Ella bit her lip and watched Anne Marie's back as she walked down the corridor. They'd just had a hour long meeting about Cyndi, and Anne had nodded compassionately as Ella went down her laundry list of Cyndi's inadequacies. Cyndi had been supervised by a senior programmer assigned to Anne Marie's office, and that senior programmer had subsequently been let go. When Anne Marie's staff realized that none of them knew enough about what Cyndi's duties were to supervise her, Anne Marie asked Ella to take over supervision of Cyndi and the programming responsibilities for Anne Marie's office.

"You sent her to me for evaluation, didn't you?" Ella asked Anne Marie after she'd suggested that Ella was being too hard on Cyndi. "I've tested her on a wide range of assignments, and she came up wanting on all of them."

"Uh-huh," Anne Marie muttered, still nodding compassionately accompanied by her best "I hear ya" body language. "So what sorts of development opportunities do we have to provide to bring Cyndi up to speed?"

"Why do we have to do anything? For pity's sake, we've been paying her to program computers for three years now, and she just can't do it. Let's pay her for what she can do ... we just need to figure out what that is." Ella tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice, but it was no use. She "didn't suffer fools gladly," to use an antiquated phrase, and she'd been handed a prize one in Cyndi.

"Well, now, we do have an obligation here," Anne Marie said in that placating tone that told Ella her mind was already made up. "After all, her previous supervisor accepted her performance as satisfactory. It isn't fair for us to just pull the rug out from under her now. Cyndi has a family, after all."

Ella closed her eyes, bit her lip and took a deep breath. "In the first place, what wasn't fair was for her to accept a pay check for work she wasn't doing. She's lucky we're not charging her with fraud. And in the second place, she's paid for her performance on the job, not for the fertility of her womb off it." She was beginning to lose her temper and knew it would be lost on Anne Marie. Anne Marie tried to live the legend of the ever-nurturing earth mother, and Ella didn't think she was even capable of being angry with anyone.

To Ella, Anne Marie epitomized the negative stereotype some people had about professional women, and she resented it. She resented Cyndi, too, but for a different reason. Cyndi was sneaky, lazy and overly impressed with her own intelligence. That was bad enough. But the one failing that Ella couldn't stand was Cyndi's stock in trade -- no matter what happens, blame the problem on anyone or anything other than yourself.

She could read the writing on the wall. The earth mother had decided that it wasn't time to push her child from the nest yet. So for the four weeks that Cyndi was scheduled to stay in her rotational assignment, Ella would have to find a way to keep her from screwing anything major up. That meant finding enough busy work to keep her out of the way, but she could do it. Cyndi's attitude was getting worse by the day, and Ella's lips were becoming painfully sore from continually being bitten.

With one week to go, Ella scheduled Cyndi's exit interview. But a half an hour before they were supposed to meet, the system crashed, and Ella and the rest of her staff were consumed with trying to repair the problem. Cyndi was told to man the phone, which was fairly ringing off the hook with disgruntled users demanding to know when the system would be back online.

Ella was on hold with the software vendor's support technician when she realized that the main line wasn't being answered. She put the technician on hold and went outside to see why Cyndi wasn't answering the phone. Cyndi was no where to be found. She asked the nearest secretary if she knew what was going on. The secretary told her that Cyndi made a remark about the fact that she felt answering telephones was beneath her and was going outside to have a cigarette.

Her timing was impeccable. Ella had to deal with the instant crisis and didn't have any effort to spare on disciplining Cyndi. She returned to the computer room and helped her staff bring the system back up. When they were through and came out of the computer room, Cyndi was sitting at her desk with a sullen expression on her face. "I won't be able to meet with you this afternoon," she told Ella, "my bus comes in five minutes." Ella instinctively bit her lip again, wincing from the pain.

"Not to worry," Ella told her pleasantly. "It really isn't necessary that we meet at all. And, by the way, you don't need to report here any longer. You can return to Anne Marie's office tomorrow. I won't be needing you."

Cyndi sat at the desk with her mouth open. "But ... but ... all of that work has been transferred here. What will I do over there?"

Ella laughed out loud, a huge smile on her swollen lips. The temptation was simply too overpowering to be resisted. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"

Props to the CHPercolator List for the prompt
February 12, 2001
905 words