Edibletcetera – Fast & Fabulous Food

As She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed has spent this week preoccupied with having an Attitude of Gratitude, I’ve decided to write this blog and its all about me, me, me…..

I get the concept of gratitude but for me it’s an instantaneous thing that’s gone in a flash, like a cookie. I remember the other weekend though; I was allowed to run off leash on a hike. Yes! I’m normally leashed as I’m prone to chase anything that moves – and come to think of it, anything that ‘moo’s’ as well. I had to be forcibly restrained from killing a Black Angus that wouldn’t get out of our way on the trail. If only I’d been allowed to have at it but it wasn’t to be and I was leashed thereafter. All I can say is that’s one lucky cow! But all in all, there was a great sense of freedom coupled with the divine pleasure of rolling in piles of bovine excrement and mud.

Anyway, back to Moi…being of superb heritage and a hardwired rodent annihilator, I hone my deadly skills daily with Squeaky and Mr. Sausage in the hopes that one day something will offer its life up. I practiced on a cat once but I couldn’t handle the noise and to date the most I’ve caught are a few slow moving flies. Being leashed really sucks especially when I feel obliged to protect her from anything on wheels. The vacuum cleaner tries to kill her once a week and I’ve bitten it so many times now that She shuts me in the other room until its over. Its stressful waiting to see if She survived every attack.

I love my daily routine though. She gets up too early for my taste and being dragged outside before sunrise is, well – a drag but once that’s over there’s nothing better than helping with her yoga stretches. BTW, most of them She learned from me and my favorite posture is lying on my back squirming under her head while She attempts my downward dog move. Shoving Mr. Sausage in her face is another good move and I love my foot attack asana which is usually followed by shouting, followed by a spell hiding in the closet.

I’ll tolerate being held like a baby but I don’t appreciate shouting (aside from my own, which I’m proud to say is pleasingly penetrating). I hate loud noise with the exception of music which I enjoy even on volume 11. Anyway, my hearing is so finely tuned I can detect an asteroid slamming into the moon. That’s quite interesting but when it starts raining five miles away and the wind picks up to 10 mph, I get pretty spooked and go into one of my famous impressions; ‘Jello on a Spin Cycle’. As for thunder, I head for the bathtub and her assurances that it’s the Man Upstairs moving his furniture doesn’t wash because there isn’t any upstairs where we live.

Other impressions of mine that generate sympathy or positive attention are Gopher; Raised Paw Gopher; Head Tilted to One Side Gopher and I do a cool version of a low creeping thing, dragging broken back legs. I’ve perfected pathetic, if I think She’s going anywhere without me.

Did I mention I prefer Men? May I also mention the stuff She makes me wear? While I appreciate the extra layer in winter, it’s pretty humiliating being adorned in pink faux fur and glitter. There’s also a dress that She forces me into on ‘Special Occasions’ – it’s bloody awful leopard print with a tiered velvet skirt. Worse, She’s emailed pictures of me wearing it to the World. I’ll never be able to hold my head up at Westminster now.

Anyway, back to the noise issue; one thing that freaks me out is the plastic container that strawberries come in – opening that sends me into jello-spin-cycle mode and I’m wary of the sound of running water as She simultaneously advances towards me wearing rubber gloves and carrying a towel after I’ve rolled in road kill. She just doesn’t get that I need to disguise myself as a corpse to become an invisible hunter. No wonder I’ve never caught anything bigger than a moth – I always smell of Baby Shampoo.

But I mustn’t complain. As long as inside doors are left open so I can mug her when She’s using the bathroom; as long as I get taken everywhere She goes and provided She feeds me bits of whatever food She’s prepping, I’m content except I wish it weren’t mostly salad stuff.

And I know She doesn’t mean it when she threatens to duct tape my muzzle or have me fashioned into a stylish purse because She feeds me twice daily, walks me regularly, lets me sleep in her bed and shred the occasional Kleenex.

I just hope She doesn’t find what I did behind the sofa to a packet of chewing gum that I stole from her purse.

