Lesson Learned

M. and I work for the same company. Worse than that, we work at the same office. But, what really takes the cake is that we work in the same department. Actually, she’s technicaly my boss, which really sucks karabaw balls.

I always try to make it a point that she didn’t become my boss because of her superior SPAM-writing skills (we write SPAM for a living) in both subtle and less than subtle ways. Everything just ended up the way it is now through some perverse twist of fate—and I sincerely believe that.

I feel like I have so much to say that I don’t know where to start so I’ll just work my way from when it all started.

I met M. during college. We took the same course, but she was a year ahead of me. She was hooked on Valiums and Red Horse at the time while I was recently discovering the deep, hidden pleasures of studying literature and doing well in school.

M. asked me if I wanted to join her band. I said yes, she was kind of cute, one thing led to another, and so I said yes when she asked me to be her boyfriend.

She said I made her forget about some guy she’s been in love with for the past three years, and I noticed she stopped taking Valiums when I told her it made her look cheap. I’m usually not the one to boast, but I think I affected M. in more positive ways than not. She admired my newly found diligence at school, and I guess it inspired her to do better.

We later learned that we had an equal exchange of skills. I always had plenty of things to say when I wrote, but was prone to typos and errors because of recklessness and arrogance. M., on the other hand, could think in the speed of a Pentium 133 during the days of quad-cores, but she could weed out grammatical errors like an anal grade school teacher. This marriage of strengths and weaknesses seemed perfect. I even felt that I got the better end of the deal, seeing I valued ideas more than something as elementary as syntax—there would always be spell and grammar check, I thought. And if you looked closely at our symbiotic relationship, you’ll see that one had more to lose than the other. I was doing fine when she was still spiraling down while getting high and drunk doing it. This sort of gave me permission to feel superior—OK, I know I sound like an asshole.

But, it wasn’t just what she could have been without me. It was also what she couldn’t have been if I wasn’t there. She became a wreck when started her thesis. It took her a little more than year to finish it, and it might have taken her longer (or she probably wouldn’t have finished it at all) if I wasn’t there to lend an open ear to her ramblings and to shake her out of procrastination. I also distinctly remember her telling me that she probably couldn’t understand what those post-modern feminists were talking about without me spoon feeding their man-hating ideals to her.

We turned in our respective theses at the same time. She said she’d be more than happy to get a passing mark. I wanted to finish school with flying colors, and I was hopeful of it too. Right before graduation we learned that her study on Jeannette Winterson was chosen thesis of the year. It was the hardest fucking “Congratulations!” I ever had to give.

To her credit, I knew her papers didn’t write themselves. God knows how much eye strain she got from staring at the computer screen for hours just to wring out a few sentences. But, deep down, I felt cheated. When I asked her how in the hell did it happened, she said those extra 0.5 points that I needed were probably held back due to some grammatical mistakes I overlooked. I told her that that was bullshit.

Time moved on, and we both started looking for jobs. She took a couple of writing/teaching jobs she didn’t like. I had one sales job that I hated. A friend of mine later asked me if I wanted to write SPAM. I said, sure. The work was light; a few hundred words a day couldn’t hurt, and so M. grew more excited about it than me. I tried convincing her that it was a bad idea for us to apply at the same time for the same company. But, after making me feel that she really wanted to be with me every day, I was forced to concede. We just relied on my friend’s word that there was more than one opening.

M. and I were hired. She got the job I wanted all because the human resources guy thought that ladies should come first, even at interviews. In the end, I got stuck writing long articles about smut. Though I didn’t take it too hard, maybe a few weeks of blaming her for not listening to me in the first place, but that was it. I adjusted, and in time came to enjoy what I was doing. Of course I enjoyed it even more when I saw her having trouble with her own job. That could have been me I said to myself.

But, just when I thought that justice was done, my superior gets fired together with our whole team. I was jobless for the next few hours until M.’s superior decides to leave due to some morality issue she felt she needed to express to the company. The next day I get M.’s job while M. gets promoted by default, seeing that she was the only SPAM-writer left.

Now I have to let her check my work for grammatical errors and typos. She finds at least two mistakes from each article I write, which I find more degrading than getting my ass kicked by a midget. And she gets to be the fucking boss of me.

Maybe it’s Fate’s perverse way of telling me to improve my grammar.