My Working Life: Mary Sue

For two years in the mid 1990s I was the manager of a hospital medical records transcription department. It was my first and only full-time management job. I was 30 and inexperienced, but I very much wanted to do the job well; in fact, the reason I took the job was that everyone would probably have been outsourced and fired if I hadn’t. That’s another story.

The time came when I had to hire a new person. HR put an ad out and I plowed through resumés, and found a few candidates worth interviewing. We had both an interview and a test, so anyone I hired would at a minimum be able to do the job without a doubt.

My first hire was Mary Sue (not her real name). She was a quiet, diffident woman about my age with a good resumé, obviously highly intelligent, and tested nearly perfect. She was eccentric; all medical transcriptionists are eccentric. Everything about her was buttoned-down. She had tasteful, conservative clothing without a button out of place, finely curled permed hair, the exact right amount of makeup, and a precise and muted voice. She played the subservient office lady role the whole way. Everything was an apology or a question, with the head tilted slightly to one side. She was so pale that “white” didn’t cover it; I think she was partly transparent.

I seated her in an empty cubicle and she began to silently churn out good work. I congratulated myself on a successful first hire! She always looked worried and hunted, but most of the people I worked with were functional neurotics and I didn’t think much of it.

A couple of weeks after she started I was talking to her at the photocopier and she mentioned that she hadn’t slept well the night before due to noisy neighbors. I made commiserative noises. “Well, I don’t know, it’s, worse, worse than that” she said mournfully. “How so?” “Well my neighbor. She is. I think you know, she is a prostitute. So many men coming and going all the time.” I paused for a moment. “Really?” I didn’t think of West Covina as being a haven of condominium whorehouses. “Oh I’m sure of it. I know. You know, we’ve had this before. It’s like it’s taking over.” I made some polite gesture and retired to my desk. Whoo, I thought. I’ve got a sexual paranoid on my hands. This should be entertaining.

A few weeks later Mary Sue showed up at my desk asking for a private conference. I closed both doors and we sat down. “I am having some trouble in the mornings,” she offered. “What’s up?” “Well, you know, Barry (a subject of a previous profile here). and T. and C., they work that same time. And they talk a lot and they’re loud. And it’s hard because I can’t get things done, and you know they aren’t doing anything. And then they’re really rude and mean to me. Barry came up to me at my desk and called me a bitch.”

I was shocked. First of all, I knew that the morning crew didn’t “do nothing”. Although I wasn’t there early I could see their workflow precisely. They were a bit slower than when I was there, but not more than reasonably. And I knew they were BSing around talking. They’d all known each other for 10 years and worked as a team at another hospital. And I couldn’t imagine any circumstance in which Barry would call someone a bitch. Finally, this wasn’t the kind of workplace where you couldn’t stop and chat for five minutes, either. If you didn’t let work pile up or mess with anyone, it was cool. I told Mary Sue that I’d stop in unexpectedly a few times to see what was up, and that if anyone was abusive to her she should log it exactly and I would take appropriate action. She was very grateful and teary and went back to her desk.

I did pop in unexpectedly early a few times over the next month. There were some embarrassing/comic moments when I saw people with their feet up on their desks expounding long stories to each other, but mostly people were just churning along doing their thing and waved a hello to me. “Hey, early guy. There’s bagels.” There wasn’t any loud boorish talking, or any sign of hostility to anyone.

About a month later Mary Sue returned to my desk. She was even more upset this time. Again she told me tales of the other morning employees harassing her, doing no work, and being loud. I mentioned to her that I was puzzled because I’d seen nothing on my surprise visits. She was silent for a minute or so and then said “Well, let me tell you it’s happening. They’re just like that. Those people are idle, it’s their way. I’m sure you know what I mean here. Those people. I knew you would understand.” Thunderbolt. I realized that everyone on that shift but Mary Sue was black. Oh crap.

I told her that if she had continued complaints she’d have to file a grievance with HR and/or talk to my boss, because I had nothing to go on based on the information I had. She looked terribly sad and betrayed, and said that she would do that, but that she had hoped I would understand the situation. I looked at her for a long moment and said “I think I do understand the situation, actually.”

I managed to call my boss before Mary Sue did. She (boss) shared my reaction. “Oh, SHIT. Barry? I don’t think so. Yeah, I’ll talk to her. Thanks.” I asked what the hell we were going to do; can you fire someone for being an insane racist? “No. But I can quit her.”

Over the next couple of weeks things were very tense. Barry came to see me and said “Well, I guess you know why I’m here.” “Yeah.” “I just wanted to say, I’ve been here seven years, and there’s been no trouble. Nothing. I just want to get my job done. I hope..” I cut him off “Don’t worry. It’s not going to be me.” He smiled and left. The others dropped by and this was repeated. Mary Sue barely spoke to me but occasionally would sit at her desk typing with one giant tear rolling down a powdered cheek.

Mary Sue quit at the end of two weeks. She arrived in my office in a portentous way and delivered a note to my desk, a generic quit note. As I read it, she intoned “I am pursuing other opportunities because both you and the Vice President have made it clear to me that serious problems are not taken seriously here.” I took the note and filed it, saying to the wall behind her “I can promise you they are, Mary Sue. Very seriously indeed.”

We had a pot luck the day after her last day. I brought the meringue cookies.

Linkastrophe

  1. Judith Miller is having a well-deserved bad year. Turns out you don’t get the Heroic Journalist Award after all when the source you’re protecting is a government stooge trying to get revenge on a whistleblower. Oh, and thanks for the faked WMD reporting, Judy!
  2. AUUUGH! One of the towelhead terrorist guys can take on the appearance of a Westerner at will! Are we fighting fucking LEX LUTHOR here? Does anyone know BUFFY’s phone number? Thank you ASSOCIATED PRESS for this IMPORTANT UPDATE!! YOW!!
  3. The Global Guerillas blog covers terrorism and guerilla warfare and looks very interesting at first read.
  4. Ell jay user tinymammoth has some cool science news updates today!
  5. Starbucks is in fact everywhere. (Flickr)
  6. The Mozilla people are starting a for-profit company. Somewhere jwz is laughing until he pukes.

