The Wicked Witch of South Jersey

The Devil Wears Prada 2 drops Friday. Before you watch Miranda Priestly terrorize a new generation of assistants, let me tell you about mine.

Year 2000. The dot-com bubble had just exploded in my face. My web developer job at a Philly bank vaporized overnight. I was twenty-something, broke, and horizontal on a Delco couch when the phone rang at 8am on a Monday. A woman wanted me in King of Prussia. In an hour.

I had no business saying yes. I wasn’t showered. I wasn’t dressed. I had no idea who I was meeting. I said yes anyway, threw on a suit, and white-knuckled the Blue Route through morning traffic like Andy Sachs sprinting through Manhattan with the Book. I hit the door at the buzzer.

The receptionist looked impressed. “Miss Linda is excited to meet you.”

That should have been my “a million girls would kill for this job” moment. It wasn’t. It was the beginning of the longest day of my professional life.

I waited. One hour. Two. Three. The office temperature swung from sauna to meat locker and back. Candidates who arrived after me got called in first. Every time I asked the receptionist for an update, I got the same serene smile: “Trust me, it’s better if you wait.” I was furious. Who does this to people?

By 3pm something shifted. I’d noticed there was only one way in and one way out of this office. Fine. I wasn’t leaving until I met the woman behind the curtain. If she wanted to keep me there until midnight, she’d find me in the lobby at midnight.

5pm. The receptionist packed up. “You staying?” I nodded. 5:30pm. The door opened. “You still there, Dawn? Come in.”

She didn’t apologize. She didn’t explain. She asked my salary requirement.

The job was admin assistant. Market rate was $30k. I’d been planning to ask for exactly that. Instead, something in me, sharpened by ten hours of sitting in that lobby, said $40k. A premium for the day. The Miranda-tax.

She tilted her head. “Why would you say that?”

I defended the number. Stammered through some justification about my background, my skills, the value I’d bring. She let me finish. Then she asked again. “Why the hell would you throw that number out?”

I started over. Worse this time.

Then she said: “You’re hired. But I want you to know I was prepared to hire you at any number you gave me. You waited all day to get here. Why did you sell yourself short?”

That was hour one with Miss Linda.

What I didn’t know yet: Miss Linda was a seven-figure sales agent who also mentored other agents. A handful reached her level. Most washed out. People in the industry called her the Wicked Witch of South Jersey. She was a force. Loud, yes. She yelled. But what made her dangerous wasn’t volume. It was that she always knew exactly what to say and exactly when to say it to get what she wanted. She could charm the pants off you in one breath and dismantle you in the next. She tested everyone, constantly, and the test was usually invisible until after you’d failed it.

I watched her make grown men cry. More than once. Sales guys with decades of experience, sitting across from her, undone in fifteen minutes. She didn’t need to raise her voice for that part. She just knew where to press.

She was a millionaire-maker, and I had a front-row seat.

I lasted three years. Everyone around her told me that alone was a feat. It ended badly, the way these things do, in New Jersey, where she lived and where the wheels finally came off.

But here’s the part the movie gets right and the part it gets wrong.

What it gets right: bosses like that change you. There’s a version of me that never got the call that morning, never sat in that lobby, never had a woman with that much wattage tell me I was underselling myself. That version of me is not running a company today.

What it gets wrong: it wasn’t all cruelty. She cooked lunches at her house and waved me in. A few times she made me stay for dinner. I saw her with her family. There was a heart under all of it. Most people who worked for her never got close enough to see it, because they didn’t last long enough.

She knew exactly how to push me. My own style as a CEO is nothing like hers, much softer, much less performative, but the instinct she drilled into me is the one I use almost every day: find the place where someone is underselling themselves, and refuse to let them get away with it.

Twenty-five years later, I still hear her voice when I’m about to ask for less than I’m worth.

Why did you sell yourself short?

I never have again.