Gaslighting

I stand here a stalwart but beleaguered member of the sandwich generation, a person who has marginal computer skills and even more tenuous tech support. Activities of daily living (ADL) is a commonly used medical concept that describes a person’s ability to function at the most basic level, focusing on bathing, dressing and preparing food. While ADL is a useful concept to determine who needs to be sent to a skilled nursing facility, I think that ADL could be easily enhanced to apply to the hapless computer-dependent worker trying to make a go of it in a home office. Test activities would include rescuing documents that have absolutely evaporated for no particular reason or deciphering the impenetrable jargon in pop-up messages that ask you to agree or disagree. Finally, one of the expanded ADLs would include a measure of patience. I would fail on all of them.

During one computer malfunction, I spent a tortured hour talking to Gateway tech support over the phone as they were trying to walk me through a computer repair. This support was a premium service that we had paid extra for, but it turned out that Gateway would only come to your home if the problem couldn’t be fixed over the phone first. How did they get away with this – clearly when our toilet or fridge is on the fritz, I don’t talk to a repairman on the other side of the date line who insists on trying to turn someone with no aptitude whatsoever into an agile repairwoman. I had to put tech support on hold several times as I rushed around the house trying to find the correct size of a Phillip’s screw driver and then I was instructed to get under the desk and remove the video card (whatever that was) from the “can.”” I could just picture the tech person smirking.

Sweating and breathing vintage dust bunnies beneath my desk, I finally found the target screw to remove the video card. My triumph was brief as I heard the “plink” of the itty bitty screw falling out of sight into the bowels of the can. As eager as I was to be a functioning member of the computer generation, this was too much for my meager patience. I let loose with a torrent of naughty words, as which point the tech person said, “I don’t need to listen to this abuse.” I said the feeling was mutual and that we both needed a cooling off period. The next day I realized I had to put my finger back in the socket; my ADL required the use of a computer. When I reconnected with Gateway, I head the tech support person pause, and then say, “Oh, Miss Brown, we have an incident report on you, and I must warn you we can’t tolerate this behavior. I will be recording this call.” Ah yes, the computer age, with one click of the button, the entire international tech support world of Gateway, be in India, Iowa or Indonesia, knows that Miss Brown is a potentially abusive loose cannon.

I have on my bookshelf a small volume called: “Gaslighting: How to Drive Your Enemies Crazy,” by one Victor Santoro. Gaslighting perfectly describes my travails with a computer. The term is based on the 1944 movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Charles Boyer, the husband, systematically tries to destroy the confidence of his lovely young wife by making her think that she is incompetent or imagining things, with the ultimate goal of committing her to an insane asylum. The chapters describe escalating forms of subtle torture, starting with “Causing Disorientation,” segueing to “Building Paranoia” and “Destroying Your Target’s Reputation.” The book seems to have been written for a disgruntled secretary, because most of the revenge strategies require access to your boss’s office. For example, if your boss happens to use a crutch or a cane, Mr. Santoro suggests that you sneak into the office and readjust their height. Or perhaps go to a thrift shop and buy a similar hat as your boss, but two sizes smaller, so he will think that his head is growing. The one that seemed most feasible was to send your boss Christmas cards from people he does not know.

As I glance through the book, I realize that I have been a victim of gaslighting in the workplace. I remember one time I received a letter which contained a ripped out page from an airline magazine advertising a seminar on improving your public speaking abilities. There was a handwritten Post-It note stuck to it, which said, – “Elizabeth, try this, it might help!” And then the signature was illegible. Now I don’t claim to be an accomplished public speaker, but this unexplained note was clearly not a confidence booster. My current work environment is all about gaslighting, based on serious communication issues (see above, “Causing Disorientation”), which I have come to believe are intentional (see above, “Building Paranoia”). I have been sent the wrong version of a document to work on, meetings shifted or cancelled without notification and an arcane internal process with a squadron of process police gleefully waiting to yell “Gotcha,” at the slightest provocation. Up to now, I feel that I have been like the innocent frog, oblivious to the fact that he is swimming in a tub of slowly heating water, and will be quietly cooked to death unless he hops out immediately. Almost two weeks ago, I called to resign this job, but nobody has returned my call yet.