedures. What I didn’t understand until I stopped hating her and really pay attention was that she still had to fight every day to be given equal access and the same respect as her male counterparts.

She wasn’t a “bitch” as so many referred to her. Yes, she needed healthy boundaries and fair consequences for her mistreatment of us, but her behavior came from somewhere.

She was a traumatized woman who had spent her whole life fighting and clawing her way out of the limitations and boxes everyone kept trying to put her in.

I didn’t realize Dr. S and I were so similar until one day we came head-to-head.

I had taken my first vacation in years with my fiancé at the time, another radiologist who worked in the department (that’s a story for another time!) and upon my return I was greeted at my desk by a very angry Dr. S.

No “welcome back”. No “how was your vacation?”

She immediately lit into me. “Why isn’t this done?” “Why isn’t that done?”

And I had had it.

Years of this was enough.

I turned right around and I walked right back out.

She followed me into the hallway (along with my coworkers who knew they were about to witness a showdown) and yelled at me.

Like I said, You can take the steel toed boots away from the girl, but…

I won’t recount the exact expletives used that day, but lets just say, Nancy would NOT have approved.

And I walked out.

I left.

I went home.

I figured I was out of a job.

But no one called me. Not even my fiancé! The people: they were scared.

And the next morning I went back into work and everyone acted like nothing had happened. Dr. S walked right by and ignored me like she always did unless she was unhappy and needed someone to take it out on. I wondered for a moment I had imagined it all.

Finally, I decided that I needed to talk one-on-one with Dr. S.

I had had enough of her disrespectful and rude behavior and the only chance I had at not having to deal with it again was to face this former trucker head on.

“Dr. S. Can we talk? Just us?”

She nodded and lead the way to her office (which was really just an empty reading room where radiologists read X-rays).

“Look, Dr. S. I’m sorry for how I talked to you and also for storming out yesterday. But listen, I am tired of you talking down to me and treating me like crap. I’m not perfect, but you make me hate coming to work. You’re a great doctor, but I can’t work here anymore if you are going to keep doing this. I don’t have permission to speak for everyone else, but I feel very confident they feel the same way. We want to support you. We believe you are an amazing doctor. But we can’t help you if you keep pitting yourself against us.”

She listened with her lips pursed tightly like she was about to blow a balloon and I thought I had made a grave mistake.

But after a moment she said, “Ok.” Got up. And walked out of the room.

I thought she was going to march into the managers office, but she didn’t. She just went right back to work. I felt dejected, like my voice didn’t matter and decided to look for a new job that very day.

But let me tell ya’ll, from that moment on, Dr. S was a different person. Was she still a hard-ass with high expectations? Yes. But she also softened up a bit and started to relax, have some more fun, and be a little more understanding with all of us.

She had listened. It worked!

Now, before you all start to think that my actions that day are because I was some kind of unique office bad girl who stood up to the boss and changed things singlehandly, let me relieve you of those allusions.

I haven’t lived in WV for almost two decades, but I can tell you that in the 90s and early 00s, you couldn’t walk 10 feet in any work place without tripping over an office bad girl. Just because I put a tip jar on my desk at work after being denied a raise because of “my attitude” and then held everyone hostage with the threat of quitting if I didn’t “get some appreciation around here” doesn’t make me special. So what if another office bad girl coworker and I planned an entire secret office Holiday party that we were told we COULD NOT HAVE in an empty office space that was blocked off for construction and everyone came to it and none of us got caught. That don’t impress me much!

It took all of us holding doctors like Dr. S accountable over and over again until something finally shifted.

And yes - It was mostly the women.

I may not have been the only office bad girl, but I sure was one at one time. And if that surprises you about me then you haven’t spent enough time with me.

But, I haven’t gotten to the point of this whole story.

The winter following Dr. S’s shift in demeanor was a hard one. Our department had lost its first office manager after she was fired for falsifying our employee reviews. Another beloved staff member had been fired as well. He deserved it, but still. We missed him. We didn’t have the funds for an office party, the snow had started early that year, and everyone was just down in the dumps in general.

