I HATE MY BOSS! #2
Oh no, Dear Jan. Hell will freeze over before I let you spoil my Saturday lazy time. I throw the phone in my bag and continue toward home. But the jerk calls again. Ring-a-ding. I’m about to get a stroke. What a pain in the ass.
Maria, take it easy. Don’t let it spoil your day.
Serenity, tranquility, relaxation. I deserve it after the past weeks of slogging at work. I ignore the ringing phone with all my might, which apparently my boss doesn’t give a shit about because it continues to ring and ring, holy fuck, ring incessantly and intrusively! Wacko.
Or maybe it wasn’t him after all? Maybe something happened? Maybe my mother had a stroke after I left the house? And I lied to her so brazenly and didn’t want to have dinner with them. Maybe if I had stayed, nothing would have happened to her.
And I got wound up, damn it. Now I have to pick it up.
“Hello.”
“I need you today for a customer meeting.” I hear Jan’s firm composed voice in the receiver.
No “Good morning,” no “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” no “Sorry to bother you on a Saturday…” Just straight from the get-go. Meeting. On a Saturday!
I think he’s nuts. I’m not going to do it.
“I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to make it. I’m having lunch with my family.” My conscience won’t even twitch, I won’t even stammer.
Silence.
“Can you repeat that?”
“Sure. I’m having. Lunch. With the family.”
Silence. Silence. A long, scary silence. Did he hang up or what?
“Can you express yourself more clearly?” He finally speaks up.
“More clearly? Table, soup, chairs, father, mother, me, day off. What exactly do you not understand in the sentence, ‘I’m having lunch with my family’?” I stop. I can feel the rage boiling inside me.
“How you can be having lunch with your family and walking on the sidewalk while talking to me on the phone at the same time.”
The what? My heart leaps to my throat. Where did he…?
I direct my gaze toward my staircase and hold my breath.
Oh, fuck.
Fucktard Jan. In a suit and tie. He is leaning against his pimped-out black car, holding the receiver to his ear and looking straight at me.
We’re about thirty meters apart, but even from that distance, his snow-white shirt and shined-up shoes hit my eyes like a bolt of lightning.
And that look of his—poker-faced, expectant, impassive.
I swallow. Well, that’s what I’ve done, I’ve brought it upon myself to have a working Saturday. And on top of that, I came off as a perfidious liar before my boss.
For a split second, a slight panic grips me, but I immediately nip it in the bud. Relax, Maria. It’s your day off from work, and you can do and say whatever you want. You won’t have some stiff barging into your private time.
“What are you doing here?” I snap at the receiver. I walk toward him with a bold step and maintain eye contact.
“I am waiting for you.”
“You are parked in a no-parking zone.” We are now only a dozen meters apart, and with each step, my heart starts pumping blood faster, preparing my body for a fight. “I advise you to leave. I have nasty neighbors. The municipal police will probably show up soon.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
There you go, Jan-the-risk-taker. Ho, ho, ho, what bravado and courage.
“Since you want to get a ticket… ”
“I will include it in the business trip expenses.” He hangs up and puts the phone in his pants pocket.
Jan is leaving? Yoo-hoo! Well, this deserves a drink today. I throw my cell phone in my bag; I feel like clapping for excitement.
“Are you going on a business trip? For a long time?” I come closer. I try to hide a smile of satisfaction.
God, what great news. He won’t be in the office, no overtime. I’m so inhumanly excited that I’m about to sing something.
Please, Jan, pretty please, tell me you’ll be gone for a month or two, I beg you.
“We are. Together. For three days.”
I freeze. I think I heard that wrong.
“Excuse me?”
“Please pack the most necessary things and wear an evening gown.” He stops talking for a moment, but after that adds, “For tonight’s banquet at a customer’s house.”
An evening gown? A banquet? Well, he fell off his rocker, the old goat.
“What are you talking about?”
“The sales department managed to get a last-minute invitation to a banquet in Szczyrk. The President of Traper, a company whose business we have been trying to win for over two years, will be there. This is an excellent opportunity to speak with him semi-formally. I want you to come with me.”
He wants. He wants! What an egotist!
“I’m not working today. It’s my day off.”
“And I have the right to call you to work on Saturday, which is what I am doing now.”
I clench my teeth.
“And I already have plans for today.”
“Change them.”
