I truly believe that the single most redeeming quality about my place of employment is the material it provides for silly anecdotes and wacky stories. Since Day one, my company has proven to be a hotbed of nonsense, a veritable smorgasbord of unbelievable characters and their even more unbelievable behaviors. Many-a-party has been livened up by dazzling tales of the going’s-on on the corner of 57th Street and 7th Avenue. Tales of assistants who hide Entenmanns’s sheet cakes under their desk and consume them in their entirety in a single day, of managers who doodle pictures of anatomically correct naked pirates on pending reports and then accidentally pass them out to their staff, of superiors who speak so much industry jargon that they are unable to form a coherent sentence, of co-workers who put on a different pair of shoes when going to the restroom in an effort to disguise their identity, and of sales reps who do not know what mozzarella cheese is. Up until recently, the star of this motley cast was a girl referred to as “Crazy Cathy.” She was employed as a Sales Assistant at my company for a brief period of time. Though this business can be fast paced and sometimes slightly overwhelming at times, sales assistants have relatively simple jobs. Many people take assistant positions in an effort to springboard themselves to the better paying, more fulfilling (or so they say), Account Manager roles. Others simply use the position solely as a means to a paycheck, and, as in the case of my assistant, spend the majority of the day chatting with people online about whether or not Episode 12 of the first season of Deep Space Nine is better than episode 7 of the second season of Star Trek: The New Generation. Cathy fell into the first category. Or so she thought anyway.
I first met Cathy at an industry party at Iguana, one of the worst bars in the City of New York. People in my industry have an uncanny knack of picking the most horrendous places to throw functions. They must figure, why go out to a nice lounge with good music and interesting people when you can hang out in a noisy theme restaurant surrounded by big screen TV’s or an Irish Pub with no ambiance? The reason behind the party escapes me, and is also completely irrelevant. It consisted of the same people, drinking the same drinks, wearing the same clothes, and having the same conversations. Habitually, I spend these parties drinking as much as I possibly can on the company’s tab, and then promptly running out the door at the earliest acceptable time to go meet my friends who work at companies that understand that there are in fact more than 2 bars in the city of New York. This night was no different. I was standing silently in a corner of the room plotting my escape, when I was approached by a strange woman wearing a bright purple polyester pants suit. Her appearance was quite unsettling to say the least. She was a rather portly woman, a trait accentuated by the tight purple double-knit fabric that made up her suit. She had kinky blond hair that was piled atop of her head in a haphazard bouffantish hairdo of sorts. The real kicker was her skin. She had self-tanned herself into oblivion, and her skin was glowing an especially frightening orangish color. Since I was trapped like a rat in the corner by this horrible glowing person, I was forced to chat with her for quite some time. She informed me that she was a recent addition to the company and claimed to have been hired as what she referred to as a “temporary” assistant. She explained that she was hired for the position for the explicit reason of becoming an Account Manager in relatively quick fashion, and that her assistantship was basically training for bigger and better things. She mentioned that they had already given her some “key” accounts, and that things were moving along quite fast for her. Though I hadn’t heard of anything like this before, I had no reason to doubt her story. It seem somewhat plausible considering that the last sales trainee they hired had the intelligence of a doorknob, and had allegedly plagiarized the presentation that she used in her interview for the job. We hire people that have been convicted of stealing mail to work in our mailroom, why not hire frizzy headed women with skin the color of basketballs to be Account Managers? It made perfect sense at the time. It took me the better part of an hour to wrest myself from the conversation, but I somehow managed to pawn her off on an unsuspecting research analyst and made a run for it. My frantic sprint to the bar for a much needed drink was interrupted by a fellow coworker. Joe was the first person that I worked for at the company, and just so happened to be the manager of the team in which Cathy claimed to be training to be an account manager. When I asked how the new “trainee” was doing, He shot me a quizzical look, and said, “Huh?” Come to find out that Cathy was hired to be a Sales Assistant and ONLY a Sales Assistant and according to him, she wasn’t a very good one at that. She had already been pulled off several accounts due to her propensity to attempt to take on the duties of the Account Manager she was working for. Though it seems like a relatively innocent (some might even say ambitious) thing to do, when handling millions of dollars of business for huge advertisers and even bigger television stations, a person who doesn’t know what they’re doing can do quite a bit of damage. The research analyst that I had pawned Cathy off on then interrupted my discussion with Joe. It seems that Cathy had propositioned the little tyke, and he, in an effort to lose her, had spent 10 minutes hiding out in the bathroom, only to emerge and find her poised and waiting for him at the door. I allowed him to use me as a human shield, and we both ran the hell out of the Iguana.
