Aw, shit

I am going to try to keep this short. When I don’t, my mind spins off in a thousand directions.

I’m not happy at my job. It’s not about the work. It’s about the people, and the management. There are many problem areas here, but for me, at this moment, it’s boiled down to one. If this issue were gone, I could maybe think more rationally and with less of a sense of panic (thanks, CR, that’s totally what it is) about what I’m doing here and whether I can go on. But the issue is not gone, and I do not expect it to go away, because of the management issues.

The problem is, one of my coworkers is a child abuser. This is not a secret. The office knows. Management knows. Other organizations know. County social workers know. For a variety of reasons I don’t want to get into, this is not a case that is going to make headway in the social services system, so the problem, for me, can’t be addressed there.

This coworker also has an abusive personality (surprise!). There are times at work where it feels like the whole day, and all available coworkers and resources, have been spent avoiding/calming down/giving special tummy rubs to this coworker, to avoid further outbreaks of screaming and tantrums. During these days, if another coworker steps out of their assigned role of tummy rubbing, they take the heat for having pissed off the abusive coworker. Nobody else gets to behave this way (well, one other coworker, but that’s another problem entirely), but the rest of us are forced to take responsibility for this abusive coworker’s attitude. This is to say nothing about the coworker’s actual work performance, which is, let’s be generous, less than satisfactory.

Management is aware of all of this. (Maybe I’m giving them too much credit — maybe they’re not. Though if that’s the case, it does nothing to change my opinion of management, because there is no way not to be aware of this.) Management does not want to get involved in the coworker’s personal life, which is understandable. However, this is a child welfare organization, and to me, when an entire office, nonprofit sector, and county knows this coworker abuses children, that has crossed the line from the personal to the professional. If it was personal, we wouldn’t know. But this is common knowledge, and affects our professional reputation. I am ashamed to work at an organization that employs a well-known child abuser.

Perhaps management has spoken to the coworker about this before. If they have, nobody knows. Management here operates under a blackout. All I know is, the coworker has not been fired. So, as far as I’m concerned, management is condoning child abuse and workplace harassment. They are welcome to tell me differently, but I am not going to ask, because I should not have to ask. I should know where management stands on child abuse and harassment. And, I think, I do.

What management does is tell others in the office to work harder not to piss off the abusive coworker, while also enacting gag orders on those who may be discussing this with other coworkers. We should bring all our complaints to management, they say. The fact that we don’t, however, has nothing to do with the employees. If your employees don’t confide in you, that is not because your employees are defective. It is because you as a manager are ineffective and untrustworthy. Management has what seems to be a very strict policy of disciplining symptoms and ignoring causes. As in, there would not be gossip if there was no problem, or appeared to be a visible solution enacted by an assertive management. Employees would not keep secrets from management if management was relevant.

At a recent work event, I witnessed this coworker abusing a child. It was not the kind of abuse that could be reported — otherwise, believe me, it would be — but it was most certainly abuse. It also occurred in front of several families that we serve, as well as their children, who, being adopted or foster children, were probably most certainly abused themselves at some point. I reported this to management. Management promised action. I do not know what this action is, or if it’s been taken yet, but I do know that the abusive coworker has all of a sudden started kissing my ass fucking hard.

When I told management what I’d seen, I also told management that from now on, I refuse to be around this coworker if children were present. This applied to events we host, and also to the workplace itself, should the coworker ever bring children here. Management was fine with this. I, at the moment, was fine with it. I reported what I’d seen, I set a boundary, and management seemed appropriately apoplectic. But since then the blackout and gag orders have taken effect, and I know nothing about what management has done. All I know is, this coworker is still employed here. Since then, I’ve started to notice little things I am doing. Like:

• Speaking very disrespectfully to my boss, who makes no negative or defensive or disciplinary response
• Pulling up into the parking lot, seeing my coworker’s car, and spending a few moments focusing my breathing before I can get out and face the day
• Spending my commute to and from work having imaginary conversations where I give management a piece of my mind
• Feeling full of dread when it is time to go to sleep, or time to wake up, because work is coming
• Being unable to focus on work while at work. The work I can focus on is a long-term project I have to compile what I know about how the office works, since none of this stuff has ever been documented here, and could be useful to others if I wasn’t around.
• Making an elaborate plan to go back to school in the hopes that I may have to leave or cut back my hours, and/or will have the credentials in a few years to work somewhere else.
• When callers ask for my name to use as a general contact for our organization, I instead give them our general inbox and the title “Administrative Assistant.” That way, I tell them, if I’m not here, your email will get to the appropriate personnel.
• The other day, this abusive coworker monopolized a conversation in order to continue at length about what things were like in their day. The abusive coworker barely stopped short of saying “uphill both ways.” Listening to the coworker’s monologue, an unbidden joyful thought came to me: “I could quit right now, and I wouldn’t have to hear the end of this fucking story.” It was a bracing few moments, getting that thought under control.

Though I would call myself technically undecided for a lot of reasons — economy, future plans, school, health insurance, benefits, commute, loyalty, bills, the good I can parse from the bad — it appears the rest of me is already preparing myself for what I figure is going to happen.

Because, at the very basic core, I cannot work with somebody who abuses their children.

That’s all.

If this coworker were not around, I may find other reasons I cannot work here. The fact that this is an organization that has employed a known child abuser at length, for one (I am not the first one to report the coworker’s abuse to management, I’ve learned — though I’ve only learned this by ignoring gag orders). Or I may find I could stick it out, because hey, things change.

But that is not the case. The case is, I am working with a child abuser.

Yesterday I found a job posting for working in a residential treatment home with youth and adolescents. That is at the top of my list of things I want to do. It constitutes a passion, my desire to do this. I don’t know how to explain this. To be crass, I love crazy kids. I do. I love crazy teenagers so hard. I think they are my favorite kind of people. They have, to me, more potential than anybody else in the world, because they are busily constructing what sanity and adulthood means, and want both so much harder than sane adults could ever understand. So I stared at this job starry-eyed, imagining all the crazy teenagers whose company I could keep.

But it paid far less than I make now. I decided that wasn’t worth considering, because of the economy, and because my bear is not the happiest with his job at the moment, and I do not want to put additional pressure on him to stay there and support me, though I think he would if I asked. It just goes against my sense of fairness and would, I think, make me very anxious about money in a way I haven’t had to be in a while. Still and all, I’ve been thinking about it since with this sense of wistfulness and daydream… I could work in a residential treatment facility… I could hang out with crazy kids all day… if only… if only…

Today I found an identical job posting, with a non-profit whose work I am familiar with and respect highly. It has a pay scale, depending on qualifications, but somewhere in the middle of the scale is what I make right now. And I have all the qualifications they want. All of them.

Now, to be sure, this job would constitute my working with child abusers, which is what is causing me to think of quitting here. But — and this is a super important but — the abuse would be acknowledged as an issue that needs addressing and rectifying. I can work with a child abuser to help them not abuse children. I can work in a place where abuse is an acknowledged reality, where confrontation is a possibility. I cannot work in a place where child abuse is unacknowledged and implicitly condoned.

Aw, shit. Aw shit aw shit aw shit. I would really like to apply for this job. I am really conflicted about leaving this job. I know I am 25 and all, but I still refer to myself as a kid, because I think it is disrespectful to real adults to call myself an adult. I do not know much about much, and have not had to do very adult things. Like this, I mean. Like making a hard decision about careers. Aw shit. Aw fuck. Aw panic.