The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
I thought you might find this map interesting. It shows where in our country we have ongoing air quality issues.
https://www3.epa.gov/airquality/greenbook/map/mapnpoll.pdf
If that pdf. doesn’t open for you, the same thing is also here: https://www3.epa.gov/airquality/greenbook/mapnpoll.html
And here’s a screenshot for those of you allergic to clicking on links.
I’m beginning to think that now is not a particularly good time to buy a house in New Mexico. The market just doesn’t feel good to me. I’ve certainly worked in harder markets – for example, the California Bay Area in 2012. But it feels a bit off. There’s a lot of overpriced undesirables that are just sitting on the market. There’s very few good houses – and those are selling quickly.
In a healthier market I’d expect to see a higher percentage of decent houses, and a more reasonable time on the market – like a bell curve with most houses going pending after a couple of weeks. Instead it’s polarized; one day or over 150 days.
And I’d like to see people doing a better job of getting their houses ready for the market. It feels stressed – like they didn’t have the time or money or inclination or understanding that they should weed the front walk and sweep the entryway.
It has an odd feel to it. But then, New Mexico is odd in a bunch of ways.
What do you think this is? It sort of looks to me like a garage with a marble floor. Like, seriously? John thinks it’s just an epoxy coat. (We did not actually look at this house, and are not going to, so we will never know.)
And what would this be? What are we looking at, some sort of big rock thing in the living room? There’s already enough rocks outside guys, believe me.
It’s a strange looking house from the outside too. Maybe it’s a second story afterthought squashing that marble-floored garage?
They’re asking over half-million for this house, and it’s not even Santa Fe, it’s just Albuquerque. And I’m like, you have got to be kidding me.
At any rate, I’ve looked online at pretty much everything in the state, and there’s nothing I currently want to buy. That could change suddenly! It only takes one house. But not this one.
Once upon a time, over a decade ago before John and I were married, I had a nuisance of a name. I should have kept my first married name, with the last name of “Wood”, which was simple, easy to spell, and matched my kids’ last name. But I had various boyfriends and women-empowerment girlfriends who all thought that was a bad idea; I shouldn’t be clinging to the past.
So, unable to give my daughter my last name, I took her middle name for my last name. Problem was, it wasn’t a name anyone expected to be a last name, so I got called “Elaine” a lot. Things were alphabetized under my first name or middle name rather than my last name. It was a total pain. I was, therefore, quite happy to take on John’s last name. Nice, simple, recognizable. I naively figured I’d keep “Elaine” as my second middle name.
When you change your name due to marriage, you’re supposed to change your social security card first, and your driver’s license later, after you have possession of your new social security card. Which I did.
In due time, my new social security card arrived, with both middle names, and John’s last name at the end. Perfect. Then I went to the motor vehicles office and they weren’t buying it. They didn’t care what the Social Security Administration let me do. They were not going to let me keep my previous last name as a second middle name and simply append a new last name. A variety of convoluted and confusing events followed, which culminated in the abandonment of my first middle name. My initials, which had briefly been KMES, became KES.
It’s a good thing we didn’t attempt to go on our overseas honeymoon until several months after the wedding, because it took that long to get it sorted out, and a new passport issued.
I assume I also replaced my 4-name social security card with a new 3-name card, but I haven’t been able to find it for a few years, so who knows. At any rate, my license and passport confirm – one middle name only.
Meanwhile, during that very brief moment just about exactly 10 years ago, when I thought I had a first name, two middle names, and John’s last name, I signed up for a gmail account. The first 3 letters of the email are k-m-e and then my last name. Simple enough.
Turns out everyone reads that as k-me, and then they laugh because they think I inserted the word “me” for myself, in between my first initial and my last name, which sort of sounds like something a self-absorbed 4-year-old would do. There’s no point in trying to explain that in reality the “M” is the last remaining vestigial from a middle name I once owned. I just dig myself deeper.
Which is my very long way of telling you all, to celebrate my 10th anniversary, and my 50-mumble-mumble birthday, I have a new email. Which I’m not actually going to post on this blog for fear of bots, but I can tell you it’s my firstname.middlename.lastname at gmail.com. (Assuming you actually followed that whole story and are clear what my name even is.) Or you can continue to use the kme email, because I don’t suppose it’s going away anytime soon.
