Slackers

I mentioned the complete waste-of-space, Skankariffic Blonde Ass-kissing Sidekick (SBAS) the other day, so I thought I’d tell you a bit about her and what it was like working for her and her fantastically enormous bout of self-love which cast a shadow on the Earth with its vastness.

She was one of those people who, when you first meet them, seem like the nicest person you could imagine. Friendly, smiley, generally agreeable. Later, once you’ve gotten to know her better, you start to get frequent monumental flashes of the passive-aggressive, manipulative, two-faced, lying, scaly troll that really resides inside her skin, but by then it’s too late and you’re in for the long haul.

SBAS was Mr. Panty-Waist’s right hand woman. His Girl Friday (through Thursday). His Executive Vice President. His personal confidant, his sounding board and the only person in the workplace who saw fit to stroke his outrageous ego (and who knows what else) on a daily basis while giggling at his jokes and twirling her hair around her finger. She was a master of spin – namely spinning things in her favor at the expense of other people. She had him wrapped around that same little finger. Where client assignments were concerned she was clueless, but office politics she had down pat.

Let me elaborate. SBAS was as useful as a chocolate car in the desert. For a start she had a big problem with getting to work on time. If it wasn’t for the fact Mr. Panty-Waist was even worse, she would never have gotten away with it for so long. She was seldom in the office before 11 a.m., usually later if she could manage it. She would call me first thing claiming she had a doctor’s appointment for her kid, which, if she was to believed, he attended on average three times a week, but then she’d show up around noon with her hair mysteriously trimmed, blown out and styled, like magic!

I guess doctors provide a bigger variety of services these days.

She would then check if Mr. Panty-Waist had arrived yet (usually not) and shut herself in her office for an hour while she made some personal calls to her nanny, her large flabby husband who looked uncannily like Lurch from the Addams Family and her friends. By the time she’d done with all that it would be time for lunch so she’d hop off to meet Lurch at some fancy grill or restaurant for a leisurely two hour-plus dining extravaganza, during which time Mr. Panty-Waist would finally show up, see her office open and think she’d just popped out for a bite after a hard morning’s work. She was really quite expert at appearing busy while doing absolutely nothing. She’d get back around 3 p.m., look at a few emails, make some more calls and go home at 4:30 p.m. The whole team would diss her behind her back and plot her demise in the most painful, humiliating ways possible. It was the only benefit to working with her really, fantasizing about her excruciating death.

She was also constantly fucking up client work. She’d forget deadlines, claiming she'd never got them in the first place and then have a crazy rush at the last minute to get everything done, while whining about how overworked she was, fail miserably, have to have one of the other, more valuable team members correct her work and pull the project together while she bleated and giggled coyly and tried to place the blame on everyone except for herself. This was a weekly occurrence and eventually, I’m pretty sure, even Mr. Panty-Waist had enough of a brain in his giant Shrek-head to figure out that she was basically just fluff. The dilemma however meant there was nothing he could do about it because removing her would mean, who would laugh at his jokes and massage his ego and agree with his every ridiculous suggestion and his constant whining? He had no other allies and the other partners and top executives hated him.

One thing SBAS was expert at was spending lots of time we didn’t have complaining about something that was of relatively minor importance. We’d have a huge PowerPoint deck containing a creative presentation to the client and while the rest of us were proof reading for typos, grammatical no-nos and checking images etc., she was fretting and pouting over the whole thing being the “wrong shade of blue”. She would literally spend hours with our graphics freelancer getting gradually more and more irritated that she wasn’t producing exactly the hue of blue SBAS had locked in the vault of irrationality in her brain. I had another shade of blue in mind. The shade of blue you get around the eyes when pummeled with my fist, in particular.

It got so bad that certain people at the client refused to deal with her anymore. Basically they got fed up with never getting answers from her or work they requested arriving in a timely manner, so they stopped calling and started using another team member instead.

Inexplicably, this giant waste of space continues to 'work' for the company, still apparently massaging Mr. Panty-Waist’s ego and still complaining about the right shade of blue.