Adventures in Corporate Survivorship

(Alternative title: How I get away with dirty jokes at work)

My employer is a multinational corporation. Recently, corporate whipped some new service standards by which each division has work by. Seeing as how our division was already kicking ass and taking names, we pretty much already met these standards, but there were a couple that had compliance numbers so high, we had to bust our hump to meet them.

After we did so, the middle managers realized that in order to keep those and the rest of the numbers up to corporate’s requirements, we’d need to bring an additional person into the office. So they sent off their ‘New Employee Request’ forms, probably in quadruplicate from what I’ve heard about the head office’s tight-fistedness these days.

A couple weeks later, lo and behold, we have our new emlpoyee. She was your typical office drone: late 20’s/early 30’s, types at an ungodly rate, a coffee junkie, though not a bad looker. The boss-lady tells us she is to learn a particular job and will then be handed off to each of us in turn to learn as much about our jobs and the computer system as possible.

Seeing as how I’m the ‘night guy’, I was, of course, the last person in line for her to puppydog around with. She showed up on time, was attentive to everything I was showing her and picked everything up pretty quickly. Almost too quickly.

That was two weeks ago.

Guess who didn’t show up last Monday? Yep, the new employee.

Guess who showed up on Tuesday in a pinstriped women’s business suit? No, not me, ya sicko, the new employee!

It turns out she was a hack for the corporate office. I found out about this on Tuesday night via an apologetic email from my boss that said that I had to stay late Friday morning for her review of my job skills.

Just like my training with her, I was the last one to get the review. I noticed no one got fired that week, but if ever I felt an aura of ugliness in the office, Thursday night was it. I hate my yearly reviews, even though they rarely last more than three or four minutes and always include the sentences “You’re doing a great job. Keep it up. Here’s your raise.” They just seem like an incredible waste of time. I’d rather just take the money I worked to get and be done with it.

I spent Thursday night thinking up as many clever comebacks for any of the things the corporate hack might be able to bitch about. When I saw my boss come in early, I knew the time for this crap review was nigh. I closed down my computer, cleaned off my desk and wandered towards the spare office I knew the hack was using for these interviews.

The hack arrived, gathered up my boss, found me and we made a convoy into the spare office where I sat down and got comfortable in an uncomfortable chair and waited for the worst.

It never came.

I got a glowing review from the hack, who confirmed what I always knew; that I get a shitload of work done in an unbelieveably short amount of time, accurately.

Her only complaints were about a couple of the macros I snuck into the system so that I can gather up four different sets of data in one fell swoop. She said that while it was all accurate, adding those did not comply with corporate’s rules.

She also loathed the thumbdrives I use to store around 4gigs of tunage. She thought that me plugging them into my desktop was totally unsecure and could corrupt the system.

After the mild scolding, she asked if I had any questions, so I asked if we were actually going to get our new employee or not. She confirmed we were and that corporate was just looking to see if anyone here was slacking before supplementing it into our budget.

I then asked if corporate knew that most folks around here would now never trust them again. She said she did, but that money was tight, they’ve found a number of offices that had employees duplicating work or had too many people, and that this needed to be done, yada, yada, yada.

After we got done with that subject and were getting ready to exit, the hack told me that my boss had hoped I’d keep my quips on the “Nice” side of the fence the night I was training because I had a bit of a sharp tongue at times.

I looked at my boss and said “Is that so?” The look on her face was all I needed to confirm what the hack said.

The hack came back with “Yes. She said you could be quite the handful.”

I looked at my boss and gathered up my best furrowed brow ‘I am going to say something serious’ look, which my boss knows means I am going to say something completely atrocious. I could tell this was scaring her and she looked as though she might start to shake her head ‘NO!’ when when I turned to the hack and said, completely seriously “Well, if you ask the wife, she’ll say I’m usually two handfuls.”

My boss almost fainted, the hack let out a snort and said that she was always warning husband about his language in public too, and I walked away.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, bitter and swiftly. We’ll see what is in my email box tonight when I get in.