One evening right before Christmas Eve we were all trying to get out of work early and miss the snow storm that was headed our way. Just as some of us who weren’t on call were about to head out, Dr. S had called into the control room and asked all of us to stay. She was on her way in with a surprise.

“I know it’s been a tough time lately and I want to give you all something.”

We all immediately got excited.

Dr. S could be difficult and drive us nuts, but one thing she did well was spend her money. She was a single doctor living in WV. She had money to spend and boy did she spend it. She may have worn scrubs most of the day, but her feet were always enveloped in Prada. She didn’t have anything that wasn’t couture.

The Devil, literally, wore Prada.

A truth she reveled in, actually. Shortly after our little tete a tete about how I wanted her to treat me, she handed me a book while I was sitting at my desk, told me to read it, and walked away cackling. The Devil Wears Prada. She looked back to see me looking at her with confusion and said, “Get it! The Devil Wears Prada!? Me…I’M the devil. I wear Prada! ENJOY THE BOOK!” Cackle, cackle, cackle.

That snowy evening as we all waited on her arrival, we took guesses at what she was bringing us. Some people thought of expensive things. Some people guessed pink slips. But none of us could have ever imagined what she actually ended up bringing us.

A co-worker and I were standing in the hallway outside the control room chatting when we heard the sounds of high heel click clacks echoing down the adjacent hallway.

She had arrived.

We gathered everyone around just as Dr. S turned the corner. There she was looking like a trip and a half with a huge smile spread across her face. She was wearing black leather Prada pants, black high heeled Prada boots, a genuine Russian beaver fur hat, a hand knit Christmas sweater, and she was carrying a very large, red velvet Santa sack.

“Gather around! Gather around!” she said.

“All of you have been working so hard and I wanted to do something special this year to show you how much I appreciate all you do!”

She reaches into the sack as we all leaned over to see. And out she pulls…

An automatic card shuffler.

We all stare at it.

She shoves the first one into the chest of the person closest to her and continues reaching in and grabbing automatic card shufflers for each of us.

It was apparent to all of us by the elated look on her face she was extremely proud of this gift.

“Aren’t these amazing? I’ve never seen anything like them before! You just put your deck of cards in the slots and this little contraption shuffles it for you! I knew I had to buy all they had and give them to you all!”

She was literally floating and giggling like a girl.

Without any discussion whatsoever, we all shifted from confused and somewhat disappointed to celebratory excitement. There were thank yous and hugs abounding. She was like Scrooge after his night of hanging with Christmas ghosts. The automatic card shufflers were her Christmas goose. We had never seen her so happy!

I worked for a few years after this fateful night. By the time I left WVUH to move to Washington, DC, Dr. S was one of my biggest supporters and cheerleaders. On my last day she met with me and we both got tears in our eyes as she told me she could see some of her in me. That she knew I would go far and do big things. That I had the capability and the guts. For many years she was one of my job references and someone I would reach out to as a mentor as I continued to grow from that defiant baby Katie and into the defiant grown-up Katie you all know and love today.

Looking back on those years of my life, I can now see with more clarity. Dr. S and I truly were a lot a like. We were a couple of women who had been through some shit and were tired of people trying to box us in, control us, take advantage of us, and above all else: underestimate us. There’s no excuse for mistreating people and she definitely mistreated us, but the more I learned about her life the more I understood the “why’s” of her behavior. We drew boundaries with her and she respected us enough to follow them. The power of the collective office bad girl, ya’ll.

And so I hope, as you are out living your lives, and you happen upon an automatic card shuffler, you will think of Dr. S and her Santa sack and beaver fur hat and it will brighten up your day a bit.

Stories are everywhere. You just have to look.

(This is a picture someone took of my confused face as Dr. S, who is on the right, was trying to say something funny to me, but it was actually really offensive. The best part: Dr. S is the one who had this picture printed and given to me when I left because someone told her they had evidence of her offending me. God I love this woman.)