She Was Excited to Get Promoted. Then a Real Life Miranda Priestly Made Her Flee to Belgium
Instead of helping her shatter glass ceilings, this boss tore her apart.
First jobs are often not people’s dream jobs. But Chrissy Barron (@chrissyvbarron) stayed long enough to get promoted at the medical supply company where she worked. The experience was rough, especially with a boss who ran the place like Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada.
“I was never prepared for how much middle-aged women hated me in corporate America,” Barron told TikTok. She said that she was just 21 and fresh out of college when she started working full-time for a medical supply company. Before working there, she had only worked as a customer service representative and a server at Chili’s. Although customer service is known to be grueling work, described by this lawyer as resembling Game of Thrones, Barron didn’t have any notable problems with her previous jobs.
“I’m all chipper, excited. I got moved from a junior position to a middle position,” she said. She excelled at her medical supply company job and had been promoted. At this point, she said that the professionals she was working with were 30-40 years older than her.
Her boss accused her of slacking off
“My boss hated me. She would come in, and she would only single me out and pick on me,” Barron alleged. In The Devil Wears Prada, Priestly was known for having a revolving door of secretaries. She notoriously made unreasonable requests from her employees and expected them to surpass the impossible. To top it all off, Priestly often criticized her secretary’s appearance.
“Back in the day, I didn’t really know what work discrimination was,” Barron stated. As a young employee, she thought that her boss was just “being hard” on her. Although Barron’s boss was only in upper management, not the actual CEO, the boss’s intimidating disposition mirrored that of the fictional character.
Barron went to the office at six in the morning. When her boss arrived at around seven or eight, Barron alleged that her boss would interrogate her about what she had done before she got there. Her boss also asked if she was just “sticking around,” presuming that she was just at the desk, doing nothing as she stared at the screen.
“I was also accused of drinking too much water, peeing too much,” Barron said. Although she found the criticism “fair,” she thought of herself as naive in hindsight. Barron said that her boss had been working in the company for 30-40 years, making her one of the most seasoned employees. Eventually, Barron couldn’t withstand her boss anymore and asked if she could switch to another boss’s team.
Barron was told no, and her complaint was put forward to HR. Later on, HR called her in, asking her why she wanted to switch teams. Barron said she told them how her boss picks on her and singles her out. But she didn’t want to make a big deal of her boss’s actions.
Saying goodbye to corporate America
“I’m going to quit. Don’t fire her, don’t worry about it,” Barron told HR. But HR ended up firing the boss. Just when she thought it was all over, Barron alleged that the people in the company ended up blaming her for getting the boss terminated.
“I quit anyways. Then I got a job in Belgium, and I moved to Belgium,” Barron said. It seems that there’s no sequel for the Miranda Priestly of her life. Nevertheless, Barron isn’t the only woman who shared her troubled experience as a young professional in corporate America. Another woman from Los Angeles shared that her female boss had discriminated against her by checking her dating profile out in front of other employees.
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