Closure
Marnee shuffled into my cubicle and kept looking over her shoulder. "She's resigning."
"Who is?" I said. My fingers froze in mid-air while I was typing on my laptop. The campaign report, the most urgent thing I needed to get done, had to wait.
"Dense is."
"... Oh."
"You're shocked."
"I didn't think it would be today. I never thought the day would come."
Marnee, nonplussed, sat her self down on one of two sleek visitor chairs. She straightened the pile of unchecked color-proofs on my table. "You're forgetting. We've all been wanting her to find' a better home' outside. If she stayed any longer, the flagship category is going to self-destruct."
She's right. We had been whining about Dense's perpetual absences, the cause of which we surmised to be her flight-not-fight syndrome. She had always found a way to vanish when dark clouds from the markets appear, leaving her two direct reports desperately running for shelter.
"How did you know?" I asked.
"The Queen herself told me, right after meeting her for some admin stuff. You know, she looked pretty relieved when she told me. I guessed she was glad she didn't have to play Donald Trump with Dense's
pasaway attendance. Dense is talented when it comes to wheedling her way out of things. As for her resignation, I don't think anybody else knows. Although I think I saw Dense talking to her people about her decision to quit a while ago."
Suddenly my evil self was glad Dense was going, short of screaming "Yahoo!" but the angel on my shoulder slapped me so hard, saying I shouldn't rejoice at other people's misery, even if they were people I didn't like.
"Changes things, doesn't it?" said Marnee, who by now was fixed on the colorproof on the table, circling the unsightly flaws on the model's neck with my blue art pen.
"Come to think of it, with her gone most of the time," I pondered, "I don't think it does."
Marnee looked up from the proof and nodded.
Labels: employees, office politics
A Rotten Tomato in the Queen's Garden
"I got your present," I said to Marnee. She gave me strawberry and mint flavored condoms. "Red and green. Perfect for the holidays."
"Sorry I couldn't get you the ribbed ones. Store ran out. I know how much you love them."
"Loka loka." And threw her a crumpled ball of paper. Monito monita ended days ago, but Marnee was still in the mood for giving away naughty presents. Yesterday she sent old Jonders from accounting a big can of whipped cream. Marnee had meant it to mean something else -- but Jonders? Jonders just thought that Nestle All Purpose was still the best for fruit salad.
"So, you think Dense is going to get anything?" Marnee picked up the big boxed gift on my table. It was from one of my planners. I kinda guessed it was a memo pad.
"I don't know," I said. Dense was almost always in our conversations lately. The reason we called her Dense was because everybody in the team, except Sts. Agnes and Jane from CategMan, hated her to pieces. She acts like she doesn't know. We all wanted her to "move on" to another line of work, like organic farming.
Marnee rolled her eyes up. "I can't understand why the Queen hasn't
let her go like she did to Charms. Charms was ineffecient, but not thick. At least she knew she wasn't wanted. She resigned the moment she felt it. Poor girl." We called our big boss the Queen, and that's because she went about our day to day speaking with a genuine English accent. We loved her for it. We pretended we were in some bizarre sitcom spinoff.
"The Queen must be biding her time. You can't fire someone like Dense just like that. You have to have grounds for it."
"But duh? She's got grounds since two years ago. Let's list them, shall we? Half a year's worth of absence without leave, lying about her leave, shirking reports, shirking strategy creation, shirking execution, lying about her neck condition, lying about her hepatitis, going on trips while her staff groped about operational stuff, and yes, lying lying lying. The biggest category in the company is going to suffer with her leading it. She has no leadership to speak of. Bah, Aling Josie could do a better job e!"
"You've really got it going, Marnee. Keep it cool," I said. Aling Josie was the cleaning lady.
"Hey. You were angrier over Dense than I'll ever be. "
"That's true." Months ago, I took Dense's favorite fountain pen and threw it out the window after she failed, yet again, on another deliverable. I had hoped it landed on her brand new car. But I had forgiven her since then. Or, forgiven may not be the right word. Maybe
forgotten is more apt? I had started to
forget she existed.
"How could she sleep at night, that witch!" Marnee was probably thinking about
that time where Dense fooled her into doing one of
her reports for Global by namedropping The Queen. And it wasn't an easy report. Marnee chaffed her fingers doing the numbers.
"Are you giving her anything for Christmas?" I asked.
"If I could give her a heart, I would. She hasn't had one, I think."
Pink-tied Glen walked up to us sucking on a long green popsicle. "Thanks for the pop, Marnee," he said, and winked. "What are you girls talking about? Dense again?"
"Yeah," I said. "I think we'd better stop talking about her. Ever. It's evil, you know. It's one of the seven capital sins."
"Well, you may forgive just this one interesting piece of info," Glen licked the melting popsicle from stem to tip. "I have heard from the royal grapevine that Dense may be off by the New Year."
"No," Marnee said, disbelieving.
"Yep," Glen said. "I think Her Royal Highness has finally put together the case against her."
"Do you feel sorry?" Marnee asked me. "What would you feel if you saw her tight little ass kicked out of the office forever?"
"I never thought that it would occur," I said. "But how could you feel sorry for
a pebble in a shoe?"
"Well done, Stepmother," Glen said, getting the analogy, and off he disappeared into the blue cubicles, licking the rest of the popsicle.
"The New Year is going to be very exciting," Marnee said.
You betcha.
Labels: employees, office politics
Terminos*
*With apologies to Dean.And so it happened that a neatly printed piece of paper was handed to B that Friday morning, B given a few minutes to read it, then having understood what it meant, got up from his workstation, and was escorted out of the building.
The Office fired him because he tampered with his timesheet (log ins, log outs), declaring OT pay as much as 20 thousand pesos a month (even greater than his salary). Of course I asked AD , who was his group manager, "But didn't his manager approve of those OT hours before they got to the payroll?" Answered me back that, yeah, he knew. I was sure that W, who was B's direct superior, was going to get a whippin' from AD in Filipino, English, and the four Chinese dialects that AD was fluent in, later in the afternoon for having been so negligent.
And then at the end of that Friday afternoon, Ant rapped on my invisible door (we worked in cubes of blue felt and steel) to say good bye. He was the demand planner for the other market in our region; an expat, and he was imported all the way from KL to MLA to work six months ago. He too, was terminated, but this time for his incompetence, and worse, his propensity to cover up his foibles badly (he got caught with every cover-up, because he was too dumb to explain his stupidity). His manager was a close friend of mine, and she was stressed with Ant, whom she just inherited from the last manager who got him. They gave him a grace period of three weeks to shape up, or else he gets the boot. He got the boot, and Friday became his last day. We weren't really close, but what the heck, I hugged the poor puppy back (you know, with the kind of hug that you pat the person's back but you're still two feet away from him as if there's a stick blocking his chest from getting to yours... it's the don't-get-so-close-to-me hug). Then I said "All the best," and I wanted to mean it, because a small evil voice in my head was saying "Good riddance."
And then I heard that some ex-officemates of mine who had claimed that life after the Office working for some other company was a whole LOT better than what they left, were rumored to be calling it quits with their present employers. Unfortunately this dispels my illusions of greener pastures with other offices... C'est la vie.
Labels: employees
