Just have to shake your head.
A little work story that I found funny:
One of my associates spends a great deal of time securing internships for our students. He and his assistant, a constant source of trouble, went to visit a large multi-national consulting firm that everybody has heard of. There might even be a reader or two that are employed by this outfit. They had their meeting with the head of local HR about getting our students in for internships. The meeting went well, very well. My associate is confident we’ll be able to place several interns with these consultants. As the meeting drew to a close, the HR guy asked my associate if he could talk to him in private. The assistant was asked to wait in the reception area.
My associate then was told about what a wreck the assistant was and that he had better watch out. He was given specific examples of her crappy manners, coarse and abusive language, petty and wholly unreasonable demands (demands she had no business making), the list went on. My associate told me he was thinking he had read the meeting all wrong and there was no way we would be able to place interns with this outfit. He was also getting quite angry with his assistant as he was being beaten about the head and shoulders with her rude performance.
The consultant finally let up and told him we would still work together, but that he never wanted to see the assistant again.
My associate walked out into the reception area to find his assistant sitting there smoking! He told me he couldn’t believe what he saw. He said smoking in that reception area would have tantamount to lighting up in church. He said he let her have it with both barrels in the car on the way back to school. Her defense was that there was an ashtray sitting there, so she assumed it was OK.
Later that afternoon the consulting firm HR guy called. He told my associate about the smoking. My associate said, “Well, there was an ashtray there.” It was a weak defense and he was embarrassed making it.
The HR guy said, “Did she tell you that she had to stand on our leather sofa, in her high heels by the way, in order to be able to get the ash tray off the top of the bookshelf?”
She was, to use a phrase we used at one of my former employers, shot the very next day.
