At my age, admonishment still stings

There comes a time in every job where you are taken to the boss's woodshed for a spanking. Or, in my case, an all-glass office with dreamy 32d-floor views over the city, furnished with a quartet of green velvet-clad wing chairs traced by white leather piping and accented with toile throw pillows

I had always wanted to test those chairs and they are far more comfortable than I'd imagined, even when squirming in them.

"Quite frankly, I was disappointed," was what was first uttered by my boss upon her closing the floor-to-ceiling glass door as we took seats in the green chairs. The moment I heard those opening words, I felt that same infusion of dread I remember from visits to the school principal.

We crossed our legs at the same moment, kicking each other in the shin and then apologized over each other. I could already see a few of my colleagues peeking over their low-rise cubicles, or "cockpits," as some of us call the ergo-dynamically designed units, one of which I now occupy after having lost a real, windowed office following our company's move to glamorous new headquarters.

Even through closed doors, colleagues can always tell the difference between a meeting with a superior and an admonishment. Funny, then, how several colleagues suddenly needed to use the copying machine in a hallway directly opposite the boss's office (one of them even took the time to squirt Windex on the glass to clean away those stubborn smudges we've all been complaining about.

In this instance of admonishment, I will simply say that, in part, I deserved it. I hadn't made a mistake (someone else did), but as my boss told me, "You handled it all wrong by sending an e-mail that was accusatory."

Ah, the subtle language of e-mails, none of which anyone should send before 9 a.m. on a workday. Someone had made a mistake, but instead of addressing my complaint to just that one person, I had copied many others on the e-mail, which in office life is akin to putting the offender in a pillory by the reception desk.

What anyone should do with such e-mail instead: Write a draft, print out a copy, mull the language, rewrite it, then hit "send" after an hour's wait. Despite the frequent absence of nouns and pronouns, adjectives and other crucial linguistic devices in many an office e-mail note, the messages can still have the subtle power of poetry.

e e cummings, the poet famous for using no punctuation or capitalizations, seems almost to have presaged the language of e-mail and even he could not have conveyed as much meaning in a stanza as most of us sometimes do in an e-mail sentence fragment.

So, I sat in one of the green chairs, counting the surprising number of missing brass nail heads on my armrest, all the while agreeing with my boss that, yes, I had phrased my e-mail improperly, and that, yes, I had cc'ed the wrong people on it and gotten them needlessly riled.

According to my boss, her favorite employee (the one who passes my desk throughout the day on the way to her all-glass office, managing every time to bump my chair like a roller-derby queen with one of her hips) was "walking around wounded" after receiving the message .

As admonishments go, this was among the most benign of my career. My boss is a talented, smart, and considerate person who never yells; at worst, she gets terse. But the older I get, the more troubling and resonant any admonishment becomes for me. I am in the thick of middle age and to be admonished by anyone other than a romantic partner or a parent feels inappropriate -- nearly intolerable.

It's the central, defining dynamic of office life that has always troubled me, the realization that every employee, no matter age or rank, works hard to please just one person: the boss. Because I knew I was wrong, in part, I felt little anger toward my boss; not even embarrassment, just shame that at my age I am still in a position to be admonished by someone.

And to be bawled out meant that my otherwise flawless record was now marred. The honeymoon phase of my office life had ended, always a sad, but inevitable, development.

One of the universal dreams of humanity, I believe, is that of extracting "revenge" on a boss who administers a degree of metaphorical spanking. I know that my boss likes me a lot and respects the work I do, but in this circumstance I realized that it was more painful for her to chew me out than it was for me to hear it.

Later the same day, on the 27-second elevator ride I shared with her to the lobby to discuss a pressing office matter (such rides, with any boss, I've discovered, are more productive and decisive than full working lunches), she spoke to me the whole while with her right hand cupped tenderly on my elbow. And at day's end, she came into my cockpit and pulled out the wheeling file drawer that doubles as a cushioned perch for visiting guests, to ask if everything was OK, the first time she has ever done that.

Not surprisingly, my "wounded" colleague's expression late in the day had been replaced with a smirk. I've now set up roadblocks in the aisle behind my desk so that she has to take another route, including putting an oversized vintage globe on the floor beside me and keeping one of the long file drawers open.

I learned many things in that transparent woodshed to which I was summoned: to not react immediately to annoying office news, to be a better editor of my e-mail messages, to accept that a boss's favorites are to be shown as much respect as if they were her children, and, perhaps, most important, that green velvet is not something I would want in an office of mine or to sit on ever again.

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