Prologue

Mary Ann

Parking Pecking Order

The Lunchtime Grab

Operation Early Bird

Solitaire

Baiting A Sloth

Instant Car-ma

I didn't get along with Mary Ann for a lot of reasons. She was condescending and talked to me like I was one of her pre-teen daughters (probably because I was one of the youngest employees - 25 years old). She thought she knew a lot about computers, but did not. She never asked me, who maintained the computer network in addition to editing books, for help. The problems she created took me hours to fix. There was never an apology for these problems, just an "Oh-well" and a quick shrug of the shoulders.

When our editorial group had a new computer network installed, I asked everyone to copy only essential files from their local computers onto it help conserve storage space. Mary Ann immediately moved all of her files to the network. When I asked her if she had looked through them to throw out old files, she said "No, I didn't want to waste my time" and promptly went back to reading a magazine.

Later that month, I began cleaning out these files. Both of my bosses were in the office as I asked Mary Ann to help me pick which ones to delete. Closing one file too quickly elicited an ear-deafening "DON'T CLOSE THAT FILE, I'M STILL LOOKING AT IT", followed by a long, look-how-much-I'm-suffering-sigh. I apologized and reopened the file; a file we wouldn't be looking at if she had done what I had asked in the first place.

In between heavy sighs and outright yelling, Mary Ann made it clear that she had no respect for me.

Next: Parking Pecking Order