[See statement at end of entry on confidentiality and privacy considerations. For those metrics types: the number of views for this blog has gotten much higher in recent months than I would have expected, but the number of views for my other blog is much lower. So that other blog does provide some shielding for what's on it. A few minor edits done 2/4/13. The only substantive additions are between + +. Slight additional edits, including to title, 7/2/13.]
It’s too bad it’s taken so long to get to this point, but given the dimensions of this mess—along with [Agency X] not doing a damn thing for more than two years other than being paranoid and defensive, and me doing all the heavy lifting in terms of accounting for what happened—I’m happy to report on one factual aspect of what happened the morning of August 27. And this is why I became a writer, and why writing about especially complex incidents that can happen—never mind “confidentiality strictures” (on which more below)—is always the root to reaching a final determination, after a lot is said and done.
Genna (the nickname for Ms. Genevieve Breen, whom I pseudonymed Georgia Bellamy) is far less to blame for the defamation that occurred than her supervisor Tweedle Dum. How I finally got some root basis for this was simple. I got out some draft pages of the first essay I wrote on this situation, stuff done in the tumultuous (for me) days of August 28 through September 4, 2010, and I see how I wrestled with the facts and moral situation, and I was reminded in those pages of a very key thing: how Genna and I interrelated with our eyes.
Coordination between us via eyes was still going on, on the last day
The eyes thing was a central theme of the first essay I wrote. Why? The unusualness of working (well) with her was centered on this. She was (still is?) is very eyes-oriented person—you could say intuitive, and maybe self-centered visually the way some young people can be—and she was also in what was for her an unfamiliar, high-stress situation in the last week we were working. I, of course, was her practical partner in handling the Suboxone items. And I was undergoing worsened stress myself.
What was interesting was how it had become part of our tactically relating—and also a matter of taste—to look at each other in a certain partnering way, almost like hands steadying each other. This may sound odd (and it mixes with stuff of a more subtle nature I keep private), but it is about as key a way as anything else to show how sanity between us was maintained amid the chaos. And she extended this way of “wanting to relate by eyes”—I formulated one style of it being an “eyes lock”—even on my last day there. I think she also said “Hi Greg” in some tiny-voiced, passing way in the later morning. Both of these innocuous enough actions she did when I knew about the defamation as soon as I came in.
And in our simply doing our work, we also, in a sense, were the only sane ones in the Ferguson
She didn’t think I knew about the alert, and moreover she might not have thought it was especially out of place. She did not come from the experience that would have said such an alert was remarkably unprofessional, or somehow tied to “me perceived as a danger.” She was probably aware that an alert of sorts had gone out—I seriously doubt she would have had the idea to demand it—but she was just there (with me, when she came by) in the everyday-ness of wanting to get more of the work done, and so she related to me accordingly. In this way, even while I was aware of the alert (with strong, violated-sense emotions—I was inwardly both fearful and enraged, but not at Genna), as I said, we were the only sane ones there: we were there to work, as we’d been doing for weeks up till then on that crazy account.
And she was young. How could she have been devious enough to be part of a grossly untoward “conspiracy” against me at that time?
How did emotional extremes play out? Not much
In my draft material on this stuff, complete with scribbled afterthoughts, etc., I wrestled with how much Genna might have spouted some emotional extremes the night before (August 26, after I was gone), or at some other points during the past week (whether I had witnessed this or not), as would have directly and yet unduly influenced Tweedle Dum into making a super-high-handed “alert” move against me for August 27. But while Genna did show—in her own right—some mood swings over a couple weeks or so, and while in a somewhat broad but quick change she had shifted from being somewhat and repeatedly flirtatious with me (not really offensive to me) to being so with someone else (which actually I had found relieving at some point several days before August 27), I don’t think she did anything so extreme (after I’d gone on August 26) to provide the necessary and sufficient basis for T.D.’s alert.
(You ask—was I too interested in GB? Actually, the type of interest you might feel is here didn’t come right away; but part of the reason for it was the traumatizing effect of the August 26-27 alert, which burned the details of the mess on my brain. Also, you ask, Do I embarrass GB with this? Well, what about me? You see, when an alert is done as was done, this doesn’t just embarrass me, it also embarrasses GB [whether she felt that way at first or not]. If you don’t think so, then you’ve got one sick company there.)
