Dean's long-time girlfriend, Kelly, passed the bar about a month ago. She beat the street looking for a gig compatible with her far-left political principles. She kicked around the idea of public defense, but she realized the pressures would be far too intense. I suspect, she also understood that her vast and profound sympathy for the underclass is predicated on a healthy set of abstractions. Actual contact risked the collapse of a cherished world-view. Semi-delusional abstraction makes the world sensible in the same way that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

    She ended up at a non-profit that focuses on the legal issues surrounding mentally handicapped children. Mostly handicapped access issues, insurance stuff. For the first week of the gig, she was put through something like a sensitivity training boot camp. Five days a week, eight hours a day, learning how to not offend her future clients. Or, more truthfully, not offending clients' friends and family. Her clients, she was informed, would probably not notice any term she used for their various impairments. Their relatives, friends, and spouses, on the other, would watch her like hawks, waiting for her to reveal the innate insensitivity and dehumanizing pity that they know exists in the heart of all humans except, of course, themselves. To prevent any blunders, she spent an entire week studying a bewildering taxonomic system designed to simultaneously identify and disguise the nature of her future clients' mental handicaps. In general, each impairment was indicated by a euphemism for the condition and by a "level" indicator: "mild intellectual adevelopement." That's all she did for the first week. By the end of week, she had an Anatomy of Melancholy-grade taxonomy of ways in which the human mind can misfire.

    So linguistically armed, she was finally able to start work in earnest. The second day in the office, she submitted a draft of a brief to one of the lawyers she works for. The lawyer reviewed the draft and then called her back in to his office. "What's this?" he asked, referring to one of the many terms she'd learned in her weeklong legal-medical misdirection course.
    "It's what the client has."
    "Around here, we use the word retarded."

    Turns out that the lawyers need to use the terminology in the legal code, which doesn't evolve as quickly as the therapeutic identity-jargon of the sensitivity-industrial complex. So, now, she's got to go through her work and replace all the cutting edge euphemisms with what amounts to archaic, turn of the century pseudo-science terms, the worst of which we now use mainly as insults.

Leadership

    Two weeks ago, I got a call from one of our sales folks out in the field. Laura.
    "Hey, it's Laura Halston."
    "Hello. How you doing?"
    "I'm fine. I'm fine. So . . . "
    "Yes?"
    "Um. This is an awkward call. Isn't it?"
    "Ah. Um. Well, it is now. What's going on?"
    "Has Toto spoken to you?"
    "About what?"
    "Nothing."
    "I don't. Maybe. Which nothing in particular?"
    "The thing is that we're, me and you, going to be working together."
    "You're moving over to research?"
    "Yeah."
    "Are you moving to New York?"
    "No. I'm staying in Texas."
    "Oh."
    "Don't tell anybody I told you."
    "About you not coming to New York?"
    "About nothing."
    "What are we talking about?"
    "I thought someone would have talked to you."
    "You could tell me."
    "I don't think I should. I got to go. Don't tell Toto I called."

    For a little background, my office is plagued with these bad pennies that people pass around instead of tossing out altogether. Usually they're the cronies of this or that high muckety-muck. This means that, instead of getting fired whenever they fuck up or laid off whenever a general restructuring reveals their current position is the corporate equivalent of parasitism, they are constantly moved from position to position, garnering raises and promotions with each jump, as they try desperately to stay one step ahead of good governance efforts. Laura's one of these. For the past year or two, she's been working out off the sales group, though the word in cubeland was that she'd botched several pitches and queered more than her fare share of critical client relationships. King David, head of sales, being unable to fire her due to the mark of protection upon her, basically left her to drift. He just stopped calling and emailing her. She was no longer invited to meetings, no longer included in general information memos, no longer told when sales meetings were. It was, for a field operative like Laura, like getting marooned. Except, unlike a marooned sailor, it took Laura more than a month to figure out she was abandoned to her fate.