Since last weekend when I hiked in the high country and enjoyed the brilliant fall colors (see for yourself here and above), I’ve had a week of little upsets and irritations:

Starting with hearing about the health issues of family members and friends; a recent filling cracked, necessitating yet another trip to the dentist; I’ve endured intermittent computer/internet issues; then that ludicrously expensive mistake of mine EHarmony, sent me one ‘carefully selected match’ who’s 2 inches shorter than me and is looking for someone to join him on regular 10 mile bike rides and kayaking – neither of which I will ever do as I’ve clearly stated in my profile; oh joy, my washing machine leaked on Saturday evening and to top it off, this morning I found out that the ‘local’ Glenwood mall sales tax is a staggering 10.1%. This after driving a 36 mile round trip because I’d wrongly assumed it was lower than my local city tax and I wanted to be fiscally cautious (yes, yes, what about the gas both ways I hear you say but fyi, gas is 20-30 cents a gallon cheaper there). To add insult to injury, someone put a dent in my car and drove off while I was shopping in Target – oh and as for Target, the only one within 90 miles I might add; they’d run out of almost everything on my list.

But all in all, it’s been a good week because I’ve decided I have a lot to be grateful for. For instance, I decided not to give these events the power to bring me down in light of the fact that my dear friend’s dog has made a miraculous recovery from what seemed like a death sentence and now she gets to keep her beloved pet and won’t be parted from several thousand $$$ to pay for veterinary treatment.

As an aside, I’m fed up to the back teeth with the medical profession being cavalier with their diagnoses; human, animal or otherwise and causing us to spend money on unnecessary procedures, not to mention the trauma of it. I’m still paying for completely unnecessary ‘nuclear medicine’ from 18 months ago. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, nuclear medicine in my case involved an injection of something radioactive that made my insides glow in the dark, followed by another injection of something else that caused my spookily-glowing organs to compress horribly. I could have watched all of this on a little screen if only I’d stopped weeping with shock for a second. It was accompanied by a strong smelling liquid being wafted under my nose by a kindly nurse who was trying to prevent me from passing out from the pain of it. They never tell you any of this until you’ve been hooked up to an IV and the drug is flowing.

But I digress…that was then. My friend’s dog is recovering; the weather is perfect and I did a lovely hike yesterday with another friend and our dogs. My place has spectacular views from every window including my bathroom and for this I’m grateful several times a day, every day. My health is good, aside from a sore shoulder resulting from a weird fall in Aikido last week and I’m really looking forward to Aikido tomorrow; tonight ‘Mad Men’ followed by Masterpiece Theater are on TV and I just created a great dish with eggplant, garlic, red onion, basil, goat cheese and pine nuts … I’m listening to great music as I type.

I could go on but hopefully I’ve made my point – point being that whenever everything seems to be conspiring to piss me off, I get through it by focusing on everything I have to be grateful for.

My glass is always half full and I like to keep it topped up. Mine’s a martini!

I’m no Luddite – I own useful bits of technology that get me from A to B without a map, deliver my emails and text at the side of the road (never while driving!) and let me call whoever from wherever.

So being quite contemporary in my thinking (and I’m really looking forward to the movie), I understand why these days people choose to display themselves and their lives on Facebook. So far I’ve resisted. I’m selective about who I share my world with and perish the thought I’d have to spend any valuable time Face-blocking an ex who’d like to get back in touch, for instance. If I’d wanted to get back in touch, I wouldn’t have blocked them from my email server in the first place. And no, I’m not in any witness protection program; I’m just a rather private person who happens to be smart enough to find you if I wanted to.

However, I do use Linkedin, the professional networking site. As a professional person it makes sense to build a network of professional contacts; all strictly professional.

But apart from the obvious (to me) exception of using Twitter to tweet work related information simultaneously to large groups of people which I think is both cool and efficient; I’m bemused by those who need to quantum blog the planet several times a day. Unless you’re really smart, funny and famous, I don’t get it because you can’t say much in fewer than 250 text characters, so you need to be really good with words to be remotely interesting given those restrictions.

Sadly it seems that tweeters mostly fall into just one of the above three categories (the famous; sans smart and funny)… and what they’re likely to tweet is that they just ate lunch at the Ivy in LA or something equally edifying such as; “Like I just flossed and found the earring I lost last week but Japan wouldn’t let me in even though like I told them like it wasn’t my purse.” I don’t know about you but I’m sure I’d hardly be able to contain myself waiting for the next meaningful missive and would be glued to my tweet-ometer for 48 hours in case I missed it! Not.

….And then there are their followers. Even more disturbing than someone needing to share their every act or thought with the world (It’s all about Meee! Tweet, tweet); is that some people want to read about it. Why? Do some folks really have so little going on in their lives that they need to feed off someone else’s throughout the day? Isn’t this slightly creepy; as if you’ve been granted permission to spy on someone through a keyhole? Like?

