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...simply telling them to their faces to go fuck themselves. One of the things I'm proudest of in my life involved that.
I worked at the big, tall, glassy home office of a corporation of which you will have heard. I was a high-level grunt, not a manager, but experienced & technically advanced at my work. Still, I had to wear a tie. At the next cubicle was a young woman in her late twenties who did the same kind of work I did. Nice kid. We'll call her Phoebe. Our department worked regularly with a related department to produce educational materials for the company at large. Phoebe worked with Ostermyer, who had been hired to captain the most expensive & revered of the educational pieces.
Ostermyer... Well, I'm prejudiced, but he was a decidedly unsavory character. Mean face & voice, a veteran suck-up, back-stabber, coward & bully. A lunch-hour drinker. A classic example of the very worst kind of vicious, ambitious, corporate toady. He'd've been right at home in the court of the Borgias. He was the second or third choice for the position. His resume — this is a grown man in his late thirties, early forties we're talking about here — mentioned prominently that he had been named "Outstanding Young Man Of The Year" by his local golf club or something, back when he was in high school. There were also indications that he had been fired from at least one job for chasing young women around the desk, so to speak. A pathetic specimen, but dangerous.
Well, of course, Ostermyer predatorially fell in lust with Pheobe. They worked together anyway, but he was always in her cubicle, speaking in a creepy, smarmy voice, trying to be hip by twenty-something standards, standing too close to her chair. Ugh! It was nasty to be next to, I can tell you. She spurned his advances, & the situation devolved to the point where he was harassing her with dozens of drunken, salacious phone calls to her home every night. She complained to the higher-ups, who did absolutely nothing about it. In fact, they seemed to reward Ostermyer, putting him in a closed office down another hallway on the grounds of removing him from the immediate area. It went on for months. Morale in the department, never sky-high to begin with, plummeted. Ostermyer took to wearing copious amounts of cologne, leaving a scent trail wherever he went. Weird, huh? But true. A real psychopath, I think. He was at one point brought in to his superior's office & dressed down about the whole thing, to which he responded with defiance, actually grinding out a cigarette on the surface of his boss's hardwood desk. And still they didn't fire him!
Phoebe finally had enough. She & I happened to live in the same suburban town, although we didn't socialize. But she came over one Sunday. She couldn't take it any more, couldn't even stand to go in there the next day, & asked me to deliver her resignation letter for her. Reluctantly, I agreed.
The next day, the department was in a mixture of disgust & relief. The bad guys had won, but at least this particular misery was over. Ostermyer was nowhere to be seen. That evening I was going home, walking with the crowds through the home office's shiny steel & marble four-storey lobby, when who should show up walking toward me but Ostermyer. I had never made much of a secret of my opinion of him, but I think it still surprised him when I said, "Hey, Ostermyer, terrorize any small children lately?"
He stopped, turned, &, angry, said, "Hey pal, I think you better chill out..."
I looked him in the eye & said, "Hey, pal, I think you better go fuck yourself," then turned around & walked away, but not before I had the pleasure of seeing him swell up & turn purple.
I got home & called the department's uber-vice-president — someone's incompetent, perky, blonde niece — & related our exchange. Ostermyer was gone the next day. I was gone within six months myself, put on the bad apple list & swept out in one of their regular word-to-the-wise mass layoffs. Best thing that ever happened to me. I ain't never workin' on Maggie's Farm again!
I came across Ostermyer again, at least I'm pretty sure it was him, same name, on the Net. He had a Web site, this is the absolute truth, which offered his professional services in rewriting & polishing up the letters men wrote to women in response to Personals Ads. Fitting.
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