How to Get Fired: Reconciliation, Sociopaths, and Sex

More than Cheese and Beer's Sunday's Confession prompt is, "Reconcile."

Well, the first thing that comes to MY mind because we are talking MY mind is a badass story. I'm not confessing at this point. I'm bragging. I'm also not understanding the definition of reconcile in the proper context... Besides, I don't feel like talking about my emotions. And I should tell this story sometime because it was a big deal in my little life.

So I was working at this local nonprofit charity in bookkeeping, and I was hired as AR clerk because I did such an awesome job to prep for the annual audit through the temp agency. Well I have a tendency to be good at math and to learn quickly, so AR clerk duties that first took 40 hours a week to do ended up being more of a 5 hour a week job (especially once I turned everything into an Excel spreadsheet). So I was looking for things to do around the office.

Boring story, huh? It's about bookkeeping. You know. One fish, two fish, three fish, four... It gets juicier fishier.

So anyway there was a guy there who handled payroll. Long story how it happened, but he ended up with the title of HR Manager, the job duties of Payroll Clerk, and, well this is a confession after all, a decent lay for someone with his penile size. His ex wife wasn't lying about that... Met her at a bar. We're friends now. We shared a lot of laughs. Awww good times.

Why I slept with him? Because young women make stupid decision. No. That's a cop out. I was attracted to him because he was old, ugly, and lonely. I'm laughing when I reread that like, "Really? This is how your brain works Michelle? What is wrong with you?"  But there's something about lonely men who haven't gotten laid in years that I'm just turned on by, and I think it's the way they look at you. They touch you like they are touching a woman for the first time in their life, but without the awkwardness of puberty. You know, no doubts, you know, you mean something to him, that you aren't just another piece of ass he calls when he's in the mood. And you also know, you are exactly what he needs right now. When he went from grumpy cat at the office to Mr. Blue Bird on my Shoulder happy, you know you did that with your magical vagina, cough cough. LOVE with your love.

But don't be fooled by the naive innocence years of sexual frustration wreaks on a man. Once a man like that gets laid by a beautiful woman, he becomes confident. Sometimes arrogant. He will take his new found self esteem and use it to get other women.

While love conquers all, this is lust, and power and greed usually trumps lust. Fast forward toward the end of my career at that place... Basically, he tried to get me fired, and it did eventually work. The office drama separated into two West Side Story gangs, and his loyalty was to the bad guys, the dark side, the assholes.

Years after this bragging moment I haven't even gotten into yet, which is less epic than this tale, I was more of the Comptroller. The real comptroller was planning to retire and just kind of left me her job duties. Fine with me. We were best friends at that point, and her job was more exciting than mine. She got to prepare reports and talk to the auditors, and prepare the Trial Balance. Closing entries. Exciting stuff. There was also a new executive director who was also a sociopath with a circle of disciple men who followed her around everywhere (including my HR prick, pun intended). They all got raises and bonuses without doing any actual work. Meanwhile, there were people working 40 plus hours a week at 13,000 a year. That's 6.77 an hour, while executives sitting on their ass doing nothing but "secret meetings" about "HR situations" (AKA, they dicked around all day), were getting paid 60 grand a year (doubled their annual salaries when I started with mine going up 10% maybe?). Small nonprofit. Of course, I didn't realize this was America at its finest yet. Nope. I saw it as a great injustice of corporate greed in the nonprofit sector that must be fought. I was trying to do the right thing.

Eventually, I gave up trying to talk people into being decent human beings. My shit level was reached. I went to the Board of Directors with evidence I had compiled for almost a year about the Executive Director and her disciples, who had been trying to get me fired for random things like making long distant calls I didn't make (I had a cell phone, why would I use their phone?). So I went to the Board with my loser reputation the higher ups were trying to form for me. I showed the "hostile work environment" (conveniently after EEOC training was done) this created, who did the actual work for the bonuses they claimed, and made some valid points otherwise. I also proposed a budget that included raises for everyone and returned the Christmas bonuses. The Board loved it. I had this bitch by her balls, except bitches don't have balls.

Nope, at the board meeting that was going to vote to fire the bitch, she showed up because the guy I was sleeping with informed her as he was logging everything I said or did in our relationship to her... She didn't show up alone. She was with the director of our greatest funding source that pays admin salaries (CSBG) who works like an hour drive away usually. He was an old pervert, and she was pretty. Not as pretty as me, shut up. Anyway, he told the board if they don't get rid of me, listen to their Executive Director like good sheeple, he would cut their funding entirely. So they really felt they had no choice. They downsized my position just so I could get unemployment because they felt so bad. I don't know how many of them pulled me aside, some I didn't even know by name, to apologize.

The karma train, maybe irony train, hit that station though. That year, Bush cut CSBG in half, so they lost most of the grant anyway. They had no other grants to fall back on because they lost about 10 grants and programs because the Executive Director didn't turn in the paperwork for it, probably because she didn't know how to fill it out and fired the only person who did (me), well besides the person who retired with her middle finger in the air (the comptroller). That agency is still a shell of its former self. They never have funding to do much of anything. It's sad how one bitch could take that down so much so hard. They really helped a lot of people back in my day, and now they don't.

