Tag Archives: workplace bullies

1: So Long

Packing is a science.

It was Vivian Moreau’s idea that I blog about our year in Switzerland. As a journalist with an entrepreneurial bend of mind, she suggested this would have the makings of a good travel book, which goes to show that I have hidden my aversion to travel from her quite well.

Everyone is a better traveller than me. Everyone. I like seeing new places, but I hate what it takes to get there.

This open-air cable car just opened in Lucerne. What a pity we don’t have time to ride it. 😉

With the endless stream of travel books and websites available now, I have no illusions of making this into anything other than a semi-personal journal of life as a corporate spouse tagging along after my hubby, which many see as glamorous, but only because they do not know the personal hell corporate couples endure at the hands of foreign bureaucracies.*

Maybe in short and infrequent bursts, corporate travel is a happy novelty, but our experience over 30 years is that it quickly acquires the enchantment of a long-haul bus tour, which is to say, the bathrooms and sleeping arrangements are never as good as those at home.

Still, it is an economical way to see the world, and we’ve done it repeatedly, so the good does outweigh the bad. If the beds, bathrooms and bureaucracies are the minuses on this crazy life; a front-row seat watching how foreign people live and how their countries work are the pluses.

This is the last Hobonotes post, unless something faintly amusing occurs on our trip home tomorrow. For our friends and family reading this, see you soon. For strangers we picked up along the way, thank you for joining us and for your engaging feedback.

* Also, I will not do truly adventurous things, like fling myself off a cliff, trusting my life to a thin sheet of fabric (parachuting, paragliding, parasailing,  you name it, I won’t do it). This is a travel blog for the timid.

Somewhat Amusing Anecdotes You May Not Know

  1. Soon after starting this blog, a former colleague demanded via email that I delete a humorous excerpt from an email he/she sent to me some years ago.  I thought about replacing the excerpt with another email he/she wrote wherein he/she used some hostile terms that if reported to our Human Resources Department, would have obliged them to pull him/her through a meat grinder. I never ratted out my former colleague, and he/she is doing well professionally now. I like to think I had a hand in that.
  2. The humorous excerpt is still somewhere on this blog.
  3. The most hits this blog got in a single day was 885. It surprised me, too. It must have streamed into a commercial travel website somewhere in the U.S. (the source of about 845 of those hits).
  4. The all-time top post was the innocuous Luscious Lucerne.  It surpassed the previous top post on Paris and kidneys, which led the pack until this month.
  5. Most hits came from the U.S., Canada and Switzerland. I had readers from every continent and almost every country, but not one hit came from Greenland. Don’t they ever travel? I didn’t do well with African readers either, although I did score a fringe of readers there.

66: Foreign fears

You can never have too much Nutella. Note: Dave is only admiring, not thieving, this bin of Nutella we found at Zurich's airport shops.

When overseas, I live in fear of several things. One of them is being arrested for shoplifting. I don’t shoplift, not since I pinched a package of gum  from a Pembina Highway drugstore in Winnipeg circa 1966. My father caught me and that was my last foray into criminal life.

But I have a guilty visage. Maybe it comes from being raised Catholic, or from belonging to a genetic group fair of hair and skin with a highly responsive endocrine system that means I blush deeply and quickly. This bites more than one would think.

I count it as the cause for many troubles. For example, when Jim Chambers spent our eighth grade year at Acadia Junior High whacking me on the head whenever teachers were not looking, if my surprised cry at being blitzed drew the teacher’s attention, it was me who was sent to the principal’s office. There I was subjected to lengthy waits and grueling interrogation sessions with principal Mr. R.D. Biggs slapping the proverbial strap threateningly against his palm while trying to get me to confess that I had hit Jim, and not the other way around.

As a side note: Having an authority figure trying to force a false confession out of me was worse than the slugs I took to the cranium.

It was all because I broke out into a crimson blush while Jim looked away as though he did not notice me nearly passing out from the latest blow. The teacher, taking in this evidence, assumed I was the abuser. Yes, their names are Jim Chambers and R.D. Biggs, and if they by the slimmest of chances read this, my message to them is: Yes, I remember your names.

Oddly, I had similar experiences in adult workplaces. Perhaps public school really does prepare a person for the rigours of the job market.

So, I look guilty, almost always. This is inconvenient in Canada or other English-speaking countries, but downright discomforting in a place where I don’t speak the language, so when I notice a store undercover patrol tailing me as I troll through the local shops, I get nervous, and when I get nervous, I blush, and then, because I am also a menopausal woman in the season of hot flashes, I start to sweat.

If they cuffed me and dragged me into a tiny backroom, I would not be the least surprised. I still would not confess though. Good luck with that, I say to store security personnel.

There is nothing like the fear of false accusation or imprisonment to spark new solutions to old problems, and I have discovered one. This week, as a female security staffer in plainclothes followed me over two floors at Biel’s Loeb store, I did something I have noticed also sent Victoria and Saanich Police’s undercover cops* hightailing away from me. I started following the security patrol. Nothing upsets the universe’s natural balance like tailing a tailer.

The officer quickly moved to another part of the store, but still within sight. I followed, and soon was flipping through the same rack of dresses as her. Her discomfort increased and she shuffled away. I drifted after her, as if I were the store patrol. Her cheeks reddened and did I detect sweat on her brow? She looked guilty as heck. I would have arrested her, but then, I was playing, she was not, so I let her off with a warning glare.

* The Victoria Police and Saanich Police undercover incidents occurred while I was working as a reporter. They were not following me, but they were following/surveying people I was following/interviewing.

** Jim’s reign of terror ended when I finally figured out that I was going to get sent to the principal’s office no matter what, so the last time he hit me in the back of head with a textbook, I punched him in the face until his braces flew out. Appeasement, reason, avoidance, bargaining – nothing worked with that bully like a solid hook to the jaw. I’m sorry peace-advocates, but sometimes that is the only way.