Who’s the Boss?
The elevator doors opened and I meandered my way across multiple cubicles to the back of the floor and the department I was interning with at a Wall Street firm during college. It was early afternoon and I was expecting, except for some aggressive typing, the usual quiet, office coma environment that came with post-lunch, but this time was different.
I arrived at my cubicle, waving to my two supervisors a few feet away, but my attention was immediately brought to the small crowd hovering over another intern of a separate division within the department.
She had gotten her hand stuck in the office three-hole puncher, and her colleagues were attempting to free it without any damage. I was horrified. (and it felt a bit awkward, with business analysts exchanging their calculators for calculated finger release). I wanted to go to them and provide support (after all, I was stellar at the game Operation as a child), but my two supervisors did not budge. Instead, I saw smiles and heard giggling.
The message they were giving was clear: they are not us; we don’t go over there.
My heart (and stomach) sank. How could humans, adults no less, behave like this? Where is the compassion? Why the division of departments equating to a division of hearts?
It was my first introduction to the shadow side of “the corporate world” and at the time, I did not know the language of the question I was feeling, and that is, what is sovereignty?
Webster’s dictionary (remember those?) defines it mainly in a political/territorial sense, as in “freedom from external control,” but it is personal, too.
By this I mean, who’s the boss of your life? Are you a truly free human or enslaved by what and how other people think? Are you part of a group to the detriment of your personal truth? These are not easy questions and peer and cultural pressures and even coercion are often at play, the most recent example being humanity’s experience during the Covid pandemic.
Speaking of which, I was at another inflection point regarding this question of personal sovereignty versus control when I switched to remote work in March 2020.
Even though I was in my own home, and alone at my desk, my nervous system was so trained to jump to action in response to my supervisor’s requests that it took a very long time for me to relax into the reality that I was, in fact, alone in my own space and that nobody was breathing over me. (I remember her attempt to “manage” her team in this new setup by sharing what “the rules” were going to be, one of them being that we should acknowledge the receipt of urgent emails and take no more than an hour to reply to them – that never really stuck).
It was around that time that I also noticed how people, when speaking about their jobs, would refer to their supervisors as their “boss.” It was suddenly odd to me. I believe that words have power, and carry energy, and should be chosen carefully, beneficially. I immediately stopped this habit and instead used “supervisor” or “the person I report to” (I always want to remain respectful of a supervisor’s knowledge capacity, regardless of their emotional intelligence or wisdom).
Baby steps help, as habits or abuse, however subtle, are usually not changed or healed overnight.
But when we say, internally, “I am who I am” (cue: the voice behind the bush in The Ten Commandments), there is a certain level of empowerment that can’t be denied.
Back to the three-hole-punch incident.
The intern’s hand was eventually saved, and a collective sigh was heard from “over there,” with smiles coming from my neck of the woods, too.
Today, though, I remind myself of “who’s the boss?” and act accordingly, honoring my truth and the whispers of my heart.
