Wherever you go, someone was already there
Starting a new job means struggling with alien personalities, unfathomable politics, and what the Ghostbusters might have called ``employee ectoplasm," a kind of bioenergy left behind by living things. When you take a new job, you can spend years exorcising the ghosts of workers past, those diaphanous creatures who held your job before you.
My first ``ghost" was a smalltown-weekly reporter I'll call Rodney. We never met, so I still picture him wearing a fedora, clacking away at an ancient typewriter, and talking like characters in Raymond Chandler novels. By contrast, I was a dowdy, timid features writer, more comfortable interviewing the local quilting enthusiast than the town manager.
When I took Rodney's place, I learned that he had been fearless at the kind of reporting that involved following local waste haulers into the outback of southwestern Massachusetts to catch them dumping illegally. Even harder to live up to was that he kept a supply of wax lips on hand, the red kind with fangs you bought at Halloween when you were a kid. The lips were gone, but a faint, minty whiff of wax hung over the old metal desk. My co-workers said he chomped on them furiously while writing, especially on deadline. They seemed oddly surprised that I didn't do the same. I am haunted by my inability to live up to Rodney's image, even to this day.
My second ghost, a man I'll call Dan, left a different legacy. He was the kind of guy some people loved, inexplicably. Especially women. From the moment I took his low-paying, high-profile job at a cultural organization, I had to contend with the sorrow of all the sales representatives he'd ever sweet-talked on the phone. ``Oh, Dan's not there anymore?" the person from, say, a phone directory service, would ask me, a tiny catch in her throat. ``We loved Dan. Where did he go? Is he happy there? Could you ask him to call me?"
Once Dan came back to the office for a visit. I was astonished to spot him in a co-worker's office chair with the administrative assistant sitting on his lap. That was going to be a tough act to follow.
At the same time, Dan had cut such a swath of carelessness that some co-workers were embarrassingly grateful for the smallest things -- like my being nice to them. With others, I had to work twice as hard to prove my competence. But the hardest part was slogging through the logistical goo he'd left behind. It once took me two workdays, several calls to state agencies, and finally a desperate call to Dan himself before I was able to decipher a simple brochure distribution route.
My third ghost, like the one in Dickens's ``A Christmas Carol," was the scariest. I have never met the woman, but in her nine-month stint at the job I inherited from her, she had managed to alienate nearly every person in every department of a fairly large institution.
I'll call her Caitlyn. Caitlyn so traumatized her assistant that the woman sought medical help. She so sabotaged the goodwill of her colleagues that even after three months I had to spend the first half-hour of every meeting reassuring people that I was not going to shove my own arbitrary agenda down their throats. Every time I heard the words, ``your predecessor" I reminded myself it was like dealing with people who had post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, as far as I can tell, I really was dealing with people who had post-traumatic stress disorder.
Of course there were some happy ghosts of workers past. A few became friends in a professional kind of way. Sometimes I benefited from their legacies; an apparently endless subscription to the Boston Review, a consultant's devotion. One woman whose shoes I had to fill left me such well-ordered files, work completed ahead of time, and happy relationships that I have tried to follow her example whenever I had to turn my job over to someone else.
That's the thing about ghosts of workers past. You realize that, at some point, you are one -- you are someone else's employee ectoplasm. Early in my career, I took a part-time, grant-funded position at a young nonprofit, the first staff position the institution ever had. More than a decade later, I remain involved with this organization, and ever so often I get to chat with the staff. At an awards ceremony I was introduced to one of my successors. I proudly told her I was the first person ever to have held that position.
``Wow," she said breathlessly. ``It's like meeting Moses!"
Wow, I thought to myself. So I was more than just a ghost to her -- I was ancestral, a spiritual leader who led the way through a vast wilderness . . .
Either that, or she was making fun of me. I'm still trying to figure that one out.