But back to my bragging story. Before the drama unfolded, before I slept with an a-hole with short man syndrome, that a-hole didn't think I could do much of anything in the office. I don't know if it's because I'm a woman, or because I was young, or because he was so blinded by my cleavage he neglected to see the brain, but anyway, Bank Reconciliation was his job, one he was 6 months behind on. It wasn't like reconciling a personal checking account. They had 6 checking accounts plus an investment account (AKA Sweep Account, that NOBODY knew how to reconcile, not even the bank) that played with a couple million dollars annually, with a 70 page GL, where we accounted to the penny (no adjustments). This guy did not think I could do the bank rec simply because he couldn't. He had tried for 6 months to do it. Obviously his logic was totally sound because if he can't do it, then surely I couldn't. Eyeroll please.

Of course, I had no idea how to do a bank rec, not even with my checkbook. So I learned first with the smaller accounts, and I reconciled them, up to date, within a day or two. Easy. This guy kept saying, "You can't do it." So I kept saying, "Watch me." Then I tackled the main account. It took me 3 days, with constant doubt-talk coming from the direction of that guy's desk, but I reconciled that bitch to the penny. Within a week, I had the 6 months we were behind caught up entirely. Then the sweep account. It really didn't need reconciled, but I had to. After asking a million people including 10 people at the bank including the bank president at two different locations, I was still at square one. So I thought about it, on paper, and it looked like some Einstein formula because algebra was my friend, and I figured it out with math and science. So then bank recs became my job duty, one that became more of a breeze once I made an Excel spreadsheet do all the calculations for it.

They got harder when we got the Workforce Investment Act money. Those grants are insane. Irrationally insane. It was you spend the money, and they reimburse approved expenses. A thousand dollars worth of motivational pictures like this was approved. A dollar for toilet paper in their office, not so much. That's our government at its finest. And they wanted every penny spent or coming in split 2 to 3 ways, in a funky percentage like 22.556312% goes to this fund and the rest goes to this other fund, and I don't want it to be off .000001% at all.

Then we hired a guy to handle just that account, who became a disciple to the Executive Director. It was more like we hired a troll to put random entries in the software. He even managed to do a single sided entry, a debit with no credit. That's impossible to do with the software. The guy gave me gray hair and hypertension. That was another one that got a year behind to get reimbursed (not the bank rec because I did the bank recs) because the guy getting paid twice as much as me couldn't figure out how to do his job. So I got those caught up and it became my job. They kept the guy at his salary to do filing, while I still made half of his salary doing the only job we paid him to not do. Then to add to insult, short man prick who I was humping at the time got a $600 bonus for that and the glory with the Board, for my work. The funding source even sent an email praising my awesome, but nobody in the office acknowledged it. It was like I was in a Ben Stiller movie.

So yeah, I'm a master at reconciliation, when it comes to numbers at least. When it came to office politics, not so much. If you don't know me, my brain operates like this. You say reconciliation, and immediately I think about numbers. Not people. In fact, I think about numbers more than I think about people generally anyway. Numbers are nice. You know they are positive or negative, rational or irrational, without having to guess at it.

Moral of the story? 

1. You might lose your job trying to do the right thing.

2. If you are attacking your boss at work, follow the money as far up as you can. Don't stop within your own organization. Cover your ass as many directions as you can.

3. This is exactly what's wrong with America. This is why there are no jobs. This is why your pay check sucks. Because this happens everywhere. It's not just that greedy people are in charge. They are evil, power hungry, ego stroking sociopaths. The greedy people are those like most of my coworkers who dared not rock the boat because they didn't want to lose their jobs. They lost their jobs anyway because the organization downsized when there was no more money for them, so it was all in vain. An ironic twist of vainness. But the world is full of them, the multitudes of sheeple who dare not rock the boat, and that is what is killing our economy. The people who actually work need to overthrow the people who don't and get paid regardless. People who don't work should be collecting government welfare checks, not corporate welfare checks.

4. Never sleep with your coworkers, and if you do, definitely do not talk about work in the bedroom.

5. Women do a better job on an academic level than a man. There's actually empirical evidence to support that claim. We score higher on tests, get better grades, and mentally trump men statistically from the moment we are kids all the way to death. So when you men get all, "She can't do it because she's a dumb woman, go make me a sammich" you are a complete dumbass and you would service the world better by collecting disability and making me a sammich.

6. Anyone, anytime, could be a future writer thinking about adding your character to their story. Behave accordingly. 



P.S. Some of my journal entries had descriptions, to entertain the auditors as they'd be the only ones to ever see it, like...

The payable that couldn't
The receivable that wasn't
Let's see if this works
No it didn't work
Diane told me to
Reversing another Mentry (that was my code word for Mark's Entries, the guy who gave me gray hair)

P.P.S. Can you tell how old I am using things like P.S.?