[copy redacted from here; could be useful, but not for foreseeable future] But I think through all this mess, even into the morning of August 27, Genna remained faithful to me in a general way (while in certain rare moments she showed a passing, strange antipathy or such toward me). I am sorry if my many-months story on this blog has seemed to suggest something more ominous on her part, but it has been important (as well as a consequence of my awkward situation) to deliberately draw the historical background of [Agency X] and come at this whole situation of August 23-27, 2010, in a gradual way, and I do this on my own power, not with any financial help or high-tech gadgets.
And on August 27, as today in a different context (and for different reasons), Genna was the young person whose innocence and earnestness (at the time) save her the most in retrospect from responsibility for what went awry among others in that context.
Also, she acquits herself as responsible for the alert as the only coworker who showed a minimal, elemental decency about how I was being made tired by all the shoved-through reading, this while she over the longer term inadvertently confessed, revealed, or otherwise conveyed her certain searching, straining, and earnest attitude that allowed me to bond with her, even while she was not being very conversational about non-work matters with me.
The way I was scheduled out
Other facts help anchor this assessment. One thing I saw on the morning of August 27 (it had not been sent to me; it was on someone else’s desk) was a “hot sheet” that Genna had typed up the day before that listed a ton of Suboxone items that had to be checked again (I think they were later versions of items that had already been approved for a set of “draft” versions that had been, or were being, printed up in advance for sales workers). All sorts of people were addressed in the e-mail, with others c.c.’d; even The Geek and ES were listed, but not me. That e-mail/“hot sheet” was sent on August 26 at 10:36 a.m., about an hour after Genna had spoken with me innocuously enough for the first time that morning.
When I saw that hot sheet on August 27, I was galvanized to quit when I did, not so much that I was bitter at Genna for it (though, over time, I would indulge in bitterness toward her about it, in the tumult of the whole aftermath). I saw I was solidly factored out of the situation there for the next week. So then why (by about noon) should I stay for that day, if I had finished what simple work there was to do?
But, though I puzzled or was bitter over this for months, I don’t think Genna was largely to blame for me being left out of the hot sheet. I think the responsibility for that lay largely with Tweedle Dum, who was exerting a lot of increased control (for that last week) over how Suboxone was wrapping up anyway. It had been on Wednesday morning (see here, at the end) that Tweedle Dum hadn’t wanted me to be an editor sitting in on a meeting on Suboxone, when she had Tweedle Dee sit in instead. (And recall my speculation in Part 1 of this series, early in the entry, about how my time was cut short in order to have the company limit its exposure to unemployment liability.)
I look at my 2010 writings on my last week there, and I see that amid notes on the managerial machinations from Tweedle Dum (that seemed to high-handedly ignore how integral I’d been to the Suboxone production, for weeks), there were also notes on how Genna was asking kindly about my eyes, and commenting on my going to get some rest, etc. Genna was being humane; Tweedle Dum was being aloof. (So you see why I kept such detailed notes: you needed them to filter out what was going on here, even at this late date, with this issue concerning me for over two years. By the way, apparently it concerns others too; you would not believe how many links there are to the third entry in this series.)
Genna in the wake of our “long” conversation
I have long wondered if, after I talked to Genna late Thursday afternoon, she had suddenly uttered some unusually strong emotional reactions about me, as if she was afraid of me, etc. I think now that whatever it was had to be minor, if there was anything. If I did hear what it might have been, I might not have been pleased, but I’ve reviewed enough such provocative facts in this case (for now).
And on a more general level, I think it’s clear from what all I’ve written and cogitated over in this mess that Genna may have shown some mood swings, but all in all she was being a good sport with me.
When I dealt with her on the morning of August 27, she seemed as if business was to be usual—there was work to ferry to me, among many other things in her realm of duties—and she also struck me as somewhat subdued, maybe feeling a little guilty. Did she show she may have felt that an alert had been circulated that was patently unfair to me? She did not show this explicitly, but as I said, she was naïve about this kind of unacceptable business practice.
Her saying Hi in the later morning, as I thought I heard in a tiny voice I could barely catch, also maybe suggested her trying to grab on to some “memory of nicer times”—if that phrase captures it. (Am I saying more was there than was there? Well, it's enough to say how much there was any "danger" between me and GB, which was very little.)
