ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I got a raise and promotion Tuesday and the new girl got fired. Ha, ha! No. I really did get the long-awaited raise and promotion to assistant manager, though, which is nice. It turns out that my boss had been wanting me to be promoted for a while and finally approached his boss about it, only to be told that his boss hadn’t realized I hadn’t been promoted months ago. So that got all fixed up. According to my boss my I am now “head flunky”, which was no problem, I told him, since it sounds like I have a fleet of flunkies at my disposal. A lot of people might not be proud of an assistant manager position at a payday loan store, but I’m pleased to know that my bosses think I’m doing a good job. It may not be a high-status or high-paying role, but it takes a lot of precision and integrity and I’m glad to be doing it well.

To follow up my account of the new girl’s less than extraordinary performance on the job since a few weeks ago, she is still floundering. It turned out that her no-call, no-show from the 18th was because she didn’t think she was scheduled that day. We only work four days a week, for godsake. Then Tuesday the 21st she showed up over two hours late, without calling. My boss and I talked about this yesterday when he was telling me how furious he was that she had shown up two hours late both days that I’d been gone last week. “I was pissed,” he told me, adding that the only reason she hadn’t been fired for the no-call, no-show was that he hadn’t wanted to leave me to run the store alone while he was on vacation. This insinuates to me that if she keeps this behavior up, her days will be numbered.

Soon after she started at our store, she decided all of our organization and filing systems needed “improving” and made up this incredibly wasteful, counterintuitive, and complex technique for making new customer folders, which entails this elaborate code which uses separate colors for each type of customer account (payday loan green, check cashing red, etc.). She made a valiant but short-lived effort to coerce me and my boss into doing this too, but as we both considered this totally retarded we refused and continued using black ink as we and our forebears had always done.

This did not reach a critical point of irritation with me until last week, when I did a huge batch of new folders last Tuesday in black ballpoint as always, and left them in a stack to be alphabetized after I came back on Friday. However, the next Monday I discovered that she had taken my folders and traced over all the writing, every single little bit of it, in green Sharpie. The result of this was, predictably, even more stupid-looking than the normal folders she makes. She had then alphabetized them incorrectly with the rest of the files, infuriating me in doing so.

I then discovered that she had done something with all the black Sharpies in the store, which I interpreted to be a pre-emptive strike against my boss’s and my persistence in using black to make folders. Now even more annoyed, because I needed a Sharpie to fill out some mailing envelopes, I reluctantly used her green Sharpie for the task. After using it, I absently put it in the top drawer of my boss’s desk, which is where I usually stash pens when I’m sitting there, and forgot about it. Shortly thereafter she started looking around for it, puzzled, and asked me if I’d seen it. It was at this point that I turned evil and passive-aggressive.

“Ah, hmm…I know I used it a bit ago because I couldn’t find the black Sharpies,” I said thoughtfully, opening a couple of drawers and rifling through them for show. “Must have squirreled it away somewhere and forgotten where,” I said. “Ought to turn up soon, though, I should think,” I added brightly. “What’ll I use for my folders?” she fretted. She could use black ink like my boss and I do, I pointed out. No, no, she couldn’t do that. Later I found her folders done up in a horrifying lime green marker that she had ferreted out somewhere.

I told my boss about the whole thing the next morning, confessing my evil deed and explaining that I felt stupid for being so irritated about such a dumb thing. He just laughed when he heard that she had used another green pen. “Hide all the colored pens in the store,” he suggested. It only took me about half a minute to figure out that the perfect place would be inside the drop ceiling. I popped open one of the ceiling tiles, stuck the stupid pens in there, and closed it back up, confident that she would most likely never consider looking there.

Yes, I know how freaking immature that is. And mean. If she asks, I’ll tell her that she can have them back if she shows up for work on time every day for a month. Ha, ha!