Inblognito

The Ballad of Sad Howie

I watched someone implode last week.

It would have been sad, had the motherfucker not metaphorically pissed all over me, repeatedly, during the months prior to his dramatic journey towards the postal. As things stand, well. I have to say that, once the drama was over and the dust had settled, I was glad to see the feckless git out of the office. Let me tell you a little about it.

Said git - we'll call him Howie - had been working for my company for twenty years, much longer than yours truly ever thought about staying anywhere. Unmarried, with no prospects of a relationship, Howie is pushing fifty, a Big Ole Boy at six-foot-three, morbidly obese, obsessed with cars n' racin', his family dying off around him, totally unable to fathom the concept of "people skills". Howie lived and breathed our Product, was an old-fashioned company-man. Honestly, through sheer lack of anything else to do, I think, Howie became the number one expert in his field in North America. He knows Queenie's widgets like no other man alive. I'll give him that much.

But - and this is a big but - Howie knows nothing else. When he spent all his time out on the road, dealing with clients and giving them the full-monty of his considerable technical acumen, Howie was a major asset to the organization. During the odd week that Howie spent at home, however, he was a nightmare on wheels. Like a bull in a china shop, he'd blunder around the office and fuck up everything he touched - pissing off the secretaries, crashing his computer with viruses (he'd open anything, any attachment, from anybody, he even bought from spammers), screwing up Inventory and Receivables by sending out widget spares without processing invoices, fucking with Accounts Payable by ordering shit from vendors without ever bothering with the mundane banality of the Purchase Order. He was a blithering fool behind a desk. We kept him on the road as much as possible.

If that sounds mean, know that Howie was a true trial to love. We kept him on the road because he was ornery, obnoxious, and obstreperous. Howie also delighted in pointing out other people's mistakes, which made him persona non grata to a whole bunch of folks, as you might imagine. For example:

About a month ago, he and I had to work together on a very large technical overhaul for a major customer - he provided the specs and I wrote the copy, sixty freaking pages of it. Just before the package was sent to the client for review, days prior to sending in the little guys in the green uniforms (and an invoice for $850,000) Howie decided he needed another edit. So, he prints out the document and lumbers off to his office with it.

Fat boy comes flying back down the hall with his big ass, ten minutes later, huffing and puffing, face red and shiny. "Man, Queenie! You really fucked it up this time!!" he brays, standing in the tiny slip of hallway that separates my office from that of The President, old S.W.

"What did I fuck up, Howie?" I ask, as calmly as possible, looking at him with a deliberately limpid gaze.

"This whole thing! There's tons of shit missing! I don't know what the fuck you were thinking!" And he goes stomping back up the hall.

I turn to open the document from the server, and ensure that it is, indeed, intact. Would be just like Howie to delete the damn thing. Sure enough, it's all there. So I sigh, push my pile of papers backwards, look in on old S.W., shrug, and saunter down the hall.

"Howie..." I catch up with him getting coffee. "Just what exactly makes you think I fucked up? I mean, what do you think is missing?"

He looks at me, his fat, red face taut and slick as a plum, and sneers. "The last column of figures! It comes out nowhere near what we talked about! Half of it is missing!" He waves the sheaf of papers in my face.

I snatch it from his ham-hand. "Let me see this, Howie," I said, quickly flipping to the back of the presentation, noting that his last page number reads 54.

I look up at him steadily, as old S.W. walks in for a cuppa. "Howie - you're missing the last six pages. Did you leave them on the printer?"

"Is that what you were on about?" asks old S.W. "I was on the phone with a distributor in Osaka. Couldn't hear myself think. Don't cuss so loud, Howie," growls old S.W., glaring, as she got in and out with her coffee.

I walk back to the shared-printer area - where Howie prints - and sure enough, there were the last six pages, right there on the printer, where he'd left them.

I said nothing. I picked 'em up, handed 'em to Howie with a look that would freeze water, and went back to my office. No apology was forthcoming, of course - Howie would see that he had done nothing wrong in the situation.

But you see, that's just an example. Howie picked on everybody. He made one of my most hardened tech guys cry this one time, out in Paramus, a former enlisted Marine, for God's sakes. But - he was good at what he did, so we tolerated him, for a long time.

Howie, though, has had a bug up his ass for months now. We've all seen him getting worse and worse by the day.