One of the worst things about this situation is how it may have been assumed, or concluded, by a range of people in the long wake of August 27 that Genna was the main person responsible for my being ostracized, rather than being a sort of inadvertent spark that set off Tweedle Dum’s far more licentious conflagration. At times I wrestled, with sharp negative emotion, with how much Genna was responsible. It’s a damned shame that a situation like this (and I will tell in Part 6 how I left, and what final e-mails I sent within the company) has led to such a widely-spreading-out wake of misunderstanding and paranoia and frustration about getting some proper airing of the issues that, as it seemed to me, Genna might repeatedly have been seen as the one to blame (and maybe more so than me being to blame for just being “nuts about the matter,” as some might have thought over the past two years, or some other interpretation).
My narrative agenda
You may have found my narrative accounts of these August 2010 days to be confusing, as if people seem to show different passing inclinations at different times, as if individuals as “characters” (if they were fictional) are not entirely coherent. Well, I have tried to be selective and fair, but to show that there were varying winds blowing throughout those days. I have muted my picture of Genna a good bit, but I have tried to show that she exhibited some emotional variation that could be stark sometimes; but this was woven amid our just interacting as busy workers most of the time.
It can’t be understated that (as I roughly call it) a sort of group anxiety/“hysteria” was going on there in August 2010, and that this factor tends, in retrospect, to “confound” what you can say of certain individuals as to how fair or realistic they were being, versus showing some individual personality quirks. And—just hypothetically and generally speaking—for Genna to have shown some, say, outburst typical of a “borderline” personality—which I actually have seen from other young female coworkers over the years—would have taken things to an extreme that I don’t think she was apt to show there. What I mean by a “borderline” outburst is that, even if the person felt an emotional bond to me and also contrarily was “drawing away” the way a borderline can do—which can be a painful “whipsawing” away from you when it happens—this would also, paradoxically, reflect a sort of fear of being abandoned. That is, the borderline person both wants to cling to the associate and to cut away from the associate; but when the issue of being abandoned is actually paramount in the borderline person’s mind, she engages in an emotional outburst, and “decides” the issue by having ties directly sundered with the person that way. If that sounds labyrinthine, that’s how it is with borderline people (and on issues other than potential “abandonment,” too), but complexity aside, it certainly can be painful for the other person. [Noted 7/2/13: Spelling this out may seem awfully complex and question-raising about the issue of discretion, but given the way the company set this problem up in August 2010, including deeply insinuating suggestions about me personally and the extraordinary means of communication that were used, I am doing what I believe best inserts balance, addresses a serious wrong concerning multiple parties, and is judicious in light of the company's labyrinthine and long-running evasions in the wake of the August 2010 events.]
But in Genna’s case, following the hypothetical and general approach here, I don’t think she did this on the late afternoon of August 26, and anyway—though (among the so-called “cluster B” personality disorders, from the DSM-IV) borderline PD and histrionic PD are close together in terms of symptoms—histrionic is actually “easier to take” for other people. And anyway, as a matter of simple facts, I seriously don’t think Genna so nastily spouted some disaffiliating comments about me after our August 26 conversation that this was an “easy pretext” for Tweedle Dum to circulate some defamatory alert about “Greg, this bipolar [sic; whatever T.D. said, which had to reflect a crass understanding] person who might raise a ruckus when he comes in tomorrow, because he’ll be torn away from his precious Genna.”
If that idea sounds ridiculous, that goes to how presumptuous Tweedle Dum’s decision to broadcast a warning was. As for Genna, as I said, she seems to have been the kindly soul least responsible for the alert—among the trio of herself, Tweedle Dum, and Tweedle Dee—because even on August 27, thank goodness, I was looking at her—we were both in close contact—because we had to be, to get that Suboxone account done. And I think I was tasteful enough in how I related to her—with the peculiarities of the situation, as I said, requiring the “eyes lock” thing. (By the way, something about Genna’s mother’s March 2011 letter to me is consistent with this, though not definitively concluding. [DOF]) Genna showed her comradely tone toward me on August 27 morning (not giving a phony look or comment as, for one, Tweedle Dee did with me that morning), which makes it all the sadder that as I was dealing with Genna, with my meaning her well as much as I could, I was also aware that a poisonous atmosphere had been created (by a manager, Tweedle Dum) leading to my being seen by all and sundry to be a “danger to Genna.”
