Nemeses

I think for the sake of balance in the universe, we are all assigned a few nemeses over the course of our lives. At Café Gypsy, it was this guy we called RB, whom I delivered some salad dressing and the middle finger one night after he gave the delivery guy a hard time and refused to pay for his salad. Somehow, I didn’t get fired for that.

Now, though, I have a nemesis in a work environment where I can’t exactly go around flipping people the bird. Enter Lenny Bambino.

Lenny’s transgressions against me aren’t ever really anything concrete—just covert attempts at making me feel like a chump for, ostensibly, his own entertainment. And today, he recruited another member to his club, this harpy named Hellissa.

I hear Lenny’s shrunken-testicle voice call me into the conference room. “Hey Kat, I got a question to ask you.”

Lenny always seems to have questions to ask me. Trick questions. Last time it was something about a new travel arrangement policy that annoyed him; he was pumping me, the new travel arranger, for information, trying to humiliate me because he thought I had been the one who had implemented it. Unfortunately for him, I had nothing to tell. I was just a middle man.

Today though, he knew I had a hand in something that annoyed him: the new office paint job.

Hellissa and Lenny hate the new paint. “How much did we pay for this?” “Ugh, we paid $6K for these ugly doors?” “What were the painters thinking?”

Unfortunately for me, I am stupefied by the barrage of questions. I can’t help but give my nemesis and his little assistant a momentary benefit of the doubt, thinking to myself that they can’t possibly know that I was in charge of the design—which, by the way, was a collaborative effort between me, Khrushchev the designer, and Neo the President of the company. For the sake of not embarrassing Lenny and Hellissa, I side-step the questions that would have incriminated any of us as the designers.

But it dawns on me that they must know what they are doing, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been called in here for my weekly trick question session; if they didn't know I was in charge, why the hell would they ask me about it? In any case, they've seen me walk around with contractors for weeks. I leave the conference room with a dumbfounded shrug and polite grin while Lenny and Hellissa thank me for my time and snicker to themselves.

Moments like these are like sunburns. You know that something bad is happening to you, baking under the ridicule, but the rage doesn’t develop until some time has passed.

It takes me a whole ten minutes to get fucking pissed. I call my friend Fanelli, who’s worked in her share of shitty corporate environments, and she suggests I combat these incidents with passive-aggression, because I can’t cause a scene in a corporate environment, especially when I’m new.

So, I take her advice. I book Lenny a seat next to the lavatory for his next non-non-stop flight out of New York City.

The war has begun.