A Tale Of Office Revenge: Email Never Lies

Over the months of working here, I’ve become pretty damn good at my job. I’m nice, I have Southern charm, and I pick things up pretty easily. I’m given loads of responsibility, way outside my pay grade, and was even asked to accompany the C-suite execs to a market show, which is a pretty covetable trip. Whereas, when I first started, I hated everyone, I’ve made some friends and really only grew to loathe one person – we’ll call her Jessica*. Jessica is just a mess of a person. Her life is in shambles, but the type of shambles that she lives comfortably in while everyone else gossips about it in the break room behind her back. Everyone hates her, except a woman we’ll call Tiffany. While everyone hates Jessica, she’s only one of two in the entire office who knew how to do one integral detail in our day-to-day, and the productivity of the rest of the team we work with relies on it.

Until now.

While Jessica’s job requirements give her a pretty nice chunk of job security, the rest of this story spells her sweet, sweet demise. You see, Jessica hates me just as much as I hate Jessica. Actually, I hate Jessica because she very clearly hates me. She always has, ever since Day 1, and though I tried to be nice to her, help her our when I could, and pretty much do everything in my power to get her to like me, I eventually reached a point where I quit giving a fuck about making Jessica happy and simply reciprocated her feelings. I’ve never done anything to act unprofessionally, but I’m definitely not going out of my way to hold an elevator for her or pick up any more of her slack.

Last week, Jessica took the entire week off for literally no reason. I know this, because Jessica didn’t even know she had the week off until our boss reminded her of this. I’m telling you, she is a diamond in a mountain of coal. Somewhere along the lines, HR fucked up, and allowed Jessica’s vacation time – even though the second person in the office (AKA, the only other person who knows how to do Jessica’s job), we’ll call her Cindy *(Cindy’s cool af) was on a two week vacation in Florida with her family. Of course, Jessica doesn’t care about this, and chooses to take off anyway; but that means she has to train me on how to do her job.

That bitch sabotaged me. In what I learned should have been a week-long training, she gave me eight hours. She left out gaps monumental pieces of information for a very time-sensitive aspect of how my entire office functions, and left me to fill in the blanks on my own. I’m still not sure how I did it, but after and entire day and praying to God, Steve Jobs, and the soul of Bill Gates, I finally figured it out. Fuck you, Jessica.

Part of being Jessica for a week meant having Jessica’s emails forwarded to my account, as well as being forwarded to our boss’ account so she could help me do both Jessica’s job and my own. At the end of the day on Friday, IT apparently forgot to end email forwarding, which is something we all figured out Monday when Jessica returned to work.

Jessica’s first email of the day went a little something like, “Fuck this. I definitely don’t feel like working today after that week off. I think I’m just going to tell Katie* to do everything so I don’t have to work.”

The reason I know that is because when Tiffany’s response email came across my desktop, it went a little something like, “Ugh, I wish I could do that. I’d make her do everything if I could so maybe we could see her cry.”

Monday just got interesting.

After about an hour of reading email after shitty email, our boss, Liz*, called me into her office.

“Have you seen those emails,” she asked.
“Yep, sure have.”
“Are you okay?”
“Never better,” I replied.
“Good. Don’t say a word. I’ll handle it,” said our fearless leader.