I bet those poster children of Twitter, Ashton and Demi, who currently choose to live their lives in an illuminated fish tank, are going to wish they’d kept quiet at some point. Don’t they have any work right now or are they actually being paid by Twitter to generate a following of Twits? Whatever happened to discretion and privacy? Perhaps their goals have shifted and they now want to be recognized as great tweeters rather than great actors.

Personally I’m far too busy to read the minute by minute minutiae of the daily activity of someone I don’t know, let alone respond. And before you jump on my case, this blog isn’t in that category. I blog once every 5-7 days with approx 500-1000 words and I have no intention of boring you with multiple daily mini-blogs about how long it took me to blow dry my hair because I used the wrong product …and I’d never presume that you’d care to read about how I forgot to buy milk or where I walked my dog as this is my personal getting-through-the-day business which is time consuming in itself.

However, you are invited to respond and you aren’t limited to 250 text characters either. And if someone can persuade me that the world would be enhanced by me joining the ranks of the twittering twits, I’m open minded enough to consider it but I think it’s unlikely in the foreseeable future because I’m a very busy person and for now, it’s enough for me that you follow me on my blog 😉

What is a friend? At what point on the scale does one become less of a friend and more of a friendly acquaintance?

If we’re lucky, we’ll have a small circle of really close friends and a wider circle of not quite so close friends; the ones we’d invite to a party as we really enjoy seeing them but we wouldn’t necessarily call upon them in a crisis. Then there’s the widest circle of all made up of friendly acquaintances that I refer to as ‘rent-a-crowd’; the people you’d invite to a large gathering to make up the numbers.

A very dear friend of mine (and you know who you are) tells me that… “To have a friend, you need to be a friend”. How true. Because she walks her talk, I consider myself lucky to count her as a close friend.

Then there are the ‘forever’ friends that we’ve known for many years but rarely see due to their geographical location. Even if you only get together once every 5 years or so, you’ll pick up just where you left off; it’s so comforting and if they happen to live in cool places around the globe, Yeah! I’m lucky in that regard as well.

On the other hand, I’m bemused when someone who’s consistently unavailable despite being well within reach, tells me how much they value our friendship. I’ve no idea what that means.

A pet peeve is the BFF who goes MIA as soon as they strike up a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. No true friend uses you as a fill-in between relationships then drops you like a hot brick as soon as they start dating. These emotional vampires tend to resurface when the relationship goes sour because they need your support …until next time. After the initial disappointment and once you realize you’ve been used as space-filler, it’s easy to let them go. The filler-friend can become your BFF very quickly and given that relationships often end the same way they start, you’ll be dropped in a nanosecond. Unless you like being used, it’s best to let them go permanently. Oh, and the excuse you’ll hear when you bump into them; “I’ve been sooooo busy!” … doesn’t work because any intelligent adult knows that we’re never too busy for what’s important. Message received, thank you.

Equally annoying is the friend who gets in touch sporadically to say how much they miss you and “let’s get together soon” but when you respond with a suggested date, you won’t get a reply for months until you receive an identical message to the first one. Hello? What’s the point here? Are you just checking in and if so, why? So you can knock me off your Christmas card list or not? After the 3rd or 4th instance of this, I didn’t bother responding and wonder of wonders! I never heard from them again. Mission accomplished and flake-free!

Then there are those one-sided friendships; when you get together it must be on their schedule (they’re frequently late but will announce that they’re never late for anything important) and you’ll always be doing what they want to do. They’ll let you down and change their plans at the last minute without consideration or thought for your inconvenience, so depending on how much you value yourself and your time, you can choose to suck it up, meet only occasionally or not at all and just accept it for what it is.

Or, perhaps you know of someone who collects people and files them away for future use? I’ve known individuals who are super gregarious and chummy in order to draw you in so they can exploit you at a later date. You’re being sized up at the outset for your exploitability-factor and if you’re deemed potentially usable, you’ll be tricked into thinking you have a new friend. Be very careful here; if you suspect you’re being cultivated, run! You’ll know this by the way they demolish other people’s characters. They may have a narcissistic personality disorder and because they’ve exploited and bad-mouthed everyone they know, they’ll have no-one left to turn to should disaster strikes them personally. Sadly, they won’t take any responsibility for this and will blame the world.

So the question is, are you a good friend to your friends? Am I to mine? If we can answer ‘Yes’ to the following, I hope it means that we are:

• You’re as good as your word.
• You’re trustworthy – you keep your friend’s confidences to yourself.
• Everyone else’s time is just as important as yours.
• You never drop friends just because you’ve found a love interest.
• You’ll support a friend in distress even if it’s at an inconvenient hour.
• You don’t only contact your friends when you want something.
• You can share the good, the bad, the funny and the tragic and know that anything you say won’t be used against you in gossip.
• You’ll do small things you know would make your friend happy and you expect nothing in return.
• You don’t have a ‘quid pro quo’ attitude.

