Assistants are far from being the only mistreated ones in the office. This horror story comes via The Angry Office Manager who is, well, an office manager.
It was Dana who interviewed for my Office Manager position at GoGorilla Media. It was Dana who officially hired me over the phone; and on my first day, it was Dana who enthusiastically greeted me as I got off the elevator. She asked me if she could call me Mandy. I only go by Mandy with my close friends and my family, because I’m just not a Mandy. But when she called to offer me the job, I had just set up an Ebay account to sell my only pair of Prada shoes, so in my mind, she saved me and could call me whatever she wanted.
Dana had set up my desk with colorful pens and markers, the kind you ogle at art stores, but never actually buy, because although you covet them, it just seems too silly to spend money on such things. She had written me a welcome note on yellow construction paper and covered it in stars and hearts and smiley faces and everything else that a thirteen year old might draw on the cover of her notebook. It was Dana that I fired, inadvertently, a mere three months later.
It was one of those warm days at the end of February when everyone actually leaves the office for lunch…that first flirtation of the year with spring weather. I sat at the same desk that Dana had set up just a few months before, when I was approached by our accountant, Linura. In her thick Russian accent, she told me to ask Dana about whether or not she’d want COBRA since it was her last day. I was confused. Not only did I not know that it was Dana’s last day, but I had no clue what this COBRA business was. Dana was nowhere to be found – she was actually out in Washington Square Park for lunch enjoying the weather – so I took my extra time to Google what COBRA was: Consolidate Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act.
When she got back from lunch, I gave her a few minutes to settle. I walked over to her and stood at her desk. I asked her how the weather was outside, if the NYU female student population were already sporting tank tops and barely-there mini-skirts, as they do from April to October. Then I asked her what Linura had told me to ask her:
“Dana, are you going to be wanting COBRA?”
“What?” she asked. I had already forgotten for what the acronym had stood.
“You know, that thing for insurance after you leave your job.” I went on to explain how much it would cost, “It will be the same monthly amount that it is now, but obviously the company won’t be paying their percentage, so you’ll have to pay the full amount…” Dana just looked at me with her mouth agape. “You know,” I continued, “because today is your last day…”
“Today is not my last day!” she snapped. I fumbled over my words. Had Linura gotten the wrong person? Linura was fairly dumb and was always saying, or writing, the wrong things. Once in an email she wrote “sorry for the incontinence” when, we think, what she wanted to say was “sorry for the inconvenience” when she had failed to pay us on time.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I must have misunderstood Linura, or she said the wrong name.” Dana got up and pushed me out of the way as she ran to our boss’ office. She slammed the door behind her, and when she emerged ten-minutes later, her face was puffy and blotchy from crying. She packed up her belongings and was out of the office less than a half hour after I had fired her.
I would later learn that that’s how that company fired people: they either set someone else up to drop the bomb, or they’d just shut off your email account. Whenever email stopped working, people would start freaking out and crying. They were the type of company that could hire you, openly humiliate you when they thought you screwed up, but when it came down to the real dirty work, they hid behind their closed doors and let some innocent newbie do it for them.
Needless to say, the next time someone needed to be fired, there was someone even newer than me to do it for them. As for Dana, she found something better, as we all do when we get booted from jobs we never really liked in the first place. She and I still laugh about the day I fired her at our bi-weekly Happy Hour rendez-vous.
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