Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Without a trace

When C first came to work I talked about her a lot to Eric. "Ohmigod," I would say. "What makes her think I care about her son's football games?" Or, "She says she can't move items in Word tables because 'they go all funny' when she copies and pastes." Or, "She was telling me about buying clothes for her son, and she said, 'We got these nice pants, they were cream, or whatever you'd call it for a boy.'"

Yesterday I got to work early, as my boss asked me to for September (due to potential overseas customers we needed someone available to talk to while they were still at work). When my boss got there, an e-mail went out. "As of Friday, C is no longer working here," it read. "Until we find and train a replacement, each of you will have to do your own [document creation]."

I asked my boss what happened. "Well...we just had to let her go," he said. My coworker Tony hinted that he knew and it was dramatic, but he didn't tell me about it and come to think of it, I was there Friday after C left, and I didn't notice anything going down.

Today I was creating a document, one of the things that's normally C's job. I had a little difficulty filling in one spot, so I opened up an old one C had done for me and I had sent to a customer. Turns out she had had difficulty too: the spot was incomplete, still with the ~99 where the information was supposed to go. I was exceedingly annoyed. I could even see opening up a document like that, something I'd sent to a high-paying client, and wanting to fire the person who had messed it up. But my boss isn't a short-tempered man. So what much-worse-than-that thing did happen with C?

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