In the immediate aftermath, I couldn’t tell quite who between Genna and Tweedle Dum had initiated the alert (though I knew Tweedle Dum had effectuated it)—and yet I was still called in to work. And in view of the completely untoward alert, with how incalculably insulting, even assaulting it was, I planned to quit abruptly when my work was done. And I knew how sad a situation it would be for Genna, because in a way she couldn’t be able to understand quite what was up, even while, just before leaving, I sent her an apology e-mail; and there was nothing I could do about this, other than be peaceable and “everyday” in how I left—so much so, I thought I would maybe shock people who expected an explosion: shock them with anticlimax.
What sensible purpose was there to the alert?
All of this raises the question: How crazy, or deviant, did Tweedle Dum have to be to circulate an alert about me, as if I didn’t know how to be a man with Genna, with whom I’d in fact been a work “dancing partner” for weeks? Was Tweedle Dum deluded about how Genna and I had ordinarily related? Was she jealous of our relationship?
One thing is clear: the type of alert was not something that could be kept secret. How could it? I was portrayed as a potential danger. (I have evidence suggesting that my Web site was linked to in an e-mailed version of the alert. [DOF]) Also, people gave away the sense of my being a danger, or close to it, when they looked at me. So what sense did it make to alert people about me, insulting my record of how I’d been with Genna, and how I’d been important to the Suboxone account? And of course, what sense does this make in terms of the fallout from this, over two years later? When the mishandling of the Suboxone P.I.s has become a more revealed issue?
What was Tweedle Dum’s problem, you might ask? On that, I would be far less sympathetic or empathetic than I would be to my former temporary work partner Genna, and the answer will be presented in a Part 6, which may not be available online. And it shows how ludicrous this situation is that such disregard was shown to the good taste and proper conduct I thought I exerted when there; to the responsibility I exerted for the account, even when put under health strain at the time; and to the professional standards by which the P.I.s should have been handled, and weren’t. The result has been that the whole matter has not been squared with for over two years, and even now, who knows if anything is being learned from it.
Was the alert—combined with my being expected to come in to read another version of the P.I.s on Friday (which ended up not being available)—a product of cynicism, stupidity, or something else?
##
Confidentiality and privacy considerations: Here is my CommonHealth confidentiality agreement signed in 2001 (the typed date says 2000, but it was penned over to read 2001; I never started at the company in 2000, only 2001). Notice it isn’t signed by a CommonHealth rep.
And here is a similar agreement signed in 2007—again, not signed by a CommonHealth rep. This pdf actually came from a CommonHealth human resources staffer in September 2010, when I requested a copy; I still have the e-mail [DOF].
The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled, in 2011, that corporations do not have a constitutional right to privacy. See this article in The Washington Post; or this Reuters article. Corporations may have status as persons, according to the Supreme Court in 2010; see this Wikipedia article. But as I’ve found from experience, you void a confidentiality agreement (or I do), and consider a corporation not to have privacy rights, when it violates your rights in ways that are, in spirit, well out of step with the reason you sign a confidentiality agreement to begin with. Confidentiality should not mean that you keep under wraps being so grievously insulted, assaulted, subjected to gratuitous interference with your rights to work, and so on, that you can’t talk about the malfeasance outside the workplace. In short, if a corporation (more than one person) can sometimes be a “crazy lady” (sorry for the metaphor, old-line feminists) that you want to expose to the light for others to see what you are oppressively, maybe even deleteriously to your health, faced with “in confidence,” then the confidentiality agreement gets voided. Especially when it’s as vague and sketchy as the samples, linked to above, from CommonHealth.
Another way to look at this is as follows: if “trade secrets” were to be what was subjected to confidentiality, I would agree with the agreement (barring some special considerations why you might expose something that had been related to trade secrets). But there are a number of things that do not constitute “trade secrets” that may be subject to confidentiality: in the abstract, these may include assault; defamation; violation of privacy; tortious interference with your business prospect; conspiracy (maybe even racketeering); unacceptably provocative sexually related behavior (from a male to a female or from a female to a male), or perhaps very worst, a manager misinterpreting and broadcasting claims about what he or she sees as unacceptable sexually related behavior between two underlings; stalking; and cyberstalking. That's speaking in the abstract.
(I did not seriously intend to sue GB for anything, so let that be known and understood.)
(I did not seriously intend to sue GB for anything, so let that be known and understood.)
