Chicks

Cathy was back. She’s kind of a benevolent Fuhrer, she’s nice most of the time, just when she gets strung out. I’m over thirty, I understand how the world gets you down, but the young girls don’t get it. She’s more like the incredible Hulk, she’s all nicey pie when she is Cathy Banner, but when she gets too strung out, she becomes Cathy the Hulk. Nobody was looking forward to her coming home. They all wanted me to stay. There were even people from outside the team who had noticed enough to comment what a changed place HR/Legal was.

Cathy was in a swing style skirt and a bold orange and red see through floral top and bleach blond hair. She’s skinny, she’d lost 14 kilos before she left. She said she’d put on two.

It was interesting watching all the girls sucking up to her. They’d all expressed their trepidation at Cathy returning, they all shuddered at the thought not a few days previously. Here they all were cooing around her telling her how great she looked.

Chicks?

At lunchtime, when we thought all the HR girls were out, Christine said, “Melina is driving me nuts with all that talking.

I said, “She seems to be arguing with Isaac (the director) a lot.” Good on her for hutzpah, but really how long do you seriously think you can talk to a director like that, as even tempered as Isaac is.

We said all of that before Cathy shut us up indicating Melina was at her desk. She was kind of closer to the wall than she normally sits and we just didn’t see her. We just came out and said it with her in the room.

She has that far north Queensland kind of opinionated nasally voice. She is very loud, that is all Christine meant. Sometimes Melina just doesn’t know when to shut up, that was as bad as Christine was being. But Melinda was fragile. Oops. It was a genuine mistake. A big one.

I went to warm up my lunch to get out of there. On my way back, Melina was coming through the door to the toilet corridor and we had to do that awkward thing at the door as we passed, all the time she wouldn’t look at me.

“Oops,” I said to Christine , went I returned to the office.

“I think she was crying,” said Christine.

“Ah, what the hell,” said Cathy.

Melina came back, after a while, without saying a word. Conversations were changed deftly mid sentence upon her return. You could cut the air with a knife.

She left the office twice more with her head bowed, looking at no one.

She left the office twice more with her head bowed, looking at no one.

We told Shayleen and Cat when they returned and, if anything they seemed a little bemused by what we’d done, smiling at each other like cats.

Chicks.

Oh Melina is opinionated and argumentative in that Christian twinset brigade argumentative, she just knows she is right. If ever she stops trying to talk you down from your opinion, she fixes you with her withering gaze that never stops saying I’m right and you are wrong.

Melina was dark for the rest of the day. She didn’t talk again. When I said good bye to her, she practically dismissed me.

My last day at (name of the company), it was probably best that I missed the recriminations from that little mistake. Oh the team will be in turmoil, one team member wounded. But not to worry, Cathy will be there in amongst it all trying to sort it out, cyborg style. And Britney, it was a good thing, her arrival in the office is immanent, I think we are now counting down in months. I’d only have to spent a morning with her locked in a confined office and I think I’d snap and kill the bitch. Exit stage left.