Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Thursday, Feb. 02, 2006 - 6:39 p.m.

Oh. My. God. Sybil is the rudest fucking human being I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. Ever. Words simply fail to describe the depths of horrifying hatred she spews across the office until it drips from the ceiling and oozes across every flat surface and down every wall. If you could see it, it would be thick, blackish, sickly, corrosive green slime, full of chunks of bubbling bracken releasing noxious miasma, seeping into every crevice, every cranny. Every nook and drawer would be filled with it, seeping out into an ever-deepening pool covering the entire floor. The whole place and everyone in it would be slowly sinking into swamp of festering viscous putrescence.

She is appallingly, astoundingly, mindbogglingly rude. Until this experience, if you had tried to describe this kind of atrociousness, I would have said you were exaggerating. Over-dramatizing. Playing to the crowd across the street. Given to wild hyperbole and playing it for mad effect, because no one - not a single person on this planet - could possibly so stupefyingly hideous.

I would owe you a serious apology.

If there is a person on this planet who could move me to actual murder for the sheer joy of watching the life slip from their eyes and listening to the breath hiss with agonizing slowness from their lips, it would be the fucking c*** I work for. I would not reach a finger to save her from being struck by a bus. Because that, my friends would be karma coming to call for her. And I don't want any of it attaching itself to me, because that is a stain you would never be free of, no matter how many good deeds you did in a hundred, thousand lifetimes. Just touching it would blight your soul forever. I thought I had known horrible people. I thought I knew what toxic was. Man, was I so wondrously, naively innocent.

I worked once with a woman named Suzanne Stevens. Suzanne was an artist in oral crucifixion. The woman worked in bile the way Renoir worked in oils and Mozart worked with music. She could spot an opening for the verbal 1-2 a mile away; hell, she could set you up for a slice across your jugular you never saw coming, and then ghost from the room before you could even begin to engage your brain in processing the dig and coming up with a response. Any response. Literally. She was miserable as all hell, and she never missed the opportunity to sink her venomous claws into a hapless passerby, hamstring them so they dropped into the muck, and then stand on their back while she licked the blood from her hands. I hated her. She was the very bane of my existence for nearly every single one of the 33 months I worked at that company. And she was a fucking cakewalk compared to Sybil.

I lost track of how many times I flipped Sybil off from behind my partition today. (or my car, or the hallway outside the office, or from inside the ladies' room) And the final straw came today, after a day filled with listening to her shit on every single person she dealt with for the entire day. I was doing her a fucking favor after all my work had been done, and a question came up, so I asked the post accountant (you know; the guy who told me not to put my overtime on my timecard), because he was the one who gave me the project to do. I was putting the timecodes into a show transcript to send to the network. Generally, this shit has to be accurate - everything you send to the network does - but the only tape with timecode burned into it was the one Sybil was working from, and godforfuckingbid I just use that one when she finished with it, so I was using the timer on the vcr. Which I noticed was slipping. If I had to pause or rewind, I was getting inaccurate times, and since you have to pause or rewind while you do that, and since shit going to the network has to be accurate and professional, I brought it to the attention of the accountant, who came to see what it was about, and then said well, just keep going, why was I concerned. I said well, it wasn't very accurate, so I thought he might want to know. He looked at me like I was high, shrugged, said "whatever," and walked off. So I put my headphones back on, but before I can put my fingers back on the keyboard, Sybil says she agrees with Adam so just do it. Which pissed me off, because a) I was already returning to it, and b) I don't need to be spoken to in a shitty tone like I am an errant 5 year old yanking things off the shelf at the drugstore while my mother is in a hurry and cranky. But all I said to her was "okay."

You would think that was the end of it, right?

Yeah, no. She goes on to tell me she doesn't get why I'm making a big deal out of it, that she needs the tape with the timecode, and I will just have to make do. Only she says it much more rudely, bitchily, and longwidedly. She drones on and on and on about how important SHE is and why the fuck am I interrupting her very important work and keeping her from getting important shit done. Which frankly, just shoved me over the edge. But I have gotten really good at keeping a neutral tone since working there, so I said, whatever, Sybil, if you don't care, I don't care. Well why are you making a big deal out of it, she says. I'm not making a big deal out of it, Sybil, I say. I merely asked. I don't care. At which point she interrupts me with how much work she has to do and that she has to leave in an hour, and she doesn't have time for this, so I raised my voice just enough to cut into her little speech without sounding angry and said, "Look, Sybil, if you don't care, neither do I. I only asked in case it was important; I really don't give a shit." To which she sniped "Well, why are we still talking about it, then," and I said in all truth, honesty, and matter-of-fact tone, "Because you won't shut up."

And no, I will not apologize, and no, I don't really care if it somehow costs me my job. And there's some uncertainty about my work tomorrow and when it should start, and frankly, I'm not going in until noon, and she can call and bitch and harangue at my answering machine all she fucking wants. I'll wander in there when I'm good and ready tomorrow, because I have just about fucking had it with her bullshit.

Peace out,
Katie

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