By the way, here’s a piece of trivia for you. If you have a gmail with one or more periods prior to the @ symbol, the periods are optional. Meaning, you can email me at:
firstname.middlename.lastname@gmail.com or firstnamemiddlename.lastname@gmail.com or firstnamemiddlenamelastname@gmail.com.
They all work. I suppose you could even use firstname.middlenamelastname@gmail.com, but that would just look weird.
I have a young coworker who can get away with saying the true things that nobody else can say. Because everyone loves him and somehow it’s all ok when he says it, but if anyone else were to say it, it would sound too critical.
This coworker has informed me that, in regards to houses, my husband must find me to be a pain in the ass. Well! I set him straight. I quickly informed him that, no, it’s not just regarding houses that I’m a pain in the ass. I’m a pain in the ass about a lot of things. (But houses is definitely up there.)
Speaking of houses, I found out that the one on Camino de la Tierra has the septic drain field on the correct side of the house (correct being not where I want to someday build a pool). But John hasn’t even seen that one yet. He’s scheduled to see it on Thursday.
John got up before dawn on Monday to fly to California. He then took a midnight flight from SFO to Washington DC, figured he’d shower & put his suit on at a community center and then went to give his presentation, scheduled for noon. I gather he gets to sleep in an actual hotel tonight. I don’t know how that all went, other than he did send a “safe landing” text from DC this morning. He’s nuts. They don’t pay him enough for that ridiculousness.
I know that guys who make millions a year have schedules like that, but John does not make the big bucks. And those rich important guys presumably sleep on those beds on the planes. It’s hard for me to believe that there are actually beds on planes, but I’ve seen them advertised in magazines. Where would those beds even be? There’s no place for beds on planes. But I’ve seen the photos in magazines; it must be true.
However, it is definitely not relevant to our situation, one way or the other. We’re not the sort of people who get to sleep on beds on planes. The bottom line is, John works too hard.
And “beds on planes” sounds like a Dr. Seuss book. Right? It’s the truth.
John, Darren, and I scheduled to take the week of Labor Day off. The plan was for John and I to drive the camper van up north and meet Darren in the Idaho mountains. That’s what we did last year for the eclipse and it was a lot of fun.
We’ve been watching the smoke maps, and it hasn’t looked good in Idaho. It’s neither fun nor healthy to hike in the smoke, so we’ve been considering Plan B, which is to fly Darren out to New Mexico instead. Yesterday was the last day for the two-week advance purchase of plane tickets, so we went ahead and bought them.
And of course, today, the day after we buy him tickets, the smoke invades New Mexico. It’s still better here than Idaho. But I can hear him now. “I flew down here to avoid the smoke? What’s this?”
I feel bad for everyone in the thicker parts. It’s hard to believe the smoke is coming this far. It’s going all the way across the whole country.
You can find this map here:
https://www.airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=topics.smoke_wildfires
You can go to that website and click on the tiny three lines in on the right-hand edge to bring out a menu to toggle different layers on and off.
Then click on the little three lines again to put the menu back away to see the whole map.
Then yesterday the air conditioning in my car broke! Not only does it not make cool air, it won’t even run the fan. Zero air of any sort. It worked fine when I was on my way down to Albuquerque yesterday. Then I parked it in the sun for 4 hours while my real estate agent drove me around looking at houses. When I got back to my car – no air, no fan, nothing but sweltering heat. It was a hot, smoky drive back up to Santa Fe this afternoon.
Tomorrow morning I’ll take it to the shop. John doesn’t have time to fix it because he’s flying to California tomorrow. Then he’s taking the red-eye flight from California to Washington DC tomorrow night. He’s never even going to get a hotel Monday night. He’s going to leave at midnight from San Francisco, fly all night, shower and put on his suit at some community center when he gets there in the morning, and then go deliver his presentation. Ugh, I would hate having his job! It sounds awful. But he likes it better than when he was a manager when we lived in California. He was miserable in that position, which is so different from me – I like being a manager.
Here is a house for sale that is located in Corrales, which is a rural area on the west side of the river, north of Albuquerque, and south & east of Rio Rancho. The east side of Corrales, along the river, is very expensive. It becomes drier (and less expensive) as you head west away from the river. In this map you can see the river on the right, and the higher densities of Rio Rancho to the left. The house is where the red pin is, in the drier, affordable, half of Corrales.
In the next photo, you can see Corrales in the top left corner, compared to the north part of Albuquerque in the lower section of the photo. The airport and Sandia are off the map to the south.