If I’ve missed anything please feel free to add your comments because I believe earning the right to be called a true friend is a work in progress.

Living in a rural area and working from home, I decided several months ago to join the ranks of the great online daters in order to meet date-able men.

I now consider myself an experienced online dater. OK I take that back; I now consider myself to have a finely tuned BS-detector and can say with the benefit of experience which dating sites work and which is an expensive rip-off. So…this blog is intended as a dating site guide for people who’ve been toying with the idea of finding a toy boy, BF, GF, Cougar or something more permanent, online.

I’ll quickly dispense with what sites sort of work (setting aside the oxymoronic status option: ‘Never married but has been in committed relationships’. Huh?)

If you can see a pic and read the profile of anyone registered on a dating site then all you need to do is fine tune your intuition, learn to identify inconsistencies and be able to distinguish a recent digital pic from a scanned Polaroid taken in the ‘80s when the person in question had hair, one chin, a flat stomach and white teeth. OK, perhaps white teeth are non-age related these days plus they could be glo-in-the-dark dentures. Match.com works this way as does POF.com which is free but you’ll sort of get why it’s free after a while, so it’s up to you. I’d also read up on Craig’s list’s related articles before going there….

Conversely, I’d recommend avoiding EHarmony at all cost despite its grandiose claims that:

• You’ll receive Matches based upon 29 dimensions of compatibility.
• It has 88 million members worldwide!
• It spends a fortune on TV ads showing happily ‘matched’ couples while their avuncular founder spouts sincerely about how helping you find your one true soul-mate is all they care about. (What? Only one on the entire planet?)
• It also takes responsibility for a healthy % of American marriages.

From my experience, here’s what you CAN expect:

• You’ll pay a hefty fee.
• There’s no opportunity to peruse their site for anyone you might find attractive, interesting, etc.
• To receive ‘matches’ you must wait…and wait… After the first flush of ‘matches’ you receive and despite their ‘88 million subscribers’, you’ll get nothing else for weeks unless you send them a nasty-gram, which will elicit a brief flurry of activity followed by another long hiatus.
• You’ll receive ‘matches’ without photographs. You aren’t supposed to dismiss these but upon reading their faceless profiles, you’ll hopefully recognize your one true soul mate by the fact that you both like dancing, coffee, seafood and road trips. In case you think I’m being harsh, let’s consider that dancing incorporates the two-step, salsa and hip-hop. And I feel most strongly that if I’d written in my lengthy probing questionnaire how much I dislike untidiness, birds as pets, ATV’s, NASTAR, camping and fast food, then whatever software is used to select my ‘matches’ should be taking all this into consideration.
• Having parted with a lot of $$, you might feel justified in inquiring as to why they send you ‘matches’ without pics, as I did. Expect a self-righteous, patronizing response, ‘lovingly’ berating you for your shallowness due to your fixation with physical appearance. This, after you’d spent 2-3 hours of your time carefully filling out their questionnaire as honestly as possible and specifying your ‘Must-Haves’ and ‘Can’t Stands’ (A clue: I ‘Must Have’ someone who’s physically fit and taller than me. A 5’6” tall, fast food addict with no picture doesn’t work for me, even though we both like movies).
• You’ll receive other helpful suggestions; e.g. “extend your geographical limits in order to meet your one true soulmate and find true meaningful love”. Expectantly, I increased my range to include the entire US and Canada. Nothing. So, just for fun and although I wouldn’t travel to Yemen even for Hugh Jackman, I increased it to ‘Worldwide’. That brave move of mine generated one ‘match’; an ex-pat living in Dubai who was considerably shorter than me and at least 10 years younger.

You may be thinking my requirements are unreasonable, that I have no teeth and a mustache – not so and I think I look pretty good (it wouldn’t matter anyway as according to these folks, looks aren’t important despite the fact that I entered in my profile that THEY’RE IMPORTANT TO ME). I do have high standards however and the most recent missive I got from them was to rethink/rewrite my questionnaire in order to attract my soulmate.

So – I can now choose between writing a less than honest questionnaire in order to receive unsuitable matches or, settle for the soulmate I already have – my dog.

