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.

Poop Signs

I finally have an American on my side at Badvertiser. It seems to surprise him as much as it surprises me.

Wino calls me into his office, and I’m thinking that he is going to request that I make up another “Don’t poop in this bathroom” sign. I wouldn’t be all that surprised, really.

There are two bathrooms here, and one doesn’t have a window. Wino gets pissed about poop in the unventilated bathroom, and he regularly asks me if I can make a “tasteful sign” to deter the poop culprits. The first sign read: “Please use other bathroom for ‘heavy duty’ activities. (Mind the double entendre.)”

Oh the homophone, oh the English word adopted from the French language—it was the most elegant sign I’d ever written.

But Wino approached me, two weeks later. “McQ, can you please make another sign… I think that this one you put up may be unclear to the Eastern Europeans here in the office.” Perhaps he was right. Perhaps they didn’t understand the double-meaning that I had chosen so carefully to make the initial no-dookie demand.

The next sign was, I thought, more to the point: “#1 only. This bathroom doesn’t have sufficient ventilation for #2. If you don’t know what #2 means, please ask.”

During my lunch break that day, one of the Russians here, a sweet girl named Nastasya, asked me about the signage on the bathroom door. “Who keeps putting those up, and then changing them? It’s like a week-to-week calendar, something different every Monday.” I confessed that I had been commissioned to create these poop signs. “I actually think the first one was clearer. I am only recently familiar with the terms #1 and #2.”

An anonymous addendum written in permanent marker appeared the next week, proving Nastasya’s point:

Cheeky Eastern Europeans. It reminds me of a joke I heard on Everybody Loves Raymond. "If you're an American in the living room, what are you in the bathroom? You're-a-peein'!"

All of this poop sign baggage, two months into my employment at Badvertiser, explains my great surprise standing here in Wino’s office, receiving acclaim for some Badvertiser blog revisions I had submitted on my own accord. “Thanks for taking the initiative on this, McQ.” Me? Initiative? More like there were so many errors in the Badvertiser blog entry that I was more self-conscious to be working for this company, which I didn't think was possible.

Then Wino asks, “Did you graduate with a literature degree? It seems you have strong written skills.”

Oh, I’m sorry, weren’t my strong written skills apparent in the poop signs you’ve had me post on the bathroom door?