Shafted on Secretary's Day

We have a cleaning man who my boss treats like a king, even though she treats the rest of us like shit. No one can figure it out. He misses work and gets paid anyway--and gets paid more than any of us. One time he disappeared for two weeks. During that time the boss didn’t hire a new service or even say anything bad about him. Meanwhile we were up to our armpits in trash. None of us can figure out why he’s so special to her. We are all a little jealous, but we mostly dislike him because his personality and how he always calls us up in the middle of the day, stoned out of his mind, trying to get more money out of the company. He keeps us on like this for fifteen minutes or more. We can’t handle it.

For Christmas, he gave us all these strange figurines of children or nursery tale characters. It looked like something for old ladies, and the woman who works next to me said they must have fallen off a truck. Nobody else wanted theirs, so they gave them to me. For a laugh, I put them all out on my desk, which was pretty funny looking. (I used liquid paper over the eyes of one of them to make the child look like a zombie. One night while we were gone, he must have scratched new eyes in, and the child looked more like a zombie than ever!) I asked my boss if she wanted her figurine, and she said it’d be my Secretary’s Day present. I thought she was kidding. On Secretary’s Day, five months later, I didn’t get anything from my boss--not even a card! She sort of mumbled excuses, but it was pathetic. She even said “Maybe I’ll take you out to lunch.” If I hadn’t learned long before not to believe anything she says, I would have been disappointed, for lunch was not mentioned again. She should have just pretended to have forgotten. The next Monday, when I arrived at work, the figurine was waiting for me on my chair. It was of a little girl shepherdess being followed by a little white kitten. I didn’t thank the boss or anything. What a bitch! I work forty hours a week to maker her rich and she can’t spend a red cent on me once a year for Secretary’s Day? And even when she gives me a second-hand piece of crap, it’s five days late!