    Now the trick to getting ahead as one of these bad pennies is no great secret: simply lose any shred of pride or dignity you might have been holding on to. As a general thing, cubeland types don't keep get stores of pride or dignity around, holding it in reserve for a rainy day. But, a bad penny can't afford even the smallest bit of it. Bad pennies are going to work every day of their lives in an office where anybody who really knows them is going to think that they are incompetent jackasses. Departments will fight over who is required to take to them on. Only their cousin, uncle, college roomie, or whoever it is that keeps their sorry ass employed, will have any kind words for them. Outside of that single office, everywhere they go, they'll be meet with collective and universal eye rolling. Bad pennies never seem to notice this. Some theorize that they are simply too stupid to understand their position in the company food chain. Such theorists speculate that, if they saw clearly for a single moment, they'd realize how soundly hated they are, how universally despised, and leave. I think this doesn't give the bad pennies enough credit. Personally, I believe that the bad pennies are the final evolutionary stop of the common office worker. Where the normal cube dweller is increasingly asked to apply their talents to useless and insane tasks, and thereby squandering whatever good may have come out of the use of said talents, the bad penny simply never develops any talent. The normal cube dweller gets ulcers from having to repeatedly swallow their pride. They get in a panic trying to apply logic and quality control standards to a situation that seems, at base, to mock all notions of reason or quality. The bad penny sleeps soundly, convinced of their purpose, value, and job security. The bad penny has divorced the concept of work from its unnecessary ideological incrustations – craftsmanship, logic processes, accomplishment, competitiveness – and as such, embraced the modern office on its own terms. In that sense, they're like serial killers turned loose in a war zone: sure they're crazy as a shithouse rat, but shithouse crazy is exactly what the situation calls for.

    Back to the story. So the call was dis-informative at best. Instead of trying to puzzle it through, I put it down to Laura's long standing tradition of gross incompetence and assumed that it would come up again if it was, in fact, important.

    Last week, Monday, I got an email from Laura. It was a standard email request – I regularly run queries on the data in the system, giving sales folks like Laura a snapshot of what is available to potential clients. The only thing unusual about the email is the last line: "Isn't it great to have a boss who is never around and think's all your work is great?"
    It just so happened that the two folks you could, with any reasonable accuracy, call my boss – Dan by virtue of the org chart, Toto by virtue of the fact that she's the head most honcho on deck and regularly ignores the org chart – were out of the office. Both of them travel a lot. Was this a slight joke referencing my peripatetic supervisors? Or did she think she was my boss?
    I emailed Laura without making reference to the boss thing and told her she'd get her report before the end of the day.

    I then emailed Toto, who would have had to approve any actions that made this Texas sales rep my new boss. I expressed my concern that a sales drone in Texas was now apparently calling herself my new boss and I requested clarification.

    At the end of the day, without a peep out of Toto, I emailed Laura her report. She responded via email, thanking me for the report and informing me that she'd be in New York for a few days next week. Perhaps then we could get together, she suggested, and finalize my transfer under her.

    I shot off another email to Toto, asking, in the nicest terms possible, if this crazed and incompetent ass was, in fact, my new boss.

    No response.

    On Tuesday, Dan was back in the office. He asked me to come see him in one of the conference rooms.
    "Toto sent me like four thousand panicked emails about you. Were you threatening to shot up the office or something?"
    "I don't think so. Though I reserve the right should it become necessary."
    "She wants me to talk to you about whatever is going on."
    "Are you still my boss?"
    "What?"
    "Laura seems to think she's my new boss."
    "I don't think so. I think I would know if I wasn't your boss anymore."
    "Look into it would you."

    Shortly after lunch, I got an email: "Looks like Laura is your new boss."
    Reply: "How will that work?"
    "I don't think it will."

    Again, I asked Toto, who was still out of the office and who must have cooked this scheme up, for clarification.
    I heard nothing by the end of the day.

    On Wednesday, deciding that I've really had enough of this place and bullshit like this new boss thing, I submitted my resume to my new boss. As she's based in Texas, I sent her an email with a scanned copy of my resignation letter attached.

    On Thursday, Toto was back in the office, but she didn't mention my resignation or my new boss.

    On Friday, finally, she decided we should talk. Money line: "We cannot rearrange the job responsibilities or the org chart. And we can't offer you any more money. Within that context, what can we do to keep you here?"
    I told her that there was nothing she could do.
    She said she wouldn't accept my resignation.
    I told her that I was pretty sure she had to.
    She said I should think on it for a week. Then she'd ask me again.
    I had set a fairly long timeline for my resignation. I didn't want Dan and his crew, which will be hardest hit by my departure, to get screwed. I informed her that, as far as I was concerned, the clock to find a replacement was ticking.