This was a draft of a post that I meant to, well, post… way back in May 2009. As you can see, it was in the heat of my encounter with the “other kind.” This post never made it online, because I thought many, many times about the consequences if this was read by the wrong people or even the right people but in the wrong light, blah blah blah. Now, in retrospect, everything is just funny. She is long gone, happier now somewhere else, selling quilts and 1000-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Ironically, she never thought badly of us when she left (she didn’t exactly leave in the best way); she was too kind for that.
Sometimes common sense begs me not to fall into the trap of thinking I have the most dramatic work life. Surely there are others with far more interesting colleagues, supervisors, and policies. (As I write this, a Huffington Post article about never blogging about your boss takes a seat in the middle front row of my subconscious, ready to jump on the delete button should I take things beyond comfortable, and sane.) If I really wanted to, I could Google the funny and weird in workplaces, and will most surely get millions and millions back. But because nothing else exciting is happening in my life, and because all morning my nerves have been stretched beyond repair (okay, that’s an exagg, a couple hours at South Spa will probably put it back to its normal place), I feel very righteous about venting in space.
I have to admit, the recent stresses here where I work is everyone’s fault. To begin with, we wanted somebody who is a good fit (read: not too smart that we can’t tell her what to do, malleable to the established office protocols, including the unspoken ones, and respectful of cultural and religious practices because I am a Catholic Filipino, one is East Indian by birth, Tanzanian by background, and Shiite by faith, and the other is a Latin atheist/non-conformist-I’m kidding. I’m really not sure but she seems like it. Anyway, I am labeling them as such because I do not want their names here, and I am genuinely friends with them not because of these labels/cultural profiles but because of who they are as persons). Now going back to the subject: What we got instead (after the selection process, of course, when it’s too late, trust Murphy’s law) is a non-thinking woman with a high-pitched voice to match her cloying personality and an almost permanent blank look on her face. This all sounds mean, but please, I really just have to get it out of my system, please please just let me keep believing that indeed, my work life is very, very dramatic and that I am most unlucky to now be thinking for two because she insists on being a retard. Never mind that in the end, it will be Latin atheist/non-conformist who will have to deal with the bureaucracy of removing retard somewhere else where she cannot cause us headaches and heartaches anymore.
Try to fathom this:
R (that’s what I call this non-thinking woman): blah, blah, blah
Me: You should first try looking up that article online, before you start typing, that’s a lot of typing to do.
R: Oh. (Blank look). How do I do that?
Me: (Seriously, I think I paused a little too long before replying.) Oh. Have you tried using Google before?
R: Yeah.
I mean, even writing down this whole exchange makes me feel stupid (shoot, there it is, I finally said the word). And she says all this in her high-pitched, I’m-trying-to-be-really-soft-spoken-so-people-know-I’m-nice-and-sweet, breathy voice. Ohh-khaaaayyy. Hex-cehllhent! Rhighhhhht. SHOOT ME NOW PLEASE!
R: I want to request double-sided copies, I should check “double-side,” right?
One time we had a huge back-and-forth about sending email with an attachment. I wanted her to discover for herself how to attach her file to the e-mail, so I stood beside her and stubbornly refused to jab my finger at Mr. Clip-it, and instead said (in much the same way that I instruct Jaden on something new), “There’s something in your e-mail window that will allow you to attach the file to your message.” Grind, grind, grit, grit.
R: K, can you please show me how to work this…. this….. stapler?
Me: Which one? (I don’t know which would have been better, if she’d said the handheld one or the electric one. Turned out it was the electric guy, that deceptively harmless-looking, very nondescript gray, smooth plastic stapler that just WHAMS!)
Why don’t you take a scrap paper and put it in and see how it goes?
By then I’d abandoned all pretense of being nice, patient and tolerant of these kind of questions. This after so many other instances of brain fry. We think she has some medical problems, and someone claims to see her constantly chowing down pills, so she might be drugged half the time, hence the blank look and the non-thinking. “But the whole point is, she lied to us!” my colleague insists. She didn’t tell us she was all this. I wasn’t at the interview, so I don’t exactly know what she told everyone, but apparently she convinced the panel that she knew computers, had tons of experience in an office (but they didn’t have electric staplers and email programs), and can learn fast. My whole point is she was offered the chance to learn computers because it is so obvious that she has no clue whatsoever about files and folders and doesn’t even know what windows explorer is, but she adamantly refused, even cheekily asking, “Why? (Do I need computer training?)”
Anyhoo, it’s another day gone by, and she will be gone soon for a “vacation,” but only God knows where she’s gonna be after her layoff. Will she come back here, and will she come back still brain-fried and blank, or will she realize that she either has to step up or start hunting again?
There, it’s out of my system.