The house is located at the end of a lane that services 4 houses. The google streetview camera didn’t go down the lane, but here’s the streetview for the entrance of the lane.
The house is on 3/4 of an acre. It starts with a very large circular driveway, which is a big waste of space in my opinion, but John is excited about camper van and boat maneuverability (and I have to admit he’s right about that).
That car, by the way, belongs to my real estate agent, Julie.
Julie, is a few years younger than me, quirky, and I like her a lot. She’s not the typical aging baby-boomer agent with the Mercedes. Julie is the one who helped me buy the first rental, the townhome on Academy Ridge, which is my favorite rental. Then she went on vacation to Greece and I had to go with a different agent for the two others, because I had a 45-day limit to execute the 1031 exchange last summer.
The front of the house is nothing special for this region. Very typical. Except since this one is not in Santa Fe, it’s way nicer and significantly less expensive than the piece of shit that I looked at on Friday in Santa Fe. This would be 500k-600k in the suburbs of Santa Fe, approaching a million dollars in central Santa Fe, and well over a million if it were right near the plaza. Out here it’s listed at $400k, and will probably sell in the high $300’s.
Here’s the entrance:
It’s a New Mexican style very common in the last few decades, including the 1990’s.
A majority of the homes out in Placitas are also this style. Sometimes people who are from out of the area really love this style, and I was super happy to see it again when we moved back to New Mexico from California because I missed it. But for most locals it’s considered outdated and has fallen out of favor. I think that’s why this house isn’t selling (that and the fact that the house is occupied and cluttered, rather than professionally staged).
I would remove some of the whitewashed mud brick. It’s a bit much.
We could leave one accent wall, because I don’t mind a small amount of it, and that section would be hard to remove (although easy enough to plaster over if we wanted to).
I would remove the pony wall at the entrance, which is just in the way. I would have to patch the saltillo tile under it, which would never be seamless, but that wouldn’t bother me.
That front door is like something from my childhood and would need replaced. That’s easy.
I would also redo the half-wall that separates the living room from the open hallway. At minimum, I would take the top few layers off, it’s clearly too high. I’m not sure if I can get away with removing it altogether and just leaving the wood columns. I think so.
If so, I wouldn’t want to put a couch there. The couch is currently orientated toward these nice big windows. I would reorient the seating to face the kiva fireplace instead. It’s a very small living room either way.
I would replace the windows with French doors opening onto an expanded courtyard. There’s already a header above the windows, so it wouldn’t be too hard to replace them with French doors. The issue is the hot-water baseboard heater under the windows. That would have to be removed/relocated, which requires plumbing work.
Currently there is a small courtyard out there with fake grass. Eventually, if we did end up retiring there, I’d expand the courtyard and install a small pool.
There is lots of space to enlarge the courtyard. The property goes all the way to that split-rail fence you can barely see out there in the sage. Also note the mountain view beyond.
There’s no sunset views, unfortunately. But west is the direction the wind comes from in this region, so sunset view = wind. Instead, it faces east, with a mountain view out of the living room and master bedroom. (No, I don’t know what that weird little statue is. Like I said, it’s still owner occupied.)
Typical kitchen & dining space, with a little bit of New Mexican styling on the cabinets. Gas stove, yay.
The master bedroom does not have a kiva fireplace, but it does have mountain views, two closets, and a decent sized bathroom. We’d take out the carpet and install wood.
John’s not particularly thrilled with the tile work. Tile colors are such a personal thing. I don’t particularly like the tiles we are currently installing in the kitchen in Placitas. We had a miscommunication confusion, and are ending up with more different colors than I originally anticipated. Oh well, doesn’t matter. Pretty soon you get used to it and don’t even see it anymore. The raspberry walls are easy enough to fix.
There’s also two other bedrooms and a very small office. All total, 3-bed, 2-bath, 2-car garage, and a small outbuilding, for a total of 2,100 square foot, on .75 acre.
A big potential issue with installing a swimming pool is we don’t know yet where the septic drain field is, and there’s a good chance they figured that on the other side of the courtyard wall was a good place to install it. I’m hoping to find out where the drain field is this week. But even if we know where the tank is, the extent of the field is just guesswork.
This is not only a perfect spot for a future swimming pool, it’s also a rather obvious spot for an existing septic drain field.
If we start excavating for a pool and encounter drain field, all work stops immediately. And we’ve then wasted a lot of money.
