Alice's Mommy Blog

Happy girlie cuddle time!

I am counting down the days to my hubby’s marathon (15 days and 10 hours in case you’re curious) and spending a few days at home with my Oma with no work! Okay I say no work but I still ended up in the office today dealing with a deadline issue that could only be handled until the end of today. I also met with boss, again, when I was in. I had a long phone conversation with him yesterday, while he was working from home and I was in the office. Then today when I needed to go in to finish this thing, I emailed him to let him know if he wanted to talk to me any more I would be in at 2pm. And at 2pm he was at my door. Normally, long talks with your boss are not great, but in my case they were. I had a bit of an unnerving situation the other day and he wanted to make sure I was okay, and to talk about things with me.

I work in a University as a program advisor, and I love my job, and I make a huge difference in people’s lives, but I also am often the barer of bad news, and the dreams crusher in some cases. The other day I was warned by a prof that a student who was not well would be coming to see me. This isn’t a big deal, and is part of the job, but what was different, was a prof that I joke with a lot, made it clear that I was NOT to be alone with this student, and did so in front of our department chair. After emailing the student to arrange a meeting I needed to figure out a way to get someone in the room with me. The prof volunteered but he’s in really late, so I emailed my male coadvisor who is in by 7:30am at like 11pm and asked him to meet with me. The student showed up, (really late) and we have a great solution for him, but he was angry, and he was twitchy, and he made me feel uncomfortable, despite my coadvisor sitting right beside me. Had he not been there, I wound have felt very unsafe in that situation.

In 5 years, that’s never happened to me. I hate feeling this way. That little voice in the back of my head that thinks of all the violence that has happened in places like Dawson’s College, Newton, Virginia Tech, and so on, and it just freaked me out. The more I thought about it the worse it got. I kept thinking what if my coadvisor couldn’t come or the student had met with me before my prof warned me. He actually came to my door but I told him to go away because I had a deadline. When he got angry my coadvisor calmed him down, and I won’t have thought to do it the way he did. I’m tough, and strong and fast, but I felt so clueless and that really scares me.

After our meeting I emailed the prof to thank him for the warning. As I mulled over the meeting I started to feel worse, (I’ve had a rock in my gut since then) and emailed my boss and our department head and update/summary of what we decided was best to do with his situation, and told them about how uncomfortable I felt in that meeting. I feel bad, because I think that must have been some of the worst news my boss (and our department head was my boss for 3 years) ever had to get. Who wants to read that their employee felt uncomfortable doing their job.

I have to give my department huge credit. My prof cared enough to warn me and make sure I wasn’t alone when helping this student. My boss called me from home and spent almost a half and hour making sure I was okay, listening to what happened, hearing how I feel about it, asking loads of questions about what he can do, what the department needs to do, other times I’ve felt uncomfortable but not to this extreme, and then came again today to talk to me about it in person. It was made very clear to me by him and the head of the department, that my safely is their top concern and should always be my top priority when I do my job. He’s coming up with a list of different training they’ll make available to me, to help me learn how to handle this situations (all the training I’ve received is about students who show signs of maybe harming themselves) but he’s even thinking as technical as moving me to more busy location on our floor, so I’m less isolated, when the people in the offices beside me are not in.

I know that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and to have a chance, but those fears have always been in the back of my mind, hiding in the dark, and this situation just brought them all up to the front. I’m thankful to have such a caring department, and I know I’ll be okay, but talking about it with my boss and my husband didn’t really make that rock in my stomach go away, so I hoped writing it out would. I’ll find out if it helped, when I go back to the office on Tuesday. Thanks for listening!

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