it's in the I's

“*Em-tee* quit” the owner told me.

“Yeah, I know. She called me Saturday so I could hear it from her.” I said as I did the double quotes thing for the last part.

“Oh, what did she say?”

“She said what I good guy I was and that she doesn’t feel bad about leaving because she never took anything from you.” After I said that I laughed.

I laughed because she was given a lot.

I was asked a few more questions and I was told a couple things. One thing was that she asked another worker to leave with her.

Loyalty

Lost

I have no problem with people leaving, sometimes it is what you have to do, I work two jobs because of it. The one that left was supposed to be a best friend of the owner. Recruiting within the office steps over a line so does betraying a friend.

Friendship

Lost

The owner wasn’t alone during the conversation there were two others near her desk so my words were guarded. It’s bad form to speak of others behind their back, especially in front of those who really don’t need to hear. I tried to keep the information to just the facts and I saved the answers to a couple questions for a more private time but we probably won’t speak of this again.

As I’m leaving I hear from one of the others “Just for the record, you are a good guy. We were just talking about you.” I laughed because usually bad things follow both of those statements and I was going to say so but I just let it slide.

Yeah, I’m a peach.

…

“Even though the owner approved this last week it didn’t get done.”

I was handed a form that had normal and special advertising requests upon it, she was pointing to the special request.

I was going to explain that even though the owner may have approved a piece of advertising, I still have the right not to run it, if I have a reason. I didn’t have a reason not to run it so I ran it.

“Are you sure? Because I’m pretty certain I did it.”

“I didn’t see the special ad in the trade paper.”

“We don’t run special ads in the trade paper. We run them in the neighborhood paper.”

“Oh. We don’t run special ads in the trade paper? I thought we had a section in the middle for the special ad.” She draws a rectangle in the air to help me understand which is rich because I'm thinking she's the dumb one and now I know she thinking the same of me.

“We only run a full page ad in the trade paper. It’s the neighborhood paper where we have the special ad in the middle.”

I thought I would have heard “Oh, sorry” or something but I heard nothing. And things would be different if 120,000 copies of the ad weren’t on the street, just as she asked and things would be different if we didn’t have a copy of the ad hanging on the bulletin board with the other weekly advertising that runs every week.

She should be reading all the advertising every week like all the other employees should be doing.

She doesn’t even know how we advertise yet? She’s been here for over three years.

Whenever I go to tell someone how to do their job I make certain I have my information correct, I’ll check and double check but I guess that’s just me.

"Well, can we run the special ad again this week?" is what I actually heard.

I just smiled.