The two most glaring cases I had are both linked to something identifiable.
First case: I’m still in college and get a summer job in a factory’s lab. I’d finished my coursework; all that was left was my thesis. This factory has asked my school for someone to do a research project for them, so since the factory is a stone’s throw from my hometown and I’ve had all the right courses, the school sent me. So, the research I was going to do for them was supposed to be my thesis. There’s two other girls in the lab: a local veteran with no degree and another college girl who’s not finished her coursework yet.
One day, my car, an old clunker inherited from a great-uncle, is in the mechanic, so the veteran takes me home. As she is doing so, a guy on a Vespino stops beside us and sticks his helmeted head in the car - just as my driver says “hi, hon” and attempts to kiss the faceplate, the guy does a doubletake, moving his head back and hitting the ceiling of the car. Good thing he had his helmet on. Turns out it was one of the guys who’d sat right beside me for 6 years in school (grades 5th through 10th, both included) and she was his famous “girlfriend from the wrong school” he’d had since we were 14.
She decided to get terribly jealous of me. Managed to get me fired and no, my thesis wasn’t done in that factory (which is enough material for a couple rants). This is a girl who had burned down the lab twice, raved all weekend and was always late on Mondays (sometimes even skipping a day without so much as a phone call), but her aunt was one of the factory’s owners. She’s tall, blonde, blue-eyed and thin with pretty big headlights; I’m short, brown on brown and could have been in the cast for Real Women Have Curves.
Second case:
I’m working in Philly. The team keeps being reorganized, which is OK because the bosses are all good so it doesn’t matter who your current boss is, it’s fine. At one point, the Big Bosses make the mistake of calling us (probably the 200 most self-starting people in the company) and telling us to start looking for new jobs ASAP because the project is starting to wind down and the sooner we all start leaving the better.
Two days later, my boss hands in his resignation. The Big Bosses were surprised; us in the team just snorted and found the look in the bosses’ faces terribly funny. This boss was an engineer, as were about half the people in the team; the other main boss came from the sales side but had a perfectly fine head thank you (she’d been wary of us engineers at first but we’d learned to work with each other - we all wanted to Just Do It Right). The replacement boss… oh boy.
I knew there would be trouble when I saw his resume. Dude started working in sales the day after getting his PhD in Chemistry. Is “oi vey” appropiate here? It’s what my next-desk neighbor said. Seeing that resume, every engineer in the team started sending his own to every contact in his address book. In any case, we were told that us engineer types would have our yearly reviews done by the leaving-boss (at this point I saw several of my coworkers recover their usual beanbag shape, after having spent several days as stiff as the laws of physics allowed), that most of the daily management would be done by someone already in the team, and that this guy’s job would be to help us find jobs.
A few weeks later, I have an interview with SalesPhD to help me look for a job, preferably in-company. I had several things lined up. He found everything terrific, I was doing fine, oh very good…
And then, he looked at the last page in my file.
Nationality: Spain.
He threw the file forcefully on the table, rising in ire, and claimed “you’re a fucking European! You’re not even mine!”
Things didn’t go downhill from there. They couldn’t, they’d gone from +100 to -1000000 in zero seconds. Those months were extremely painful for the 4 Euros, the Venezuelan and the Mexican. His PhDship couldn’t attack the Colombians, but really… the only reason we didn’t bother bring it up with the lady in charge of Non-Discrimination or whatever it was called is that we were too busy getting our jobs done in spite of this guy. We were all fired when the project ended.