Septic systems usually only last about 30 years. The house was built in 1993, so it’s getting up there. If the system fails during pre-sale testing, the current owners have to replace it. They cannot use the same drain field location twice. So we would want to have some say-so in where they put the new one. If they locate it poorly (like where I want to build a pool), then we wouldn’t buy the house. (Yes, this is starting to sound like last year’s septic field saga on Calle del Norte.) Although we’re less likely to hit bedrock here in the river bottom.
If this is all starting to sound too complicated, keep in mind that if we are going to retire in New Mexico, we will probably end up building a pool no matter what house we buy. There are not very many pools in New Mexico, and the likelihood we would find a house with the type of pool I want (small, curved, with waterfall, visible from the house) is very low. We could retire to Phoenix or Houston or Florida and buy a house with an existing pool. Or we could build a pool in New Mexico.
The other thing to keep in mind, is that John wants a rural house. That means well and septic, no matter what house we look at. So the issue of swimming pool vs drain field would become an issue at any house we look at. In fact, it is even an issue at our current house in Placitas, should we decide to stay here. The septic is old here, and almost all of our 2 acres is a significant slope. Siting a new septic and a new pool would be very difficult.
At any rate, we wouldn’t be building any pools anywhere until we are both retired, because we currently don’t have time to even use a pool, much less build one.
On the other side of the house, off the kitchen, is a beautiful shaded courtyard with large trees and a pergola.
Those were pictures I took yesterday. Earlier, in the spring, this pergola was covered with purple wisteria blossoms.
There are several other reasons why I like this house a lot better than the one in Placitas; less wind, closer stores, and near the river.
It’s down out of the wind, and there are trees and a neighbor’s house blocking the direction the wind usually comes from. 
The wind comes from the left side of these photos, blocked by the gray roofed and white roofed neighbors.
The brown roofed house is the one on the market that we’re considering. You can see there is a lot of room on the right hand side of it for a pool, which would be sheltered out of the wind. The well head is to the right of the driveway, which is why I’m afraid the drain field is further up nearer to the house. I wish it were the other way around.
The neighbor to the west has the white roof, and the smaller white roof is the neighbor’s casita (guest house). You can see the back of the neighbor’s guest house from the driveway, but can’t see their main house due to the trees.
The white piping on their casita is a mini-split system, that they apparently added after construction. Mini-splits are getting really popular. They should have painted the pipes, but there’s no HOA out here to force them to do it.
The small square to the left of the driveway (in the birds-eye photo earlier) is an “art studio,” which is jargon for “useless outbuilding with no plumbing, probably not permitted”. This one is very small, at only 11′ x 11′. It’s finished on the inside, has electricity but no plumbing. I don’t see any use for it without plumbing. Most kinds of art need a sink. And it’s of no use for overnight guests without a bathroom. I guess I could banish John out there if I were really mad at him (lol). Here’s the front of it.
Here’s the inside of the “art studio.” The current owners appear to be using it as a meditation room (or it was staged). I guess we could install an enormous TV and make it a man cave. Otherwise John would fill it with piles of garage junk, and it’s too nicely finished for that. I could retire and claim it as my “writer’s studio.” Haha – no.
A big reason I like this house is that it’s rural but still very close to the stores I like, unlike Placitas. In fact, the stores are the same ones that I used to go to from Placitas, except they are a whole lot closer to this house. See Placitas in the far upper right, and the natural food stores in the lower left. Corrales (zip 87048) is just a few miles north of those stores. In addition to organic food stores, that same area has a big mall and all the major big-box chain stores. They are only about 5 miles away, instead of over 20 miles away.
Another great thing is it’s close to the river. There is a very nice bike path on the far side of the river that goes for miles and miles. There are also dirt walking/jogging trails on both sides of the river, as well as along the acequias (“ah-seh-kwa”, i.e. irrigation canals).
Also the house is single story, which is on John’s wish list. I don’t care too much about how many stories, but our current two-story on top of a hill is nose-bleed-inducing.
We both want down out of the stratosphere into something that feels more homey and cozy. We hope we don’t miss the views too much.
I did hope to move into whatever we buy sooner rather than later (and continue weekdays in the Santa Fe townhome, until I change jobs).
I have no idea when I will next change jobs or retire, but I’ve never worked at one place for more than 4 years in my entire 25-year career. So it would be fairly stupid to orient around any current job of mine (don’t tell my boss I said that). For example, there are also state jobs in Albuquerque.
