death by her own design

As a rule, I try to avoid office gossip. In truth, however, I try only to avoid spreading office gossip but whole-heartedly condone listening to it. With this being said, the following events from Monday, October 23 have been reconstructed from bits and pieces of overheard conversations around the office.

11:00 am: Cara, the other salesperson in the office, had two appointments scheduled for the day. She called in after her first meeting had ended and spoke to our receptionist. Things went ‘awesomely’ she reported, but was too busy to speak with the boss and promptly hung up.

11:05 am: The company that Cara just left called the office asking where she was. “She never showed up for the meeting,” they told our boss.

1:00 pm: Cara’s second sales call of the day is scheduled to begin.

1:10 pm: Our boss, now skeptical of Cara’s whereabouts, calls the company to see if she is actually there. The answer, he is told, is ‘no’. “She cancelled the appointment this morning.”

1:45 pm: Cara calls back into the office. “My second sales call today was awesome!” she tells our boss, who made it a point of answering the phone when she called. “I’m going to grab some lunch and will try to make it in later this afternoon,” she continued.

It was at about this point when our boss told Cara to ‘cut the shit’. “I know that you didn’t go to either appointment today. You better get into the office immediately.” Cara’s response was that her car broke down and that she had been too embarrassed to say anything earlier.

2:15 pm: Despite the broken down car, Cara makes it into the office surprisingly fast. She is quickly dragged into a meeting with our boss and the office manager.

2:25 pm: Her story has changed from 40 minutes earlier. The new and improved story involves a friend with personal problems who was at Cara’s house the night before. Cara stayed up all night consoling this friend and didn’t get any sleep.

“You’ve told me two completely different stories,” our boss is rumored to have said. “Which am I supposed to believe?”

2: 33 pm: It is unclear which story Cara asked him to believe. Some around the office say the former. Others, the latter. Still others think that a third story, involving alien abduction and mysterious crop circles surfaced. Whichever of these Cara stuck with, she broke into tears and said that ‘this will never happen again.’

2:34 pm: Cara was right, it will never happen again. She was fired. It has been reported by people who sit near the boss’s office, that Cara stormed out declaring how ‘unfair’ this was and how he would ‘be sorry’ for letting her go. Unfortunately, my boss does not value ‘pretend’ work.

2:35 pm: I become the top sales person in the company…by default, of course, yet who am I to deny the title?