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Long, long ago, in a galaxy 2,000 miles away, I was once a nice Midwest girl. I said, “please” and “thank you,” and I said, “pop” instead of “soda.” Soon, the two merged and I began to say, “Soda (sans please)” no longer recognizing myself. Isn’t it funny how Hollywood taints us? I mean, I think I am still the nice girl I once was. You can take the nice girl out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the nice girl, right? That is, until you move to L.A…
I don’t know what it is, but Hollywood just does something to you. It is mean; you’re mean back. It talks to you in a degrading way; you talk back. It chews you up; and you let yourself be chewed… again, and again, and again… or not. As someone who has worked as a Writers’ Assistant (WA) on TV shows out here for nearly a decade now (I know, I know, I will take my own advice soon and “retire the keyboard,” as I spoke about a few blogs ago), I have worked with bosses of all genres: the good, the bad, and the ugly (and, sometimes, all three at once; yes, those ugly bipolar bosses are a real treat). My only regret in dealing with the mean bosses is not having been mean enough back. Meaning (no pun intended), I sat back and kept typing without even flinching at their sharp comments or unnecessary, irrelevant screaming (sometimes followed up by throwing an object across the room as I ducked…). After all, I thought I was doing what people out here say to do all the time: “Have a thick skin” (my second-favorite phrase to its second cousin “Don’t take it personally.”). (By the way, I do hope you note my sarcasm here.) Since when should any of us have to have a “thick skin”? All that really means is, “Let him/her treat you badly and yell at you for no reason. And don’t react. If you react, you’re a wimp. And we don’t want to have a wimp for a WA. You should feel lucky to work on this show; if you can’t hack it here, you can’t hack it anywhere. You might as well just get out of the business now.” (You may think I am paraphrasing, but a boss once said this to me, practically verbatim.) I really wish more WAs out here did not continue to take the abuse. The abuse that is NOT present on every show, by the way. I have had – and know people who have had – the best non-yelling, non-mean bosses ever, where they never had to alter their Midwest or East Coast skin into becoming more “thick.” (Personally, I like my skin the thickness – or thinness – that it is, thank you very much.) Point being, stick up for yourself. If you’re getting tired of just sitting back and typing, sans reacting to bad behavior, making your skin thicker and thicker by the day, then don’t do it. What, do you think that if you don’t toughen up, you’ll lose your job… or, worse yet, never find another one? And, even if you do lose that job, who cares? There WILL be a better one out there for you, trust me. At one WA job where the writers favored yelling over talking in nice, calm, Midwest tones, I finally started yelling back… and you know what? They respected me more for it. I’m not saying I liked doing it, but it sure as hell felt a lot better than just sitting there passively, taking all their shit. Pretty soon, their shit stopped; they wanted the old me back. But to get the old me back, they had to invent new “me”s for themselves. Does that make sense? (I hope so.) If you do stay in an environment where they relish thick skin (and you do nothing about it), the worst part is, once you successfully make your skin thicker on “x” show, a show down the line may warn you that you need “thick skin” to work there. You’ll say no problem, you’re used to it (or they’ll know it just by looking at your resume, seeing that you “survived” working with “x” boss, so surely you’ll survive working for them). And, guess what? You’ll have to make it even thicker than the last time. You then start to play this sick game with yourself; if you survived at “x” show, you can surely survive at “y” show, right?... WHO CARES?! Is winning “The Most Thick-Skinned WA Award” really going to make you feel better about yourself (not worse)?! It’s an endless, ugly cycle… that really is unnecessary. Remember, for every bad, sucky boss out here, there is a good, unsucky one. And, the more we all let these bad bosses get away with bad behavior, the more they will do it. Sure, it may take some show-hopping to find that good boss, but they are out there, I swear. (It’s sort of like finding a boyfriend or girlfriend; the worthwhile ones do exist, they may just take longer to find.) The moral of the story is, you can still come out ahead without changing the thickness of your skin. Sure, you may say “soda” now, not “pop,” which is fine, as long as you allow that nice Midwest girl to stick up for herself and keep the skin she’s already in.
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