Dig This
In the autumn of 2008, after a summer of bartending and working in a newsagent, I finally managed to get a job at an archaeology company in the UK. I was thrilled as I hadn’t been out doing fieldwork for a whole year and I couldn’t wait to get back into it. However, things quickly went downhill when I met L, my site supervisor. Due to the recession the company didn’t have the money to hire people with the proper experience to run a site, so L was just a slightly more experienced digger than me yet she had been made an “acting supervisor” due to the amount of time she’d been at the company. L seemed to be under the impression that her job title was “queen of everything.”
She was on a constant power trip and had to be in control of everything. She frequently shouted at the new diggers for writing measurements in centimetres rather than metres, as if the graphics team who would work with the plans didn’t know how to convert between the two. One extremely cold November morning, my friend H and I were having a chat inside the site hut and trying to psych ourselves up to brave the weather outside. At this point, a good supervisor would have said, “Come on guys, I know the weather sucks but we’ve got a deadline, and you’ll warm up once you get digging”. L’s tactic was to scream as us, “IF YOU’VE GOT YOUR BOOTS AND WATERPROOFS ON, THEN GET THE HELL OUTSIDE AND DO YOUR JOB!” I found myself wondering if I was actually still in primary school.
H had it worse than me, though. One day, she was writing up some notes inside because it was too windy outside to keep the papers together on her clipboard. L sent her outside. The very next day, L saw H chasing several sheets of notes across site, which predictably had blown away in the strong winds. L marched over shouting, “WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING YOUR RECORDING OUT HERE, IT’S CLEARLY TOO WINDY!” In the end, there was a specialist job going at HQ, which I applied for. I didn’t get it, but I did end up spending a lot more time inside as I had skills which were useful in post-excavation.
I was enjoying this job now, not only was I away from L but I was actually using the stuff I’d learned in my MA. I actually turned down a job at another company who I had previously worked for, and really liked, because we were told in October that we would have work at least until March. The head of the environmental division of the company kept telling me how great it was to have me around and to be able to do certain analysis in-house, until the end of November, when all 15 of the new staff who were hired were laid off because there was suddenly, mysteriously, no work for us. I was happy to go back to my dead-end bar job.
not a good sign when they hire a BIG idiot to be your boss. should have taken the other job.
OMG, I used to be an archaeologist too and they pull that job promising/lay offs BS ALL the time. Shovel Bums need a union. I am so glad I’m not in that field anymore!
So many managers are not trained to be managers. Yours sounds like a piece of work, but perhaps a week long course in people handling could’ve turned her around.
As a woman manager, it’s sometimes tempting to be extra loud and bossy because my whole life I’ve had it pounded into my head that men don’t listen to women…This is not the case. Just remember her if you’re ever giving orders.
Maybe it’s just me, but she didn’t seem like that bad of a boss.
She asked you to do mesasurements correctly, to actually work when you were on the clock, and not to be an idiot when it was windy out. Big deal, she was probably upset about who she had to supervise.
Tanek – On paper, those attributes are great to have, but it’s how the manager implemented them that made her a jerk.
Tanek – every company has different guidelines on how they like their measurements to be written, but most are chilled enough to assume that their staff know that 10cm and 0.1m are the same thing. also, telling H “not to be an idiot when it was windy out” – she gave totally conflicting orders on two consecutive, equally windy days! But yeah there was nothing she did particularly ‘wrong’, rather her attitude that was the problem. It’s really important to have a sense of camaraderie on a dig, and she totally shattered our morale.
Karen – I should indeed have taken the other job. They gave me a job the next spring, and it was bliss compared to this one!