The Weekly’s Executive Editor Juliet Rieden recalls working under a boss so demanding she made Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada character look warm and friendly.
Breeding the competitive spirit into a mean fighting machine was the ruling dogma at one of the most challenging workplaces I have experienced, a British newspaper office, and in order to achieve this a rigid hierarchy of bosses made their own competitive game of who could be the most unreasonable and demanding dictator.
My own fearless leader cut her teeth on reducing staff to tears in Oscar-winning performances of ritual humiliation but her particular and favoured sport involved lines of communication.
Cruella — not her name but an apt moniker — had a computer in her office but never used it. In fact when she resigned we discovered the computer had never actually been connected to the central server.
Cruella, you see, refused to use such egalitarian forms of communication as email — that would mean people would be able to talk to her freely and at will.
Instead Cruella’s office, the door of which was always closed, was protected by her own door bitch PA seated in an outer office, a purgatorial no man’s land where you could put in your request for an audience with Cruella.
Your name with your topic of discussion would be written in a big book and at some later time — maybe 10 minutes, maybe two weeks, maybe never — you would receive your appointed hour which she may or may not turn up for.
For more regular contact with myself and my sidekick, senior staff members on this publication — which had a substantial staff putting out a high circulation weekly magazine with cutting edge news content — Cruella had installed what we called “the bat phone”.
This was a phone that sat on the desk between me and my colleague and was connected to Cruella’s private phone line in her office, a number we were not given access to by any other means.
It should be noted that our desks were literally right outside Cruella’s office, but communication was only via said “bat phone” from her to us — not vice versa — or via the PA door bitch. This phone needed to be manned at all times when Cruella was in the building or Hell would most certainly freeze over.
If we were both busting to go to the bathroom too bad…if we wanted lunch at the same time, forget it. The phone had a unique shrill tone and when it rang raised heartbeats to critical levels.
Cruella would bark an order then put down the phone. There was no repeating the order, no supplementary explanation of what it might be about or how we might complete it, all that was clear was that instant action was required.
Needless to say we always worked it out — somehow — such was the fevered reaction of the abused children we were. And when we managed to complete the task — always undergone at high hysterical speed — we felt somehow fulfilled, even complete. Such is the power of the nightmare boss!
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