I continue to work part-time at the small publisher. I've been there since January, working 2 days in the office and 1 day at home.

The editor in chief is becoming more of a problem. While we seem to have pleasant enough conversations when we're talking about her dogs, her family cabin in the Catskills or her Irish heritage, she takes on a very disrespectful and condescending tone when it comes to the work I'm doing.

It's hard to describe the nature of the work I'm doing, which requires online research of hundreds of different magazines half the time, while the other half the time I'm making updates to Quark and FileMaker listings which contain information about these magazines.

I don't think there's been a week I've been there where there hasn't been some change in the hardware, software, or procedures we're asked to follow. The work, while not rocket science, requires the utmost concentration because there are hundreds of places where, if you click the wrong box in filemaker or fail to mark something a certain way, it messes things up.

On top of that, there was just one day of "group" training of me and my counterpart (I'll call her Delia), who started the job when I did. After that, the editor in chief and another long-time woman, I'll call her Sally, would respond to specific questions, problems or issues that arose as they occurred with either of us. The problem was that when they worked with Delia on some situation, I wasn't always listening in on the conversation and so i didn't get the benefit of what they were telling her. And vice versa.

So yeah, the editor in chief, who has made it well known that she's been there for 25 years, is generally impatient, tense and snippy. There are tons of little rules and procedures involved in this job and it can be hard to remember the "right" way to do everything. So on any number of occasions, when she has to tell me how to do something more than once, she will ALWAYS take the opportunity to tell me how many times previously she told me the very same thing. As if doing so is going to improve my retention. On the contrary, it makes it harder, becus her obvious annoyance is a distraction.

The first time this happened, I just looked at her and didn't say anything, startled that she was so rude. I felt like she were addressing a 10-year-old.

The icing on the cake occurred last week. I was reviewing notes she had made on some new magazine listings I had written. She actually suggested that I was either "lazy" or "plagarizing" descriptions of the magazines.

Here's what happened.

We are working with ancient equipment and software. The company doesn't have any money to spend. I am using a small, 12-inch diameter monitor and need to have no less than 6 windows open at any time on the monitor: this includes the master quark file, the filemaker file, the website, the editor follow up form and the category page. Toggling back and forth and minimmizing screens is time-consuming. So what I had done to cause her nasty remarks was copy descriptions of a magazine directly from their website to my quark file, where I found it easy to rewrite the description when I could just look at what they wrote right in front of me. Unfortunately, there were two listings where I thought that I had already rewritten the description, when in fact i had not. A very unfortunate mistake, but certainly not laziness or plagarisim, either. Hence her comments.

I've worked as a writer for nearly 30 years, and I am neither. But i was so pissed when i read her notes that once again, i chose to completely ignore them and not say anything, even to defend myself.

Since then, I have fantasized about getting even. I happened to have another job interview on Friday, a place where I would love to work and which pays substantially better than the $15 an hour I'm making now. The woman I interviewed with actually told me the range she usually pays writers, from $30 to $45 an hour. It was really refreshing to talk to a prospective employer who was candid about pay instead of playing the game of trying to force me to name a price so they can determine how little they can pay me.

So my fantasy was that i get the job i interviewed for and then I can email the editor in chief, saying largely what I've said here, and announcing my departure, effective immediately. I would copy the people the editor in chief reports to. It would be a huge embarrassment to her.

From conversations I've had, she's like this to others. I mentioned here before that Delia, my counterpart in this job, who i like very much, told me she nearly quit herself last summer but was talked out of it by another woman who had our job previously (and left herself after 6 months on the job). In her case, the editor in chief was getting on her case...a lot..because she was working too slow and needed to work faster and complete more listings.

I know, I know, don't burn your bridges and all that, but i don't intend to make a name for myself in publishing and I don't think she could hurt me. What's frustrating is that I've built a career and enjoyed success, awards, kudos, etc. over the years. So when an editor who hardly knows me immediately accuses me of being either lazy or a plagarizer, it REALLY ticks me off.

The woman is so arrogant that when we email editors at the publications we are researching, in search of certain information that we can't find on their websites, she wouldn't even allow us to use our own name as the signature. She made us use HER name and title immediately below our name. Her reasoning was, being that she's been in the business for so long, some editors "might" recognize her name and there'd therefore be a better chance that they respond to us. Needless to say, using her signature with my name on an email I sent caused a lot of confusion, which was evident when various people would email me back, often addressing me by her name and so on. And here she's telling us she wants us to try to build "relationships" with various magazine editors when they don't know who they're talking to.

There have been any number of times when I've overheard her remark to Sally about how well we're doing in terms of progress, and listings written by me and Delia, especially when compared to where they were in previous years at this time. (They establishede weekly quotas we are supposed to meet as to the number of listings we complete.) Apparently there was always a lot of hair-pulling and last minute scrambles to get the books done. Not once, however, has the editor thought to address me and Delia directly to say hey, guys, you're doing a good job. Thanks.