Understand that our company's undergone something of a shakeup in the past few months, and old S.W., while she's been second-in-command for nearly twenty years, is a relatively new President for us. Ever since old S.W. took the reins when Mister Perfect (my old boss) retired, Howie's been staying in the office, trying to help "oversee" things. He's been agitated, acting like he's the "real" boss and S.W. is an interloper, like he can take The Company by coup de etat. He talks shit behind S.W.'s back. He challenges her decisionmaking, publicly, in meetings, and belittles her math skills. He's also incredibly, incredibly mean to the boss's daughter, who does our bookkeeping. S.W. has borne all this with far more grace than I should have, but she's a very controlled and professional individual. She's tried to reason with him, to no avail.

Me, I think he thought that he'd be tapped to run the place when Mister Perfect left, even though he has no management experience, no human resources experience, and everyone hates him. He holds old S.W. in high contempt because of rank jealousy, even though she's doing a fine job - we have more money in the bank than we have in years, our customer-base is growing, she's investing in training and technology for the employees. Despite it all, Howie's been gunning for her. Said it was a "blasphemy" that old S.W. should run The Company. Personally, I think the fact that old S.W. is a woman has a lot to do with it. Howie has always had a problem with female employees, which have been few and far between in our technical-industrial field, until fairly recently. Now, after a lifetime of quiet disdain for the whole sex, he has to take orders from one? At any rate, I know it rankled, because he said as much, in full hearing of most of the office.

Last week, it all came to a head. Howie just freaked, over the dumbest thing. Old S.W.'s daughter - who does our bookkeeping - had been out sick all week long. Terrible case of the flu or strep or some such - she came in Friday before last and was promptly ordered back home to bed, due to her fever and shakes. We'd seen her sick. Hell, I'd seen her vomit. Her kids got it, her husband got it, and well, dammit, she had to stay home. For some unknown reason, this stuck in Howie's craw bigtime. He's tormented this girl - who works hard and is incredibly intelligent, a real asset - for months, with his sheer assholery, and during our Friday meeting, he just blew.

We were discussing Christmas vacation, who's got to man the place and when. S.W. is proposing a generous plan - Wednesday through the weekend off, both weeks, when Howie explodes on old S.W., in front of the whole office, about her daughter being sick. He demands that every employee except S.W.'s daughter be let off, with pay, for the entire two-week Christmas holiday. Howie wants her there alone, he says, since she's such a slack employee.

"She's never here!" he bellows, sending a shiver through the teak of the conference room table. "She deserves to have to stay here and work during the holidays! She's been laying out all week," he roars, turning a stink-look on old S.W.

"Howie," says old S.W., a dangerous glint in her eye, "that's none of your business to decide. Charity has been sick as a dog, she's not laying out. Besides, she's an hourly employee, anyway. She doesn't get paid when she's not here. Anyhow, she can't do much here alone. She doesn't know widgets; she can't help with technical issues or anything. She's just the bookkeeper. We're taking Wednesday through Friday off, both days."

This sends Howie into a rage. "Is she being paid for her time? All this time she's not here? Is that legal? I want to see your payroll records," he says, trembling all over, taking his oversize coffee mug and heading for S.W.'s office. "Come on! Come here!" he says to S.W., like a dog. "Show me. Prove to me that you're not paying her for laying out." Just hateful.

At this point, competent, cool, and professional S.W. was having no more. Buh-bye, Howie. We had to call security to get him to leave.

On the way out, Howie screamed at S.W. "I hope you've considered the consequences of your actions! I hope you're prepared to shut this place down! You can't run this place without me! You know nothing!"

Okay...I take it back. It is sad. The guy is an asshole, pure-T, but he has nothing now. Nobody. No job, no future without The Company. We make the only widgets in town, and unless we employ him, it will be extremely difficult for him to find alternate employment in a related field. Unless he farms himself out as a consultant...which I doubt he has the sales ability to do. I think he's going home to drink himself to death, or to stock up on ammo, if you know what I mean, one of the two. Either alternative is unpalatable.

I think I'm playing Secret Santa to the boss's daughter. I think I'm giving her a little .22 pistol and some shooting lessons this holiday season. And I ain't hanging around the office by myself any time soon, either. Nuh-uh.

Posted by Queenie at December 21, 2004 09:38 PM | TrackBack