This particular house is within commuting distance for John. But when I mentioned moving soon, the look of abject horror on John’s face has caused me to reconsider. If we bought it, we would probably rent it for a bit until he can contemplate the prospect of moving.
I think moving to Corrales would be apropos. It was our compromise first date location 13 years ago (it being midway between each of our houses back then), and it could make a great compromise retirement location. Full circle. Plus it’s just weird that I grew up in a town named Corvallis. I’d be saying the wrong town name for the rest of my life! (And John would have to continually correct me – “She means Corrales“)
I went and saw a house in Santa Fe during my lunch hour today. It was on half an acre! And only 6 minutes from my office! And it was less than half-million! (uh-yeah). And it was…disappointing.
Yep. Santa Fe prices have been zooming up, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me to pay California prices in New Mexico.
I’m trying to find something, somewhere, with a touch of green and a few trees. Is that too much to ask? Well, I do live in a desert.
I was talking to my coworkers about where to look for an affordable house with at least a tree or two (John vetoed South Valley, it really is sketchy down there.) Maybe the North Valley? Espanola? East Mountains? Corrales? My coworker said, “A different state.” Sigh. He’s right though.
Just for the heck of it, I did my identical search in Florida and I was blown away. Enormous houses with swimming pools and fountains and pools and acres of green and trees and flowers.
This isn’t a park! This is literally part of the property of a house in Florida that costs the same as the run-down little one in Santa Fe I saw today.
LOL, don’t worry, we’d never move to Florida. We are New Mexicans at heart. I just would love a couple of trees.
Hey John, I think I owe you a piece of 10th Anniversary cake, now that we’re done with that keto diet experiment.
This article is written in a little bit of a hyped style, unfortunately. But it contains good information.
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/FDN_Glyphosate_FoodTesting_Report_p2016-3.pdf
I’ve been totally bummed out for the last day or two. Luckily Kira (our youngest dog) is in Santa Fe with me this week to keep me company. She’s used to having two other dogs to pester, so she’s pestering me instead. It’s probably a good thing.
I’m feeling discouraged, but rather than immediately working on my thinking patterns in order to try and bounce myself out of it, I’m going allow myself to just be with it for awhile first. It’s surprising the useful insights that can come from patience and non-judgmental curiosity about negativity.
I’m not exactly sure why I’m bummed. It could be because my new diet didn’t work and I got another migraine yesterday. I’m still having a couple of days of migraines every 10-14 days. Yesterday I quit the diet since it wasn’t working, and I was very happy to dig out of my garage a package of pretzels that I hid out there when starting my ultra-low-carb diet 😉
I’m actually eating quite similarly as before, except now I have small amounts of dried fruit and nuts on my enormous spinach salad at lunch. And I’m back to eating my daily carrot or two. It’s hard to imagine how carrots could be bad for you. And in addition to my evening snack of roasted seaweed, I might also pop up a bowl of salted organic popcorn. Living it on the wild side, I tell you.
The problem with deciding on a Monday to quit my vege-and-fat diet is I didn’t have time to go buy normal food; the work week had already started. So, I have 9 avocados, two oversized containers of fresh greens, two big sticks of hard salami, 3 kinds of cheese, 2 dozen eggs, 2 packages of cabbage, and an enormous, brand-new pot of mayonnaise. No bread, no rice, no tortillas or beans, no cereal, no noodles, no chips…
Laura sent me an article about a new migraine medicine, which in theory would be very exciting, except it just feels like a daunting task. I’d have to find a specialist. I’d have to undergo tons of tests I’ve done before years ago. I’d have to try (again) over a period of several months, a litany of various other medications, originally developed for random other conditions, not migraines, with significant side effects, before being allowed to try the new one.
I’m just feeling too tired to go through all of that yet again. Some of those meds cause depression, some cause foggy-brain. And hello? I have a job, I have a life (sort of) and I don’t have an entire year’s worth of patience to fight with the medical establishment for the privilege of paying thousands of dollars for the one and only medication that has ever been specifically invented to prevent migraines.
I would sooner quit my job and rent a hovel in Boston so my sister can prescribe it for me, than be insulted and reduced to tears repeatedly for many grueling months, navigating our entirely fucked-up medical system. As a middle aged woman with migraines and a smattering of possibly auto-immune symptoms, the respect I get in a doctor’s office hovers around zero.
I’m also probably bummed because John didn’t like the house I liked in the South Valley. He’s worried about it being the South Valley, which is legitimate because there’s definitely some not very good areas down there.
