by Cathy Alter
Unfortunately, Bruno didn’t seem too wounded by my rejection. For weeks, he had been convinced that I doth protest too much, that no meant yes—and it had turned him on. If he had merely been a bad employee, I could have gone to my manager. Bruno’s shoddy output, grossly abbreviated workday, and misuse of company property for his own extracurricular propaganda (I had recently found a stack of his flyers, “A True Patriot Should Know the Truth,” clogging up our printer) was grounds enough for complaint. But I couldn’t exactly walk into my manager’s office, stand in front of his wall of ferrets, and announce, “I’ve recently ended an affair with Bruno, and he’s still trying to feel me up in my cubicle.”
I not only needed advice on how to deal with a crummy coworker, I also needed to know what to do if I just happened to have fucked that crummy coworker.
This was a job for Cosmo. Helen Gurley Brown practically wrote the book on office affairs. In her 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl, she breezily noted that a job “has everything to do with men anyway,” and filled her early magazine columns with strategies for how to impress the boss—and marry him as well.
It didn’t take me long to find what I was after. In “Take the Sting Out of a Breakup,” Cosmo editors had culled through Greg Behrendt’s latest book, It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken: The Smart Girl’s Breakup Buddy, and reprinted his six commandments of surviving a painful split. I have to admit, I was predisposed to disliking whatever Behrendt had to say. Last year for my birthday, a former coworker had given me his first book, He’s Just Not That Into You, after endlessly eavesdropping on my one-sided phone conversations about why so-and-so didn’t call me/buy me/do me anymore. At the time, I huffed about her overbearing gift and questioned why she hadn’t attached a string so I could wear it around my neck like a scarlet letter. Fearing I’d see myself all over every page, I had never even cracked open the binding.
But things were different now, and I was ready to admit that even though Bruno had always just not been that into me, the pain was still hanging around. The stress of working side by side, of fending him off, of not forgiving him or myself for the joylessness that went on in our cubicles, was only going to get worse unless I did something about it.
This time around, I eagerly embraced Behrendt’s wisdom.
COMMANDMENT 1:
DON’T SEE OR TALK TO HIM FOR 60 DAYS
Even though I couldn’t totally “he-tox” from Bruno since I had to see him almost daily (the days he chose not to call in sick, that is), I could easily get away with not talking to him. Email is a wonderful invention, after all. Any communication that couldn’t be shot out into the ether could be contained on a Post-it or relayed by my manager (who was secretly, tragically in love with Bruno and took any opportunity to pull Bruno into his office for a meeting).
COMMANDMENT 2:
TOSS STUFF THAT REMINDS YOU OF HIM
“It’s crucial that you transform your place into recovery central,” wrote Behrendt. I had already packed away the blimp photo, but I still had one souvenir from my time with Bruno.
During one of his trips to Argentina, probably before boarding the plane to come home, Bruno must have had the anomalous desire to buy me a gift. I say this because, from the looks of it, he bought it at the airport. It’s a metal cup covered in white leather, with the Argentine flag embroidered across the center. With the cup came a long metal straw with a perforated hollow spoon bulb at the end. I had unwrapped the straw/spoon first, and my initial reaction was to think it was some kind of drug paraphernalia. Later when Bruno visited my cubicle, he explained that it was for drinking maté, a traditional Argentine drink that looks and tastes like cut grass. Afraid to leave this token of our relationship on my desk at work, I brought it home and used it as a pencil holder.
Now, looking at the flowerlike arrangement of pens, markers, and multiple scissors bursting from the cup, I felt stupid for hanging on to this hideous desk accoutrement for so long. Behrendt was right—this last-minute impulse buy was still acting, according to him, as an “altar to your failed relationship.” Not anymore. I found a brightly painted vase from Czechoslovakia for my pencils and tossed the maté set into the garbage.