History Lesson: Let’s not play soldier.

Looking for information on military units like the one Bob served with in Vietnam is incredibly frustrating. Bob was in a special warfare unit in the Navy. This means that he was a UDT, or a SEAL, or a “Navy Scout” or something. So he was in one of these shadowy things like the “Maritime Studies Group” or “Studies and Observations Group” that were just killing machines. When you look for that stuff on the web there’s this mountain of macho horseshit to plow through. The official histories and some sites run by veterans are there, of course.

But good God, the fixation this country has on elite military units! Message board fights about who a real SEAL is, dissing of various public figures about their war records, lots of debunking of people who claim to be SEALs or Special Forces or whatever but aren’t. Every meathead in the country claims either to be a SEAL or claims to know all about them and have the real scoop, unlike those other poseurs. Regular soldiers aren’t enough; the poor bastards may get blown up, shot, underpaid, mistreated, and dumped to die but they don’t have flaming death’s head patches and special medals and really really cool face paint.

You know what that is? It’s pathetic. Bob killed so many innocent people and saw so many unspeakable things in his time at war that he spent the next 25 years marinated in Crown Royal and wreaking havoc on himself and everyone else. It was a nauseating, terrifying Hell that makes a very unlikely craggy cynical old bastard like Bob tear up and flinch when he sees a Vietnamese person to this day. Special Forces, in his case, meant an especially bad war that made him an especially bad person. If these web warriors and message board heroes had to see any of that they’d never stop shitting their Dockers. I suppose they have an image of a straight-jawed Hollywood actor heroically cutting down uniformed bad guys and saving his buddies. The reality was more like a gang of maniacs blowing up and burning houses and schools and hospitals, and one of the maniacs is you.

Dude Ranch Nation gives me ennui.

Another slice of Bob Trout

I get this ambulance ride to Hoag, because my back just fucking exploded. Yeah, you remember. About six years ago. Anyway, flash back to the old days. I was running with this… …thief, drunk, maniac. He and I had a great fuckin’ time together. And I was constantly drunk, big mule of a guy, poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder. This guy Pat, he was a Harbor High football star from the sixties. complete degenerate. One time we installed a hot tub in the place for a doctor at Hoag, fourth floor place down on the Bay, bring the girls up in groups and fuck ’em. I remembered the guy’s name, he was an E.R. doc.

So then, right, my back goes. Fine since then, I take my drugs and I know the woman can’t be on top unless I got a good mattress. But this time they had a bodybuilder pick me up like I was a feather and toss me in the ambulance and I got to the Hoag E.R. I’m lying there and the orderly is saying well Mr. Trout we’re going to transfer you to the VA, and I say yeah, that’s right. And then I said to him “Does Dr. S. still work here?” “Why yes, he’s in charge of the E.R.” I said “Well tell him that Pat C. is dead, and the bastard owed me $200 and owed him $900.” Orderly looked at me kinda funny and left. He comes back a few later and wipes my ass with alcohol, sticks a needle in there and gives me a huge shot of morphine. Says “Dr. S. says that’s for you, and you can spend the night here.” He always knew I was the one doing the work and Pat was an asshole.

—

This is how we did it. You know, there was nothing but killing. No strategy, just kill. I was a fucking war criminal. And we killed a lot, a tremendous number of people. Be standing in a big clearing just piled with bodies and say well, let’s call this a hundred for the records.

We’d fly in on Pierre’s helicopter and he’d drop us about over by Hoag, in the weeds. And our target was maybe over there, by the YMCA. We took a week to get there and get ready, and we told Pierre we’d be right back at the same spot at this time and date. Thank God we had good pilots, they always fucking found us. I mean, if they didn’t, that was that. So we’d go into the Viet Cong training camp or whatever at night, and load the place up to the fucking treetops with mines. Claymores everywhere, interlocking blast fields. We’d back off and fire one shot and they’d all come running out of their tents. Boom! Claymores means chunks of metal flying around in every space there’s air. These guys are fucking lasagne. Almost all of them dead or dying. But we knew we didn’t get the instructors. And those guys would tend to some wounded and then come looking for us. And they knew how to kill and how to run in the jungle, and so did we.

But Pierre would be there, every time, waiting for us just when we said. God bless him he never missed the spot and you know you couldn’t fucking see it from up there, he just had to know. No electronic shit. Mark Tork, from Manhattan Kansas. I remembered the name, that’s something.

You don’t know these weapons until you see them. Like if you shot a water can over there on top of the bricks, one shot from an M-16. You’d expect maybe the can would go to pieces, water everywhere, but no. It flies straight up 20 yards in the air. What the fuck?

War is just the worst fuckin’ thing.

It’s St. Dogboner’s Day and Time for Links!

  1. BOOM! There goes the neighborhood. There’s a customized nuke map of a 100 kt blast at my house. Sorry about the neighborhood. Make your own, today!
  2. Here’s a great idea. Let’s give the TSA rentacops “temporary and reversible” death ray stun zap magic wands!
  3. Reason #2942 not to do speed: Meth Mouth. Tweaker teeth are ugly.
  4. I am overjoyed to see that Walker rides again! And now we see what has happened to Janine Turner’s career.
  5. Did they have a tornado in England and I missed it? (Flickr)
  6. One reason there’s so much ATM card fraud is that lots of banks don’t use half the security info on the cards. Thanks, guys!