Insolent nincompoop.
“With all due respect, but… ‘Screw you, Jan!’” is already on the tip of my tongue, but I restrain myself just in time.
I need the job and the money. I can’t give him grounds for termination, which doesn’t mean I’m not going to exercise my labor rights.
“You have a shitload of employees straight from the Pecker Headhunting and Partners, so what do you need me for?”
Jan frowns.
“From where?”
From the shithouse, you moron.
“From the Pecker Headhunting and Partners.”
“What is Pecker Headhunting and Partners?”
Oh, mother.
“Never mind.” I pass him, open the door and enter the stairwell.
“Where are you going?” Jan follows me.
“To the old-fashioned luncheonette.”
“Where?”
I roll my eyes. Jan’s sense of humor is like snow on the Equator; not once recorded since the last glaciation.
“I’m going to change. What about you?”
“I need data from the server.”
“Then you are in the wrong building.”
“This is where you live. Is that right?”
“I’m just visiting a friend.”
“This is the address in your file. Am I to understand that you gave someone else’s address to HR?”
Jesus save me. I don’t have the stamina for this anymore.
Does he have some kind of defect? He doesn’t recognize irony at all, can’t tease, doesn’t understand metaphors, jokes, not to mention reading facial expressions and sarcastic tone.
He takes everything too seriously. Interpersonal communication level at minus one hundred on a scale of zero to ten.
“It was a joke.”
“So you do live here.”
“Yes. This is where I live.”
“So presumably you have your business computer here, with access to the server. I can’t log in from my cell phone.”
Hearing his footsteps behind me, I glance surreptitiously over my shoulder. And if I notice even a small glance towards my ass, I’ll sue him for harassment. But he has his gaze fixed on his phone. He is typing something, moving his thumbs efficiently.
“Watch your step, Maria, or you’ll stumble. And I have no desire to look for anyone to take your place while you are on sick leave.”
I clench my teeth. I hope you will trip and hit your teeth against the step. You… You… wooden stick with an abacus instead of a heart.
I turn the key in the lock, open the door, and it glides on the rustling plastic sheeting that I haven’t cleaned since the morning after finishing my wing chair renovation.
I step inside, toss my keys and my bag on a table in the narrow hallway, and approach the desk.
I type in my password and see my website appear on the screen.
The sight of pictures of the armchair I put up for sale a few hours ago immediately makes me feel better.
I minimize the windows with the website, e-mail, Photoshop and the Excel file where I run the calculations for my company’s business plan, and log on to the company server.
“Here you go. You can sit down.” I glance in Jan’s direction, and he’s standing like a bump on a log, staring at the floor as if he’s looking for something.
Did something fall on him or what? I strain my gaze, carefully following the plastic sheeting step by step, and suddenly I have an epiphany.
I can hardly restrain myself from laughing.
The entire film is stained with white paint, and Jan the Spotless is apparently afraid of getting his shoes dirty.
“Right leg on green, left hand on blue.” I can’t help myself.
“Excuse me?” Jan looks at me.
God, what a numbskull.
“Have you never played Twister?”
“Played what?”
Jan-on-the-spot.
“Twister. A game. A large plastic mat spread out on the floor? Big colorful dots?”
He looks at me. He hasn’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about.
“Have you played?”
He shakes his head.
Of course he hasn’t. The game requires you to bend, squat and twist, which is unfeasible for someone who has a rod stuck so far up his ass that it reaches all the way to his cervical vertebrae. It was hard, but he somehow got it in.
“Long strides, Mr. Engler. Right foot at two o’clock, left foot at eleven o’clock, then right foot at three o’clock, and you are safe,” I say.
Jan glances at the sheeting. He looks as if he is about to walk through a minefield.
I can almost hear his right hemisphere boxing with his left.
Creativity fights logic. Engler may have finances at his fingertips and be a well-organized boss, but plays and movement games for kindergarten kids are out of his depth.
Finally, he takes three long strides according to my instructions and stands right in front of me.
He is so close that I almost touch the tip of my nose to his chest. My heart speeds up strangely.
I can smell his scent, the warmth emanating from his broad shoulders, and I watch the chest on which the black tie rests rise and fall.
“Are you renovating?” he asks in a low voice.
I can feel his breath on the top of my head. I can hear him draw in air deep through his nose. Wait, is he sniffing my hair?