Dude does not look like a lady- rather, lady sounds like a man.

Right now I’m sitting on an eight hour long conference call and if you think I’m listening, you’re right. I’m listening with my magical multitasking skills to three people carry on three different conversations. I can’t tell who they’re talking to but that’s part of the fun. Are they talking to me? The wall? That crazed chinchilla in the corner, staring beadily from his hiding place inside the laptop bag?

Lately I’ve been on lots of these calls and sometimes, if I’m really lucky, I get to fly to The Frozen Tundra to bodily participate in these meetings. I use the term “participate” very loosely because, hello, I am Southern. Southern Folk don’t waste their time on all-day meetings, especially when there’s this handy-dandy newfangled thing call THE INTERNETS and THE ELECTRONIC EMAIL. So mostly I nod intelligently and pretend to take notes. During bathroom breaks I check to make sure my face is still holding up its Moderately Interested look because there’s always the chance I’ll get tired and slip into my WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK face.

Last week was more interesting than most because my boss, Leotissimus, was requested to join the call. It’s not that his mere presence made it interesting because it’s generally real hard to spice up a conference call when you’re stuck on the ass end of it, listening via the telephone in your office. It’s more that Leo has this innate ability to insert his foot square into his mouth, all the way down his esophagus where his toes wriggle around and rip a hole in his spleen. Like that one time he accidentally walked in on a woman pumping breast milk in one of our unused offices, right after someone had told him that a new mother was going to be using it to pump in peace. He just wanted to make sure the door was locked. Imagine her surprise.

He’s normally pretty good with the shit we give him, just like the rest of us. Nobody is immune. My other boss once sent an email to the wrong [redacted] that just said “Kreatur wants a kiss!” That sentence has a long and sordid history and one day I might explain it. But it has nothing to do with my boss wanting a kiss, which is pretty much what The Other Robin assumed. I once returned a phone call from our then-Vice President, like, THE Vice President, the one that’s right under the president, the one that blinks twice and shit sings down the toilet, with “TAG, YOU’RE IT.” In my defense I didn’t know who he was because much like Dick Cheney he just kind of faded into the background, on purpose, so he could surprise unsuspecting employees and make them piss themselves with fear.

The thing is, we all do it. We all do asinine things and later regret that our mother didn’t shoot tequila during her pregnancy because at least then we could claim mental defect. It’s just that here, at The Undisclosed Location, we never let you forget it.

So last Thursday I was sitting in a room with fifteen very unhelpful Yanks while Leo dialed in from Little Rock. We’d had about two hours worth of document revising when the person to my right started talking about how System X was going to communicate with System Y. During a lull in conversation, Leo popped in with “Who was the gentleman that was just speaking?”

Pretty innocuous, right? But the room goes silent and since no one appears willing to speak up, I lean into one of the strategically placed microphones and tell Leo that the last person speaking was Tanya, but Robert was the one a few minutes before. Leo says, “No, the gentleman. The gentleman that was just talking about System X.”

That was pretty much what I was afraid of, so I whipped out my blackberry and sent him a message that said “NOT A DUDE.”

But I’m 700 miles away and there’s probably a 2-3 second lag time between when I hit Send and when he reads his message. Three seconds that could have saved us all a lot of tension. Meanwhile he digs the hole deeper, summarizing what “the gentleman” was just talking about, just to make it clear that he wants the name. Of the gentleman. That was just speaking.

And then The Universe intervened and he finally read his crackberry message. His response? “Oh FUCK.”

It’s a tribute to my upbringing that I kept a straight face.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

It’s not to say that I’ve become disenchanted or disillusioned, because that would imply I had grandiose illusions and, um, enchantments to begin with. Is ‘enchantments’ really the word I’m looking for? Because short of stewing toad legs and newt eyes in my spare time, I can’t say as I’ve ever let myself be enchanted by much of anything. I’m nothing if not a realist. Maybe a very optimistic realist, but a realist nonetheless. I’m aware that kittens get run over, puppies are bludgeoned and little old ladies have their life savings stolen by men of ill repute, men who normally lack a full set of teeth. Maybe the grannies relate to their lack of toothedness, I have no idea.