Finally and if you have any lingering doubts, consider the following; last year I signed up for 3 mos of EHarmony with laughable results. Being persuaded that I didn’t give it enough time I signed up for 12 more, using a different name/email.

Despite identical criteria, my current subscription gets almost no matches but the expired one is bombarded with ‘matches’ that they’ll only show me if I subscribe. Hello? They’re both me and if you can send ‘matches’ to the expired me, surely you can send them to the fully paid up me – assuming they do exist?

Oh – and unless you cancel within the first 3 days, they’ll keep taking your money for the full year regardless of whether they send you any matches or not. They tell me they’re waiting to find me the perfect match – I bet I’ll get a few just before my subscription expires…so, caveat emptor!

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking up Aikido for some time so after a recent conversation with a friend who’s an Aikido black belt, I bit the bullet and signed up for a semester.

Initially what impresses me most is the philosophy; ‘Ai Ki Do’ translates roughly to ‘The way of harmonizing vital energy, life force, or spirit’. It has numerous interpretations but they’re all seemingly peaceful as Aikido is designed to neutralize and dissipate any aggressive act aimed at one’s person; all the while remaining focused and centered while emitting loving ‘vibes’.

Anyway, that’s what I learned in my very first lesson last night; along with how to repeatedly fall backwards and roll right up again while escaping a fierce arm grab, rendering the attacker both harmless and unharmed. Not bad for a first go and it would have come in very handy during marriage # 1. My right leg was a bit sore this morning from all the kneeling and the bouncing back from being knocked down but otherwise I’m unscathed.

I came to this because I like to try new things every now and then – it helps to keep my mind open and prevents my existence from becoming too much of a routine. For instance, I took up skiing late in life followed by yoga for which I was very grateful last night after the umpteenth fall, roll and rebound. I know I keep mentioning this but I was convinced I’d end up in a neck brace so I’m thankful to be suffering from little more than a sore leg muscle.

On the other hand, getting my open water SCUBA certification was something else. Having a lifelong fear of deep water and confined spaces but determined to overcome this (the water part), I was horrified to learn that my certification was to take place in an underground hot spring in Utah. That sounds quite relaxing doesn’t it? Well it wasn’t. Imagine climbing into a largish hole in the side of a small hill then along a damp, cramped, rocky passageway that opens up into a massive, gloomy underground cavern containing nothing but a lake full of hot cloudy water with just a rudimentary wooden platform to sit on. From the murky depths there filtered what seemed to be a 20 watt light which barely illuminated a flimsy plastic contraption, 15 feet below. This was kept in place by a couple of buoys bobbing on the surface. I was told that this ‘lake’ is 60 feet deep; however we were just going to dive to the plastic thing and perform maneuvers. The sides were vertical, clay-like and slimy so the only way in or out was via the wooden platform that had seen better days.

Apparently the murkiness of the water was due to panicky people like me desperately trying to grab hold of something, anything – and bouncing into the side walls which released mineral deposits into the hot water. My only comfort was the knowledge that no predator could possibly live down there due to the extreme temperature because frankly, SCUBA certified or not, I’ll never dive in murky water where I can’t see the bottom – and this hot hole was fodder for a recurring nightmare.

There were eight of us in the class and we were required to sit on a slick ledge at a depth of 25 feet and take it in turns to rip off our masks, partially drown while our eyeballs were scoured (so it seemed), then put our masks back on and clear them of water. It was about 98F degrees down there and dark, so after 15 minutes of waiting for my turn and even with my heart hammering in my throat, I unexpectedly nodded off.

Despite this and a few obligatory exercises that I was forced to repeat as I’d rushed them, my breathing was apparently so slow and controlled that I emerged not only fully certified but with almost a tank full of air (thank you yoga, once more). This was considered praiseworthy but on the basis that we’re supposed to dive in pairs and must surface together when one of us runs out of air, I can’t see what good it does me except that I won’t be the party pooper. The minerals in the water left me with bloodshot eyes for days.

I did a reef dive shortly after this horror and it was absolutely worth it, so I guess the point is that sometimes we have to push ourselves through something unpleasant in order to reap the reward.

Back to Aikido – by comparison and even after just one lesson, it’s enjoyable and I particularly like the structure, tradition and routine. Despite the fact that the three black belts in the class were attired like Samurai and looked like they could disembowel me with a chopstick, they were extremely gracious and patient and I’m really looking forward to my next lesson tomorrow.

I’ll let you know if I make it.

