Mom Gets Canned
Hilariously misguided paranoia may run in the family, but there are occasions when they’re still out to get you. For months, my mom’s been bitching because she felt like her superiors were trying to oust her from her job. It’s a part-time job, nothing special, and last summer they decided to hire a new girl when they needed extra help but my mom (foolishly, in retrospect) didn’t want to increase her hours. She was a perky, extroverted college student, in contrast with my mom’s frumpy, irritated housewife.
Then there’s the office manager, whose bizarre, attention-whorish behavior has forced me to assume he is Michael Scott, Steve Carell’s character from The Office. The immaturity, the thinly veiled (or not veiled) racism/homophobia/misogyny stemming more from ignorance than from real hate, the obsession with being the center of attention and the most well-liked boss on the planet, the aversion to doing any actual work…the only differences are that he’s a fundamentalist Christian and he’s married with three or four kids. Oh, and he used to own a business that tanked when he lost a discrimination lawsuit after firing a black employee for, apparently, not being white.
It probably goes without saying that he’s a liar. This was confirmed about a week after my mom started working there. He’s new, happens to have moved into the same town (not a huge coincidence considering the job is only two towns over) so initially he attempted to bond with my mother over living here; she hated him right off the bat, though, so it didn’t work terribly well. One story he told her shortly after she started was about going to this water-park in town. He said he went to take a shit in the public facilities and was apparently by himself. A trio of junior-high-aged kids ran into the bathroom, screaming and heckling him, beating on the stall doors, throwing paper towels around, whatever. Eventually, somehow, it reached a point where they crawled underneath the stall walls and into his stall, and basically stood there making awkward, Beavis & Butt-Head-esque jokes while watching him attempt to take a shit.
After this, he claims to have flipped out and (one of the many holes in this story — nobody seems to know how he magically escaped from a tiny restroom stall containing three other people) went to tell an employee, who filed a report. Then he supposedly had a conference call with the “top dogs” at the Park District on the morning he told my mother (and the rest of the office) this story; it was a long-winded, bizarre, pointless explanation of why he was half an hour late. I’m sure everyone in the office relished the mental image of him taking a shit.
Inconveniently for the boss, it happens that one of my best friends from high school works for the Park District, and specifically manages the water-park when it’s open during the summers. Her exact quote: “That didn’t happen.” She would have, at the very least, known about the report and the conference call; more likely, she would have been involved in the conference call. To sum up: that didn’t happen.
Which begs the question: why make up such an outlandish story to explain something like, let’s say, “Oh no, I overslept.” Why would someone go into detail about something as humiliating and privacy-invading (both in the context of what happens in the story and in retelling it) as three 12-year-olds terrorizing you while you take a shit? Especially when it didn’t even happen. See that whole attention-whore thing? I would say he’s just trying to pull one over on all the employees, but after a long time hearing these crazy stories, his problem is that he’s not a practical jokester — he just thinks he’s smarter than everybody and can make up insane, pointless stories to remain the unquestioned center of attention. Unlike The Office, nobody in reality has the balls to point out that he’s full of shit and his stories are littered with logic gaps and continuity problems.
And then there’s the new girl. The boss became enamored of her pretty quickly, flirting with her in that sleazy disgusting way fat, middle-aged, married men flirt with women half their age; and she flirted right on back because, hey, he’s the boss. If he can be flirted with, he can be manipulated, and she had very little problems manipulating him. Soon enough (whether it was her doing or not), it became pretty clear that the boss was trying to hustle my mom out the door.
Unfortunately, he had no grounds to actually fire her. Even worse, as the college girl settled into the routine, it became pretty clear that she was both lazy and incompetent, so if he were to say, “We don’t really need two people for this job, so we’re keeping the college girl,” my mom would at least have some grounds for an age-discrimination lawsuit; the dude’s a jackass, but after having his own business fail as a result of discrimination, one would assume he’s smart enough to not fire her over that. Furthermore, my mom had her direct supervisor (just below the office manager) and the owner of the company on her side, so his hands were tied and all he could really do was fight like hell to keep the college girl.
Then he tried not-entirely-subtle ways to get my mom to quit. Treating her like crap didn’t work, so he finally just decided to ignore her. It’s always funny when people who are really self-obsessed and in constant need of attention think that by ignoring people, it’ll hurt them; if the person they’re ignoring can’t stand them, as my mom can’t stand the office manager, it’s pretty much win-win. Their jobs barely coincide, so it’s not like him ignoring her would cause huge problems with her getting the job done.