It’s the river valleys that were settled first (which makes sense everywhere, but particularly in the high desert). They contain many, barely habitable, very old adobe structures from various decades past. Since then, those areas have accumulated old trucks and farm equipment from the 1930’s scattered around ranch homes built in the 1950’s, with trailer homes from the 1970’s left to rot on the back lot. There are also a few amazing Spanish haciendas dating from the 1800’s, but those are not relevant to our socioeconomic status.
And more recently, the river valleys have been filling in because they continue to be green and appealing. In the 1990’s they built 2-story houses with sunken living rooms (that’s our economic bracket). And then there are “Tuscan” style monstrosities with dark ironwork and fancy roof lines built 10 years ago. And now square-sleek-gray-slate-and-sandstone boxes. I don’t even know what that new style is called. But it doesn’t match the adobe traditions here, even if the exterior is done in stucco instead of horizontal gray faux-stone panels. Doesn’t matter, John won’t even consider those. It’s surprising to me that a logical and practical scientist with a tendency toward perfectionism, likes unusual and even funky houses better than I do.
There are “nice” neighborhoods in the river valleys, but the prices rise rapidly in those areas. In the desert, you pay through the nose for irrigation rights, particularly if you don’t want your greenery coming along with neighbors with old cars on blocks.
Corrales – where John and I went for our first date because it’s halfway between Albuquerque and Placitas and he’s a logical guy – is a lovely place, but what we would be able to afford there would be depressing. Definitely no outdoor kitchens and swimming pools. Because there you’re buying the address as well as the water rights. You can be like, “Oh, yes, we live in Corrales.” instead of, “mumble-mumble” followed by, “Oh, you mean you’re all the way down in the South Valley?” “Uh. yeah.”
And it’s the river valleys where I want to live, if I have to live the rest of my life in the desert. Because psychologically, it’s weird living exposed on a hill in the middle of a desert. It’s not what our brains have evolved to imagine means “home.” Home is a water source, some shelter, some green plants. (And an outdoor kitchen and a swimming pool, lol!)
Maybe I’m trying to replace the house I left behind in California. Although I’m not sure if it’s that house that appealed to me so much or the fact that both my kids lived there with us.
Realistically I should chill out about looking for houses and put that on the back burner for awhile. John says we have a couple of years to find one, and I guess we have as many years as we have life left. But I’d really like to get him out of that house of his and into one we both feel like could be our home together, even if it’s too far for me to commute daily as long as I’m working in Santa Fe. Is it worth spending Santa Fe prices to buy our retirement home right next to a job I won’t have all that many more years?
Speaking of the job, yes I still like it, but it’s been a bummer lately. I haven’t talked about work much because I’m not sure how much I should put in a public blog (that all of 3 people read). But the manager who is nearest to me on the org chart, my closest peer, is feeling the heat from our management. And the fallout is affecting me and my team.
She was a very good senior employee, and now she’s a mediocre-to-poor manager. This happens all the time. The skills involved in being a good employee are not the skills involved in being a good manager. We’ve all had these mediocre managers, the ones who oversee everything too closely, who bottleneck processes because they kept the skill sets that made them good senior employees, without developing the skill sets that would make them good managers.
Most companies, and in particular large companies and agencies (like the state) continue to trudge along with mediocre managers because that’s how life is. We’ve all had to deal with this kind of manager. I certainly have, more than once. My manager in California was terrible. It’s non-ideal, but it’s part of what they pay you for. You keep your head down and quietly get by.
Except her employees were emboldened to rise up and complain. To build cases against her. Maybe because our next-level boss thinks he’s running a start-up and has a track record of getting rid of people. Or maybe there is more to it that I don’t know. Maybe there is something she did that is way out of line, worse than the usual micromanagement and lack of supporting and empowering one’s employees.
It’s painful to watch. We all wish she’d just step down and save herself, regardless of the fairness of any of it. She’d make a dollar an hour less as a senior employee than a manager. That’s 8 bucks a day, before tax. To be a great employee, vs a mediocre manager with your boss on your ass? For less than 8 bucks a day difference? To regain happiness and contentment by giving up less than 8 dollars a day?
But she’s stubborn. She feels she earned this position…she deserves this position…she’s right and they’re wrong. Except, under pressure she’s starting to crack. She’s making mistakes. Mistakes that she would not have made if she were a senior employee. The types of mistakes that HR cares about. Those are the mistakes that management is going to use to push her out.