The national news covered a story this week about someone who was bullied and abused by his boss to such a degree, he took his own life. Apparently he also suffered from depression which must have made it impossible to bear and his co-workers confirmed publicly that he’d been singled out for torment by this particular individual who of course, promptly hired a defense lawyer. The victim had made several attempts to speak to the employers but it seems he was ignored.

Some time ago, I interviewed with someone looking for a ‘right hand’ to help with marketing, copy writing, legal contracts, etc. I interviewed with this person because they were purportedly one of the best in their field and I thought it was a smart way to learn all aspect of the business in order to further my career.

I’m honest about my skill levels in interviews so I made it very clear at the outset what my talents were and what experience I’d had, relevant to the position in question. I also mentioned I had a scheduled 4 day vacation to visit family across the country and that my flight was booked. “No problem!” he told me. Looking back, I realize that he wasn’t actually listening but indulging in puffery and self-aggrandizement, while at the same time heavily criticizing my predecessor – I was so fixated on ‘working with the best’ that I chose to overlook this red flag.

During my first 3 weeks I was subjected to such an overwhelming amount of abuse that I did two things; first, I started looking in earnest for another job and secondly, I started to keep a daily log of his behavior. What follows are a few examples of what I experienced on a daily basis, frequently within full earshot of other staff members and clients:

• Offensive, sexist remarks.
• Insulting comments about my nationality.
• Being told; “Shut up and listen”, whenever I asked for clarification. I should point out here that with his slight speech impediment, it was sometimes hard to understand what he was saying so I would have to repeat something back to make sure I’d got it – this enraged him as apparently it proved that I wasn’t listening properly in the first place.
• Having his right fist punch repeatedly into his left palm barely 3 inches from my nose, while telling me to “Shut up and listen” – see above.
• Being told; “I hate what you do with your eyes and your face – you really irritate me”.
• Being told that he and not I, will decided when I can take time off as he pays my salary (he didn’t, the parent company did) and as he hasn’t given his permission I must cancel my family trip. He denied I’d ever mentioned it. That was a costly cancellation in more ways than one.
• Being repeatedly told that I’d exaggerated my skills at my interview, that he was extremely disappointed in my lack of knowledge and that the only thing I did well was interview.
• Being told that my predecessor was a PhD by comparison (The person whose character and work ethic he’d demolished in my interview).
• Being called at home on a Sunday evening because his son needed help with his homework and had computer issues, then becoming angry because I was unavailable.
• Being told; “You have too much self-esteem – you’re not that good and you need to be knocked down a peg or two”………and so-on….there was so much more but you get the drift.

It wasn’t just me who was subjected to this tyranny. I observed him verbally humiliating numerous other female colleagues on a daily basis. Men on the other hand, were treated as good ‘ole buddies. Strangely enough, when I twice offered to resign and help find him a replacement as he was clearly so unhappy with my work, he back peddled and expressed appreciation for everything I did – for a day or so.

I recall rationalizing his behavior being partly due to the fact that he’s short in a Napoleonic way; barely tall enough to reach my chin in his high heel booties. But that’s absurd as I know several wonderful men who are short in stature.

During the first couple of weeks – and I’d like to add that this was the most egregiously offensive thing of all; I had a quiet word about the issue with the ‘office manager’ who’d been entrenched for 17 yrs and presented a motherly demeanor, encouraging me to seek help anytime as I was ‘new’.

I was told the following; “Yes, I agree that he’s a problem but don’t bother reporting any of this to the HR person as she won’t do anything”. This was probably true as the ‘HR representative’, who worked for the parent company but was stationed in our office, seemed to be no more that a job application processor and demonstrated all the communication and interpersonal skills of a door mat that read ‘Go Away!’

I countered this non-advice by suggesting that surely, this type of inappropriate behavior shouldn’t be tolerated and why had nobody filed a lawsuit over the past 20+ years that this had apparently been going on for?

You know what she said? She said… “Oh, yes we all know he’s totally out of line but no lawyer in this small town would touch it – they all play golf together and it’s an old boy’s network, so don’t waste your time”.

Fortunately for me, I found another job within 3 months but I admit it was a grueling 3 months – and, like all true narcissists who have bad boundaries and believe they’re the Center of the Known Universe, he asked me on my last day if I’d like to continue working for him part-time because he couldn’t cope without my help. I actually laughed all the way home.

I lasted as long as I did because I’d also been going through a 6 week interview process for my new job. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel which made it more tolerable and this time, it wasn’t a freight train coming the other way.

I escaped unscathed and recovered instantly but how about you? What would you have done in my position? What HAVE you done in this situation and is any job worth hanging on to when you work for an abuser?