Member-only story
My Boss the Liar
One principal’s obvious fib made her teachers hate her
I’ll never forget the day my boss spied on me as I left my international kindergarten classroom in Pudong, a suburb of Shanghai.
I didn’t see her at first, but a colleague stopped me as I was about to walk out.
It was 4:30, the end of a long day, and we were all anxious to catch the next train to the other side of the river. Pudong was infamous for its middle-of-nowhere vibe and the majority of the foreign staff lived in the actual city, a ten-minute train ride away. The commute was an easy one, but it meant we didn’t dither at work. Once we all sat on our train benches facing one another we could decompress after a long day of crying kids, midday meetings, and weird interactions with our new boss, Lee.
That day, Lee snuck behind me as I left at my usual time but Greg, a fellow kindergarten teacher, stopped me before I could clock out.
“Did you see that?” He gestured to our boss behind us, who spun away at an unnatural speed, her sensible heels clicking down the hall. “She was writing Early Leavers and our names on a piece of paper. She’s spying on us!”
His words stopped me in my tracks. Early? Who was leaving early? Our contracts clearly stated we could go at 4:30. All of us left at the same time…
