The Best of July - Horror Stories From Advertising

Oh, you know you want to... read on for happy horror goodness.

As of August, I will have spent the longest consecutive amount of time employed at one company since I began working 14 years ago. Surprisingly it will be with the company that after my first week in this building, I wrote the the staffing agency : "These people are insane. I have never worked for a more immoral management team in my entire professional experience." Aside from my initial instincts, another telling sign that I should have run away was that the girl who was supposed to train me quit at lunchtime on the day I was hired. Later I found out she was in a recovery program for under-age alcoholics (19 and drunk all the time, yeah baby!). So the other gal and I made due... she had worked for the agency for 2 months, but was incredibly neurotic and should have probably been locked in a mental health facility. Sometimes she'd just scream for no reason then run into the bathroom with her purse and not come out for an hour. Sure enough she gets put in the hospital for drug-treatment... morphine being her vice of choice. I stuck it out as the staffing company rushed 4 more girls through the department. Finally, The Boss hired RJ through the recommendation of an account rep, and here we are nearly 2 years later still working hand-in-hand.

In all this time I have observed my company continue to use the staffing agency for all of their new-hire needs... and am in awe that they keep going back for more abuse. Our accounting department has had turn-over that I liken to a McDonald's during summer break. At last count they have flushed through 9 people to fill 4 positions since January. Through it all remains the department manager and a whiney little sausage-fingered troll (who shall further be called Frogger). Due to her commitment to the company, the accounting manager will not give Frogger further responsibility because she is in fear of losing her one long-staying employee. Sadly she is blind to the fact that Frogger is the reason everyone quits. "Um, I have all these pages from FedEx with daily totals, but I don't have the page showing the weekly total for all of them." "I know. Our printer broke and we had to wait for a replacement." "But how am I going to know the total for the week without that final page?" "You could use a calculator and make your own totals sheet using the numbers from the daily pages." "Yeah, but, well I guess I could do that even though I've never had to do it before." Are you that fucking stoopid? I can't get your pages from the weekly report because the file was lost when you were too lazy to TEACH yet another new hire how to pull your documents properly. NOT MY PROBLEM. "Also, I need someone to do an inventory count for me. I don't do that anymore." I guess Frogger's fat ass can't squat low enough to count up items in their shrink-wrapped packages of 10. OK, I'll do your job... which is the primary complaint of every new hire, by the way. "She won't teach me anything. She just complains to our manager that she's too overworked, then she spends the afternoon on MSN Messenger to her friends. She talks on the phone, takes 2-hour lunches, shows up to work late and leaves 30 minutes early every day! How can I take this job seriously when people get away with crap like this?" I just want to tell them that when a manager finds a pet, everyone else may as well not exist...

And speaking of favorites, let's talk again about Thongie. She is a manager's pet. Thongie has her head so far up the ass of her manager that the woman craps rhinestone earrings on a daily basis. Having been a manager before coming back to Advertising, I think it is good for employees and managers to spend time out of the office together once or twice a year just for the sake of team-building. What is happening with Thongie and her manager is just plain unprofessional for any office environment. Recently, Thongie's manager had a sleep-over for just the two of them while the manager's husband was out-of-town. Now no one would have known except Thongie made it a point to brag at a team-building event recently. This week Thongie has been giggling around the office that she has been invited to the manager's private Jewelry Party this weekend... and Thongie is the only one to be invited from the building. All 13 other people in Thongie's department working under that manager know about it and don't fucking care. Early July everyone was thinking Thongie would get fired because she has used up all her sick time and vacation time with random thought-up illness, and of course she wasn't working more than 30 hours a week because she's special and doesn't need to. As of today, the entire department has lost all respect for Thongie and the manager... they look like members of a private asshole club that no one else cares to join.