COMMANDMENT 3:
ENLIST A BREAKUP BUDDY (BUB)
This commandment was also easy to follow. Dave, my gay work boyfriend, already knew all about my fast times with Bruno. Dave missed hearing my bawdy tales of cubicle sex and had transferred this resentment into an even deeper hatred than mine for Bruno. For Dave, who managed our company’s human resources publications, Bruno was only good for one thing, and it certainly wasn’t creating cover art for Dave’s products. Bruno was a great punch line with a funny accent.
“Your BUB’s new job?” asked Behrendt rhetorically. “To talk you down when you’re struck by an uncontrollable urge to call your ex or stalk him or boil his pet bunny.”
Dave’s new job? To make me feel better about myself by making fun of someone else.
The next day, I got my “ass in motion” by practically sprinting to work (COMMANDMENT 4), and didn’t let “my appearance slide” by wearing a tight pencil skirt and sheer blouse (COMMANDMENT 5). Then I followed the third commandment and picked up the phone and made Dave the job offer.
“Cat, Cat,” said Dave in his best Bruno voice, “I accept in the name of my country!” Making fun of Bruno’s national pride was already standard shtick for us.
“Oh comrade Dave,” I replied like a Telemundo soap star, “If only Che were alive to see you now.”
Having an ally like Dave would be key. Not only was it comforting to have someone to bear witness to, it was also a small measure of protection, since I didn’t know how Bruno would react to the silent treatment. What little I did know of Bruno’s early days was that his father had died when Bruno was only a few weeks old and that his mother, who slept in the same room as her son when she visited from Argentina, thought Bruno was Jesus incarnate. Bruno was used to the warmth of being in his own spotlight. What would happen when I killed the lights?
Showtime!
Like clockwork, Bruno arrived for work at eleven, strolling down the hall like he was window-shopping along the Champs-Elysées. He paused by my desk and greeted me as usual. “Hi, Cat.”
I regarded my computer screen as if it were revealing the eighth wonder of the world. Bruno hesitated for a moment before slinking off, whistling something low and tuneless.
Later that day, Bruno showed up with a flyer for me to proofread. I gestured for him to leave it on the end of my desk. Taking the pages out of his hands was too much communication for me and would have felt like I was accepting an offering. Thinking I was going to attend to the many typos I would inevitably find in his layout, Bruno stood there expectantly. When he realized I was not going to jump to, he pushed the flyer a few inches in my direction. “Cat?” he said quietly.
I stood up so fast he jumped. Then I slid by him, turning my body so that I was showing him my back, and took the elevator up to Dave’s floor.
“This is going to be fun,” I told him and then sat down and reported every gleeful detail.
It actually was fun. I marveled at how efficiently I could conduct business with Bruno without uttering a single word. If I had to check on the status of one of our projects, I’d send him an email that did the asking for me.
During the course of the week, Operation Freeze Out backfired only once. While Bruno was taking one of his obscenely long lunches, Todd brought me a marked-up document, one of Bruno’s handiworks.
“I’m about to go into a meeting,” he explained. “So when Bruno comes back from lunch, I’ll need you to go over all these changes with him.”
As Todd went through the revisions, I jotted each fix down on a jumbo Post-it, drew an arrow, and stuck it next to the mistake. When my manager left for his meeting, I laid the Post-it-laden folder across Bruno’s keyboard and took my own obscenely long lunch.
The next morning, there was a Post-it note smacked on my com
puter screen. It read, in red, “See me now!”
Out of all the people in my department, I knew Todd felt most comfortable dealing with me. We had become a little friendly out of the office, I think owing to his partner Jim’s affection for me. In the office, Todd relied on my reputation for being well liked along the hierarchical ladder to help mitigate his reputation for being a bit of a joke. He was only a year older than me and often seemed both surprised and annoyed to find himself in the position of authority.
“Did you go over those changes with Bruno?” he asked, handing me the same folder that had been on Bruno’s desk the day before. It was untouched, my Post-it notes still secured in the exact same place.
“Yes,” I half-lied.
“He said you never talked to him.” Todd bore a striking resemblance to a better-dressed Pee-wee Herman, and I always had the urge to say something stupid like, “I know you are but what am I?” whenever I felt him challenging me.
