You neglected to mention…

We returned from winter break to the sad news that our sales lady’s mom is in a bad way. Stepzilla didn’t expect it to be a positive outcome. The sales lady misses the first week of January. The week passes and we don’t hear any news about her. Another person in our department decides to call her and see how her mom is doing:

1 – “Hey, how’s your mom doing?”

2 – “Stepzilla didn’t tell you?”

1 – “Tell me what?”

2 – “My mom died. I told Carol and she said she’d tell Stepzilla…”

(Hold on a second, I have to shoot a rubber band at a sales person for having an extensively personal and lengthy phone conversation with her friend.)

Stepzilla is confronted in our morning meeting about the sales lady’s mom. She brushes it off like it’s no big deal, asks what type of time off the sales lady will be taking, and how long she’ll be gone. Totally callous.

Stepzilla tells Sharpie to add a picture of a family on the cover of a brochure. So she finds a picture of a family with two kids and puts it on the cover. Stepzilla returns it to her and says to just put a picture of a couple on the cover—that she doesn’t want to give the impression that the place is overrun with kids.

Stepzilla doesn’t have kids and frequently boasts about how much she hates them.

Our department ordered noise-cancelling headphones back mid-December. We need them because, at times, the sales ladies are overly talkative (not necessarily about work related activities, either) and we need to concentrate. We’ve been wondering where they were for about a week now, but I was giving some leeway for the holiday shipping craze.

Finally today (tired of the headaches from non-stop chatter), I ask CEO-Lady’s secretary where the headphones are:

“Hi! Would you happen to know when we should expect those headphones we ordered to arrive?”

“What headphones?” (granted, she is known to be fairly dense, but I didn’t expect her to forget this easily)

“The noise-cancelling ones?” (I pantomime large headphones on my ears.)

“Oh! Yeah. Nobody told you? Carol told me not to order them and she’s looking for another solution. You should talk to Stepzilla.”

“Ohhh-kayyy, thanks.”

So, in the meantime, I’ll be blasting my iPod at full volume and damaging my hearing because Carol’s looking for another solution. I know the headphones were a tad expensive, but expenses have never been a problem before.

I let Sharpie know about our “not going to be arriving” headphones. We corner Stepzilla in our morning meeting. It was clearly another thing that she was delaying telling us. I’m beginning to wonder if she’s being passive aggressive about the whole no-vacation thing from last month.

Stepzilla acts like she doesn’t know what we’re talking about when we bring it up, then blows it off like it’s no big deal. Apparently Carol was more concerned that it was a bigger issue and that what we really needed was to move, in the summer, six months from now. So that’s why she didn’t order them.

She’d much rather we suffer for six months, wade through another move, and end up with shittier offices, than have the problem fixed right away.

While she’s explaining why we won’t be getting any headphones, I butt in and ask, “So then, should we just go out and buy our OWN headphones?”

Stepzilla clarifies that we are not to buy our own headphones; that, rather, we either choose to have a new office or get headphones. She’s pressing us to decide and I make a point to say that we really need to think it over first. I was hoping she’d leave, but she doesn’t. She continues hovering until we decide that headphones NOW are better than a move six months from now.

Since Stepzilla has chosen to be horribly passive aggressive, I can almost guarantee that she hasn’t let Carol know that we’ve chosen headphones over a new office.