This is What I Post When I'm not Feeling Well

Mandy was a girl who loved Marilyn Manson the way some people love the Grateful Dead. She would travel with her boyfriend, whom I never met but about whom I was always curious, to cities all across the country just to see Marilyn play. She would come to work the next day, raving about how great it was. We didn't believe her.

When Mandy was in high school, they paid her 5 bucks a day to show up. It was some sort of city program for "at-risk" youth. Was this a good use of our tax dollars? Nobody knows.

Mandy was about 5'3", 300 lbs. Five bucks a day buys a lot of cheesburgers. She had straight jet black hair that stretched to the middle of her bulbous back. The black hair blended nicely with her clothes, which were also black. I never saw her in any other color. She was also queen of the 10- minute smokebreak -- sometimes taking as many as 7 in a single day. Needless to say, she smelled like a giant ashtray. That smoke would get up in that dyed hair and just hang out for a while -- yick.

Mandy was loud, too, in the special way only combative girls with floor-level self-esteem can be loud. She got on everyone's nerves, and never seemed to realize it. There was this guy named Chad at work who spoke his mind constantly. Chad and Mandy didn't get along, and would argue loudly over the stupidest things. It got so bad that the head of our department had an hour-long face-to-face with them in his office, and when they came out they were even whiter than usual and were being very quiet. They were nice to each other for about a week after that.

Mandy liked to make the office coffee, because she liked it strong. She put two packets in there for every one pot of water, and didn't seem to notice that everyone but her didn't like it. If someone else made coffee before she could (as people often would do just to prevent her from ruining it), Mandy would complain loudly about the fact that it tasted like water.

At some point the business took a turn for the worse and people were being laid off. One Friday afternoon, Mandy was called into a conference room by one of my 3 bosses and when she came out, she was crying. She kept saying, "No, don't you dare do this to me!" "You can't!" But they could, and they did. The bosses joked with one another as she left the building with her box of stuff. They were practically singing, "Ding, dong, the witch is dead..." Everyone else just kept working, pretending not to hear what was going on and quite frankly happy it wasn't them. I told her to take care, feeling really lame.

I took over almost all the work she did and still had time to spare. That should tell you how little of an asset she was to the company. If anyone ever deserved to be fired, it was Mandy. She came into work exactly once after that sobbing incident, to let us know that she had landed on her feet and was now managing a gas station. I often wonder if she's still alive, and if so, what hospital she's staying in and why.