“He hadn’t come back by the time I left for lunch,” I began, thinking up the excuse as I went along. “I didn’t want to waste any time, so I just left the folder on his desk with enough direction for him to do the job without my supervision.” Then, just to divert the focus even further, I added, “I didn’t think I was supposed to be his manager.”
I’m sure normal bosses wouldn’t have put up with this kind of nonsense. But Todd was different. He was a pushover. Not only would I slip out of today’s deserved admonishment, Bruno would continue to escape them as well. The last time Todd tried to discipline Bruno for his late arrival time, Bruno had yelled, “Manage yourself!” and threw an apple at Todd’s computer.
Until things soured with Bruno, I never really paid attention to the screwy corporate culture around me—I was too busy getting laid and working on my freelance writing. I was also benefiting greatly from a compressed workweek, supposedly putting in longer hours in order to get every Wednesday off. My boss left every day at 4:50 to catch his train home to Baltimore; I left at 4:51.
Walking back to my desk, it occurred to me that Bruno wasn’t the only thing wrong with my job. I recalled an article I had read in Marie Claire the night before called “Your Weirdest Boss Dilemmas Solved!” In it, Kristen Kemp highlighted six uncomfortable office scenarios and offered sample scripts, “face-saves,” for maneuvering through each one.
The mortification was all fairly standard business:
You’re trapped in an elevator with the company’s CEO. And she says hi.
MAKE IT THROUGH: Respond to her hello with something basic: Hi, how are you today? said with assurance.
MAKE A SPLASH: If she smiles or keeps the conversation going, drop your name. Tell her, I’m Becky Smith, and I’ve always admired you. I really enjoy working here.
Here’s how this situation would have played out at my company:
I’m on the elevator with my company’s president and he says hi.
MAKE IT THROUGH: I say hello and ask him how his ex-wife is doing. (My friend and former coworker knew her, and we had all spent a Saturday wandering around a crafts show. She was a lovely, loose-lipped woman who didn’t mind dishing about her no-good ex.)
MAKE A SPLASH: I say hello and ask if he appreciated the irony in a recent lawsuit where our company paid out one million dollars in damages after being sued for sexual harassment, even though our company publishes Sexual Harassment Report, a weekly journal whose sole mission is to help companies not get sued in the first place. “Don’t you read your own work?” I say, stepping off the elevator.
The more I thought about my fellow employees, the more I realized the fucked-up-ness rained down all the way from the top. For every one of Kemp’s sticky situations, I had one of my own.
1. The coworker directly behind you has had a disgustingly productive cough for six months straight. She refuses your gentle suggestions that she should see a doctor or at least call in sick and allow you to get through one day without listening to her death rattle.
2. The coworker next to the coughing queen has been planning a trip to Australia for over a month. As part of her research, she has spent days printing out the entire Internet, using up all the toner when she knows full well that no one in our department knows how to correctly load new toner into the machine.
3. The coworker down the hall passes by your desk at least ten times a day on his way to the bathroom and wants so desperately to say hello and announce his I’m-here-ness, but is so socially awkward, all he does is sigh like the weight of the world rests upon his ability to edit books with titles like The Sedona Principles: Best Practices, Recommendations & Principles for Addressing Electronic Document Production, Annotated Version.
4. Your friend in the legal division, after gleefully discovering that your company’s HR handbook has no formal policy about drinking on the job, keeps a bottle of whiskey in the bottom drawer of his desk. Every day at 4:00 PM, he and his cubicle mate pour themselves a stiff one and flagrantly toast their manager.
5. Another Argentine coworker who is not Bruno but is as equally in love with the idea of getting something for nothing frequently calls in late because he has scraped up roadkill—most recently, an opossum—and needs to head back home before coming to work so he can clean it up and refrigerate it for tonight’s supper.
6. And, unbelievable as it may sound, a coworker down the hall takes nude sponge baths from the middle sink in the restroom. Her washing is random and unpredictable, so one day you might find her standing naked in front of the mirror, her clothes casually draped over a bathroom stall, and the next day, you might find her applying lipstick, fully dressed in head-to-toe floral.
