First of all, this is the definition of delicious: after dinner outside on the porch with Jon (for the first time this year, just because we forget that we have a porch) I took four steps over to the hammock and collapsed into an evening nap. After some undetermined amount of time (when he washed all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen), Jon woke me up to say he was going dancing with Anna. And then I had the energy to roll out of the hammock and take a shower and sit down to write. The true definition of delicious is having the time and energy to write. If I had the bandwidth of my kids, I could also listen to one of my favorite radio shows right now, The Moth, but I can't do those two things at once.
What is most on my mind right now is that a worker quit today. He quit because I yelled at him. I yelled at him because I was impatient with his pace, which was snail-like. But what I failed to understand, and now I see a little bit more clearly, was that he was already struggling with being employed here. He had arrived on the scene last year, dropping by a market and introducing himself, and he came to volunteer about once a week. His connection to farming was that he had worked on a small farm for quite some time, a farm that used no tractors, only human power. So it was a very intensive operation, with permaculture, and a completely different mission from ours, evidently. He said he wanted to work on a farm that used tractors to learn more about a different scale.
I am patient with volunteers, of course, and I actually had little to do with him last year. It didn't matter if he wasn't getting much done. But this year he asked if he could be a paid worker. Against my better judgment, I said yes. I asked Carrie if that was okay, and she agreed. Most of the time I am not on the home farm anyway, so it didn't make a difference to me.
One day a week, I am home. So by chance I was working with this young man and one other young man I know pretty well and with whom I have a good relationship. We were going to load bales out of a barn onto a trailer and take them to the field. It was a fifteen minute job, tops. Within seconds, I was impatient. I was standing on the trailer, poised to stack the bales, waiting for them to be thrown to me. I waited. I waited. I asked if something was wrong. I tried to peer into the dark barn. One bale arrived. I waited some more. And so it went. I asked again what was going on. No answers.
It went downhill from there. After about five minutes of this pace, I told them we would switch places. I would go into the barn and throw the bales and they could stack the wagon (which is the skilled job). I threw bales to them, they couldn't keep up. I said this was unacceptable, that a 55 year old woman was doing all the work while they were standing around.
It continued to go downhill as each task we attempted together was an opportunity for me to see how inept this young man was. He just had no idea what we were doing, and he was flustered and upset that I was upset. Eventually I apologized for losing my patience, and I tried to be more of a teacher and less of a tyrant. We were all hot and sweaty, but only two out of three of us understood the job we were trying to do. He protested that he knew how to mulch, he had thrown bales hundreds of times, he knew what he was doing. This did not help his case a bit, in my eyes.
I left them in the field to mulch and went back to work with the CSA group. I told Carrie one or two of her workers might quit. She said okay.
Today he wrote Carrie a long note saying that he was not coming back to work because I yelled at him. He thanked her for her excellent managerial skills and said that working on this farm made him feel like he was compromising his values (essentially) because we make choices that have to do with money, and not sustainability. Good thing he wrote to Carrie and not to me because it would take me ten minutes to write a strong rebuttal.
But of course I am feeling bad that I lost my patience and scolded him. He is clearly a sensitive soul who was unprepared for any criticism at all, and had no idea that his pace was substandard. He said as much in his note -- he said Hana thinks I am slow at everything but I keep up with the others. He has no idea whether he keeps up with the others because he has never worked with anyone who has a pace to match. Carrie keeps him on the no-need-for-speed team.
The next day I went out to Loudoun and watched a crew of six young women, most of them new to this farm, unload a wagon of hay expertly, mulch it slowly but with determination, and finish ready to go directly to the next task. I appreciated them so much. I appreciated their competence, their ability to learn a new skill quickly, their joy. No one really likes moving bales or mulching, especially when it is so hot (which is always is), but these women uttered not one word of complaint in my presence. I told them that I had lost my patience the day before, and they were shocked.
So, I am not proud of my behavior and we lost a worker who didn't really love it here, and we move on. I won't be able to have a follow-up conversation because he told Carrie he is never ever coming back, and we should give his last paycheck to a coworker to deliver to him.
I misunderstood his attitude as talking back to me. He was talking back, but in self-defense, trying to demonstrate that he had a position to defend. His position was that we are too focused on productivity/money and we make choices that are counter to his sensibilities. I missed that completely. I just saw incompetence and an inability to try to do the work as requested.
What I regret is that he thinks that I am abusive boss, and he said so in his note. I don't agree with his assessment, of course, but I regret that he feels that way. Apparently he has experienced this before (no surprise, if he doesn't want to work the way people want him to work) and his response has been to avoid all workplaces where the bosses are abusive. Can't argue with that, I guess.
This brings me to another line of thinking, which is not productive since I won't be able to tell him myself. If you feel that your boss is abusive when s/he expresses her discontent with the quality of your work, then you are unprepared for any job that requires you to follow directions and learn skills as they are expected to be learned. So you had better find a way to be self-employed because I cannot imagine a job situation that was more lenient than this one, until the day you worked with me.
Yep, I am still mad. But mostly because he got the last word. I will have to live with that, and live with the fact that I lost my patience. I did not say anything cruel or untrue, I did not generalize, I just said he wasn't working fast enough and I did not have time to wait. But I was really energetic about it since I was still throwing bales, still hauling them into the field while I was expressing my discontent.
Sigh.
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