So things went on like that for a few months, with my mom bitching about the unfair, preferential treatment of the college girl, being treated like shit by the college girl herself, and basic “I’m a disgruntled employee” complaints like not being told specific things pertinent to her job (by her direct supervisor), being aware people were talking shit about her behind her back, having her desk moved out from under her like Milton from Office Space — all of these things led her to elaborate conspiracies about how they were going to fire her and she was just waiting for the ax to fall.
My dad and I tried to reassure her, using things like logic (which should never be applied to workplace scenarios) to say that there’s no way they’d fire her, and then, on Wednesday…the ax fell. Twenty minutes before she was supposed to leave, the office manager and her direct supervisor took her into the conference room and explained that they were laying her off, they had already laid off a customer-service people and would be laying off more, and that the college girl would be laid off Thursday (today, because she has Wednesdays off). They also said maybe in a month, if business picks up again, they’ll hire her back.
What happened? Why all the layoffs, even beyond my mom and her problems with the boss? Funny story: the boss is 100% incompetent. Remember how I said he doesn’t want to get any actual work done? He literally doesn’t do any work, and as a result the customer-service team he supposedly manages were not providing adequate customer service, and they lost a huge chunk of business from a big company, then several smaller companies withdrew their business completely. This is entirely his fault, and my mom saw his getting fired coming and just hoped she could outlast him.
Here’s where the paranoia kicks back in: my mom doesn’t think they’re canning the college girl. She questions the customer-service girl they laid off on Tuesday, wondering why they didn’t lay my mom and the college girl off on the same day. Wednesday is the only day the college girl takes off fully, so my mom’s theory is that they’re laying her off on Wednesday, they’ll lay the college girl off on Thursday but lying. She’s been lied to enough that it’s at least somewhat reasonable to argue that they’re full of shit, although it seems odd that her direct supervisor would go along with it. Maybe her theory is “at least half-assed help is some help.” Technically the office manager is her superior, so if he says, “We’re keeping the college girl,” she can argue but can’t do much else.
Again, trying in vain to apply logic to a workplace scenario, I argued that maybe they’re just rolling the layoffs so that people start disappearing but nobody knows why until they’ve been cut loose. This doesn’t work practically — usually all the employees know the second someone else has been fired — but it doesn’t stop employers from attempting it.
It also seems reasonable for the “surprise” factor that they’d let the customer-service person with the least seniority go, because they are liars and they have a hard time holding on to customer-service employees. They could easily say, “I guess she’s just not coming back” and pretend to be all surprised and just hope none of the other employees have had time to befriend her. They told my mom, who isn’t in customer service but it’s all the same cubicle clusterfuck even if they’re jobs don’t overlap, that she was sick. They could easily tell the college girl my mom is sick, if she even asks, and then, “Okay, sorry we had to lie [ha!], but we have to lay you off.”
Unfortunately, thanks to my voyeuristic tendencies and the Internet revolution, I made the mistake of looking up the college girl on Facebook, because, as it happens, she goes to my school. I didn’t bother for awhile, when all I had to go on was a first name and the knowledge that she went to my school. When my mom finally found out her major (which seemed vitally important to her, I guess because she was trying to gauge whether or not the college girl would just up and quit in two years when she graduates), I figured the needle in the haystack had just gotten a lot bigger, and I managed to find her profile. I wanted to see if she had a blog or LiveJournal or something that explained her perspective — was she really trying to manipulate my mom out of a job to protect her own ass, or did she (as I suspected) just not give a shit? I didn’t find a blog or anything, just the job under her “occupation” heading, along with a pretty glum description of her duties.
Now I find myself checking her profile constantly to see if she’ll update it once she finds out she’s canned; so far, nothing. My mom, I shit you not, wants me to drive her (so they don’t recognize the car) to the office tomorrow to see if her car is still there. I kinda think that’s stupid because her supervisor told her specifically she could come on Friday to get her last check; that either means that they’re really laying her off, or they already know the college girl won’t be there. There’s a possibility that they slipped, but really the only way it’s a sure thing is if she is there. It’d be safer to wait until Monday or Tuesday and catch them off guard.
It’s pretty sad how much I enjoy pseudo-investigation events like this.
Posted by Stan on April 26, 2007 3:23 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Family: The Horror… | Digg It
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