Naturally, as a writer, I knew my nutty coworkers would eventually wind up on the page (and so they have). But even fruitcakes have a shelf life. As I became more and more attuned to areas in my personal life that weren’t working, I realized there was another sector that needed fixing, or scrapping entirely.
Bruno was definitely reacting to my silent treatment—just not in the way I had intended. My inattention had caused him to desperately seek the reverse, in an escalating manner. At first, when I’d drop off work for him, he’d take a finger and lightly draw circles around the crotch of his pants. When this didn’t elicit the desired response, he began to strum his crotch like a banjo. When this display failed to pique my interest, he resorted to exposing himself, an act that had once worked so marvelously for him.
COMMANDMENT 6.
NO BACKSLIDING
“Sure, it’s tempting to hook up one last time,” read Behrendt’s sixth commandment. “Maybe you convince yourself that you need carnal closure. But that kind of relapse doesn’t just put the brakes on your progress; it sends you reeling to the bottom of that hellish pit of pain you’ve been working so hard to claw your way out of.”
This was the easiest commandment of all to honor. The kind of closure I needed was not carnal and would never come from Bruno. It was the storybook ending that explained why I had allowed myself to be mistreated for so long by such a loathsome creature. And I was the only one who could write that conclusion.
About two weeks into my vow of silence, I entered Bruno’s cubicle and found him staring at his computer screen, jerking off like a monkey. At first I thought he had downloaded some porn, but then I realized I could see my own reflection in his blank screen. As my plastic frog had once warned me to stop my cubicle wrongdoings, the image of me playing across his darkened monitor had alerted Bruno to begin his. He had been lying in wait, gun in hand.
“Cat, take a look at this,” said Bruno.
“No, thanks,” I said coolly. “I’ve already seen it.”
I had broken the first commandment after only sixteen days. But did I have any other choice? What if Bruno continued turning more and more twisted and mad, like the Latin version of Howard Hughes? What if he went from masturbating in his cubicle to showing up at the front door of our apartment wearing nothing but shoes made out of our Dear Subscriber letters? What if he told Karl everyth
ing?
It was time to consult with my Breakup Buddy. “This isn’t working,” I told Dave.
“Of course it’s not,” he said. “You can’t insult a narcissist. Bruno is taking your silent treatment as a challenge. Rebuffing him is just feeding his ego, not shrinking it,” he explained. “This is all light banter for him.”
“What should I do?”
Dave gave me one of his I’m-glad-you’ve-finally-asked-me looks and laughed like a mad scientist.
“Turn into the entire cast of Dynasty and become the biggest bitch Bruno has ever seen.”
Dave was right. Being ambivalent was too soft-shoed a strategy. Bruno only allowed for intense emotions. I could either fuck him or fuck him over. As it happened, I had an article on this exact topic. “Evil chick behavior is on the rise,” began the title deck to Cosmo’s “How to Handle a Bitch.” Luckily, Freya Williams offered a plan of attack. “In order not to get torn to shreds,” she wrote, “you need to know what to do when one of them bares her fangs.”
Actually, I was more interested in picking up a few tips on how to be the flesh-shredding canine. I planned on turning this article on its head, reading it as a roadmap to becoming a bitch instead. A pull quote on the article’s first page gave the following statistic: “Female bullies choose female targets 87% of the time.” I planned on being part of the smaller percentage, taking aim at Bruno with both barrels loaded.
First, I had to figure out how to be one. I mean, I knew how to be bitchy—just ask my mother—but my style was predictable and one-dimensional and consisted of me sounding like a teenage girl who has just been told to get off the phone. But maybe all this time, my inability to be a full-on bitch has been dependent on a reason to behave like one. Williams’s article shed even more light. “These days, you can’t buy a coffee, exchange some clothes, or get through a day at work without running into a vicious chick with a chip on her shoulder.” That was the key to the bitch kingdom—I had never had a chip on my shoulder. Until now.