Here’s to you, The Storm – A (hopefully) More Complete Description

So The Storm is really gone.  It actually happened.  Still reeling with disbelief I went back to work on the Wednesday following Black Friday (the day she was canned) and there was nary a trace of her.  Her account and password had been deleted so I couldn’t snoop around on her computer to see what she’d been up to before she left.  All that was left of her were tonnes of boxes of pens, highlighters, and Liquid Paper which she had been hoarding in the cupboards above her desk.  There were literally 5-10 boxes of 20 pens and about 5 boxes of 10 highlighters, 5 boxes of Liquid Paper, boxes of paperclips, a number of staplers, and more – quite weird.

I realize now (you always realize what you’ve missed once they’re gone) that there are a number of things about The Storm that I’ve failed to write about on this site, and that some of these things are really worth mentioning in order to understand this woman.  In the comments section of the last post, SW said he thought The Storm may have been reading my blog, and was thus gaining inside info into the goings on at work, like Rita’s exit letter, and I can understand how someone could think that if they didn’t know how out of touch The Storm was.

To start I think I need to give a physical description:  She stood about 5″10, and was quite large, like she was probably pushing 220 pounds (probably less, I’m always terrible at estimating women’s weight) but woreit very well.  She wasn’t doughy but certainly had some girth to her.  For a long while she had really long hair, and her face was slightly feline – a friend at work nicknamed her The Lion (The Cowardly Lion after she canned him while he was home sick so that she could avoid all confrontation).

She wore these really long trench coats of varying colours, one of them was actually Black Matrix-like pleather.  She wore dress pants every day and 80s styled power suits once in a while, in colours like bronze, wine, or maybe a powder blue.  When she wasn’t wearing a padded-shoulder number she was wearing flowing blouses, she did a lot to disguise her girth, and these flowing blouses were always in swirling designs that would play upon a single colour.  They would be orange and black, but all swirled around.  With black pants.

Sometimes she’d wear a turtle neck with a padded-shoulder blazer over top.   She always had a number of earrings in her ears and they were almost always dangling.  She would pull her long hair back and link it to her hair on top with one ponytail, and would then give it another ponytail further down her back.  I hope that makes sense. Her hair was dyed a rusty orange-ish colour and she really did look like a sickly male version of the king of the beasts.  One day, she even wore a swirly orange blouse with a sleeping lion covering her whole back.  The coincidence was almost too much, like she knew that she was known as The Lion and wanted to let us know, in her passive-aggressive way, that she was aware of all that went on around the office.  Then she got her hair all chopped off, or a lot of it anyway (it was nearing her waistline) and had a kind of side part 80s cut like this:

All the same length – still worn with the old outfits, so the overall effect was much the same.  She had kind of crazy wide-open eyes, a weird grin, too much make-up, and incredibly long and elaborate fingernails.  She was an eyesore yet she must have put so much effort into her outfits and still looked completely out of touch and dated.  Kind of sad really.

Two other important parts: She loved dogs, and used to moonlight as a dog trainer.  She referred to her one dog (she had two until this job but had to let one go because she just couldn’t care for both of them with such a demanding job) as her baby, and would sometimes refer in the first person to her and the dog as “us”.  She also wore a headset whenever she was on the phone.  And I mean that. Whenever she was on the phone.  As soon as it rang, even if you were sitting beside her teaching her how to do something, she’d say “Just a minute”, then with her long nails and excessive hair she’d try and wrangle this phone-headset onto her big head.  It would take a while, sure, but she didn’t care.  The person on the other end would have just about given up – thinking she wasn’t there – when she’d finally get everything worked out and say “hello” into her mouthpiece which would be suspended right where it should be: in front of her heavily lipsticked lips.  When it was a 10 second phone call, she’d go about it with some sort of dignity.  She would go to the trouble of wrestling the headset off of her and put it back down on its holder which was right beside her phone, and she would turn back to you like “where were we?”.  That was one of the baffling things about her.  She acted like what she was doing was perfectly natural.  Yet, if you said something that was the slightest bit off, she would attack you with a “OOOhhh Kay, Rita, whatever that’s all about” or something similarly sarcastic.

It was things like that: sarcastic comments, passive aggressive behaviour, firing anyone that didn’t show her the respect she thought she deserved, her petty comments, her thinking she was always right when she very seldom was, her dishonesty, and her general smugness that made this pathetic woman worthy of ire.  Usually you’d think she’d be deserving of pity – but she certainly wasn’t.

So, this is my memorial (I realize that I’ve referred to her like she’s dead throughout this, just because I don’t see her any more, pretty selfish right?) to the Storm.  I hope to never see her again.

~ by beenhavingsomethoughts on November 27, 2008.