I’ve spent the past few weeks simmering down from my full boil of righteous anger after a boss of mine was treated horribly. This, in turn, means that what little morale we had left around this place has gone directly down the shitter. It’s gone down so far and so hard, not even Heidi Fleiss can relate. Here was a man standing up for us, speaking his mind (as he was encouraged to do) and running our department with the kind of intelligence that makes me struggle with ever referring to myself as a Smart Kid. Then one greasy old cheeseburger of a woman gets her panties in a twist, smiles smugly and says There’s the door, sonny.

It started back in October, when my boss, we’ll call him the Can Can Man, got wind of some change in the air. The change had the kind of odor that accompanies Important Decision Makers within general crumbling companies that are struggling to keep their very large heads above water. This odor is greatly reminiscent of dirty asshole, because more often than not these Important Decision Makers have their heads firmly lodged in someone else’s rectum. And if I had someone’s head lodged up there, I’d have a hard time keeping that particular area clean, too; hence, the smell of dirty asshole. Not pretty flowers, just asshole.

The rest of us got the news at the start of January. Happy New Year, ya’ll! It was a shock to say the least because, hello, we make money. Oodles and oodles of money. The Big Company? Not so much. We’re better and quicker and faster than The Big Company because down here in Aw Shucksville, Arkansas, we don’t fuck around. It’s too hot for all that. Plus, there’s a rule in the handbook about putting your head up where the sun don’t shine. It ain’t sanitary, it ain’t healthy and it sure ain’t conducive to getting your work done and heading on home for a cold beer on the front porch.

The thing about The Decision (the one that puts me out of a job in X amount of months) is it really does look good from a high-level perspective. Can Can Man made a note to point this out because it’s best to understand the rationale THAT PUTS ME OUT OF A JOB. But when the Big Company brings in a third party to run test after test, wouldn’t you think it would be a good idea to utilize that information? The information that says this company right here in Arkansas, whooo-eee do they get their shit done right- ya’lls yankee system ain’t near as fine as what they got right here, and we reckon you’ll lose a bunch of money by trying to reabsorb their business. Can Can Man thought so, too. And he wasn’t shy about saying it.

Ultimately this was his downfall. The Big Company just wasn’t used to hearing such clear, succinct words. After all, it’s rather hard to understand someone when they’re speaking from the general location of your colon. Can Can Man had valid points: why WOULD you destroy a system that generates millions of dollars to put it on your decrepit and function-less one? Why would you ignore processes and procedures that we can prove generate a substantial profit? Why would you ignore study after study after study that says THIS is the better system THIS is the better process and THIS is the better company?

Why? Because someone way up high, someone so high on the food chain they’ve retired their personal ass hat, said so. They deemed it so, and so it shall be.

They said it was Can Can’s fault that we were leaving in droves. They said he should have done more to keep us here until the end. The end where they hand us our meager severance check and we all pray for a job in the middle of this forest called Little Rock. What they didn’t, and don’t, understand was this: He was the reason we stayed as long as we did. He was our morale booster, our rock of knowledge. You don’t find those qualities much nowadays. Mostly you get the Vice President who kiss-assed his way to the top, or the one that knows his job but couldn’t begin to grow appropriate personnel skills.

And so, because I’m too low on the ladder for anyone to really listen to me, here’s what I’ve got to say:

Dear Big Company,
You are very cordially invited to go fuck yourself.
Sincerely,
Robin Holmes

Overall I’m just gravely disappointed, and I hate it that I didn’t expect to feel any other way. What little loyalty I had left was destroyed by the treatment of Can Can Man and you can bet I’m going to smile when you fall flat on your ass. Of course, you won’t really fall. You’ll just move your losses here and there, claiming that they’re capital interest or some such flumubbery. That spreadsheet where you showcase your loss-recoup time will casually be thrown in the shredder and you’ll all pinky swear not to tell the board of directors about your giant failure. No one but us slow-brained Arkansans will remember how you made a poor decision and went about that decision’s execution like a two-year-old and a plate of spaghetti.

I wonder how long it will take before I get fired for running my mouth.