A couple of days later I noticed an eerie glow a short proximity away, and observed that Cathy was sitting at the previously empty desk that was situated near my office. (Read: cubicle). Upon some investigation, I found out that she had been moved to a team with smaller stations and even less responsibility. She apparently had been up to her old tricks, and had developed a habit of constantly telling the clients who called that she was capable of performing Account Manager duties. I feared that the move would cause problems, and she would attempt contact with me on a regular basis. Thankfully, I was wrong, and my contact with her was limited to awkward conversations at the fax machine about her status as “trainee” and brief encounters in the kitchenette while purchasing pop tarts in the vending machine. Occasionally I would hear a story about how she flubbed an order, or had had yet another delusion that she was functioning in a more prestigious role in the company. For the most part though, I was blissfully unexposed to the dangerous glow of her skin, right up until one fateful day at the Health and Racket Club of NY.
The Health and Racket Club is the gym in which the employees at my company are offered a discount. Due to this “deal,” during the lunchtime hours it is teeming with my coworkers. It’s hard enough dealing with said coworkers while they are in their regular clothing, it’s another thing seeing them scantily clad in sweaty workout clothes, or even worse… (gasp) NAKED!! Much like when I go out to bars with these people, I spend the majority of my time at the gym avoiding anyone else from the company that happens to be utilizing the facilities. I take great pains to always keep my headphones on and to avoid eye contact at all times. This is not an easy feat, but with practice and perseverance I have managed to perfect it. Unfortunately, you’re a bit more vulnerable when in the locker room. There are no headphones to protect you, and for the most part all of your concentration goes to trying to figure out how in the world you are going to cover yourself with a towel the size of a washcloth. Due to this it isn’t uncommon to be caught off guard, often times finding yourself face to boob with a very tall coworker who finds it necessary to chat you up while you’re both standing there in the buff. One afternoon, I was hiding out in the steam room trying to relax, when the door opened and I noticed a familiar orangy hue emerge through the mist. Surprise, surprise, it turned out to be Cathy. She had herself all wrapped up in a navy blue silk mini-kimono and was heading right for me. She said something to me, but I could not hear her. I was too busy trying to figure out why she was wearing sweat socks in the steam room. I felt slightly violated and a bit frightened, but caught like a deer in headlights, I remained steadfast. I kept my eyes closed and waited it out. Self-tanner must not agree with deep heat and humidity, because in no time flat she got up and left the sauna, her sweat socks making a squish-squish noise with each step out of the room. The showers at the HRC are in the direct field of vision of the steam room, and I had a perfect view of Cathy preparing to get in the shower. Here’s an interesting factoid: Preparing to take a shower doesn’t take very long when you don’t actually remove all of your clothes. She dropped the kimono on the floor, and very leisurely stepped into the shower while still wearing her sweat socks. Perhaps she was in a hurry or perhaps she had some sort of hygiene-related foot issue, the reason was never made all that clear to me. What I DO know is that she took a shower with her socks on, and proceeded to wear these sopping wet socks throughout the locker room while she got dressed.
As you can imagine, one can only be so crazy for so long without causing serious damage to their life in some way. The damage in this case was to her (faux) career. Strangely enough, at my company you practically have to murder someone in order to warrant being fired. In order to let someone go I’m pretty sure policy dictates that you have to give the employee in question approximately 43 warnings before you are allowed to dismiss him or her. It’s absolutely preposterous. Regardless, Cathy somehow managed to meet these lofty pre-requisites to unemployment, and the shit hit the proverbial fan. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary that finished her off. It was simply one more instance of the same old delusional behavior that resulted in her ultimate demise. As she had many times in the past, she took on the role of an account executive, resulting in disaster, and cost the company quite a bit of money. She was gone before anyone knew it, leaving behind only memories and the faint odor of self-tanner in the air.
Life here is just not the same without Crazy Cathy. Luckily for all of us, my place of employment continues to be fertile ground for insanity. Cathy was recently replaced with a crazy assistant who, in an effort to explain his excessive absences and tardiness, told his supervisor that he has cancer. When asked to bring in a doctors note, he brought in a diagram of the human body with arrows pointing to various body parts labeled “cancerous.” It appeared as if he had torn the page out of a medical journal or textbook. We are still waiting for a “real” note.* I’m not holding my breath.
*An addendum: Since writing this essay, this new “sick” assistant has been fired. He called one morning claiming to have checked himself into a hospital for tests. We called his wife to find out what hospital he was at, as we wanted to send flowers and a get-well card from the company. We were informed by his (shocked) wife, that he was not in fact at the hospital, but actually in the Dominican Republic on vacation. We instructed his spouse to tell him that it wasn’t necessary that he return to work.
