The Christmas card was impersonal; signed by both company owners, no note. It was accompanied by a bottle of wine. What was missing was my Christmas bonus cheque.
It wasn’t just me. Fifteen minutes earlier, Nicole had been in a fury, eyes wide, almost vibrating with anger. “This is our bonus this year,” she’d hissed, shaking the bottle, her rage and disbelief surrounding her like a crackling aura. Nicole was prone to drama, and plenty of it, but I felt the same way. “It’s bullshit,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
But it was true. A bottle of wine and a Christmas card. No bonus.
The cheque we’d find in the card wasn’t huge—one hundred dollars. But it was a hundred extra in a month where so many things pulled money from our wallets. And it meant that our work mattered to the Brownes, just a bit. We mattered. And it bought a nice Christmas dinner, covering the groceries with a little extra for something special.
[spoiler]But this year? A bottle of wine. It probably cost around ten dollars, maybe fifteen. I’m not an expert. I was thinking of taking a picture of the label, when I was about midway down the bottle, and going to see for myself at the liquor store. But the bottle went into the recycling bin and I to bed, and by the time I remembered, it was too late. It was probably a ridiculous (and petty) thing to do, and it would have only made me feel worse.
The men who signed the card weren’t in the office after Boxing Day. They were on a family holiday. All the Brownes of Browne Properties gone, leaving nothing behind but the work in our inboxes and their name on the letterhead. They were off, along with their wives and children, and the parents, of course. Hawaii for New Year’s and a slice of dismal January.
Must be nice to get away, I thought, plodding through the rain, head down. Winter meant rain, grey skies, darkness and wind. No trip to Hawaii for us, and no Christmas bonus, either. It stung, to be frank, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
It wasn’t just me. No one felt like doing much work in that funny lull between Christmas and New Year’s. We were in the office, but the owners weren’t. Even with plenty to do, it seemed there was time to gossip, to pick at our grievances like sores, to wonder where this family-run business was going. Changes had been happening, and they didn’t seem to be for the better.
I had to wonder where I was going. I lived a half-hour drive away, where it wasn’t nearly as pretty. Once I’d dreamed of a mansion in the nicest part of Oak Park, but now I’d be happy with just an ordinary house in town. I didn’t even have that—a double-wide trailer was what my budget afforded, me and all the retirees in our “park”. I wasn’t close to retiring. But I felt too old to be starting again. Middle age had arrived, and I was stuck there. I wasn’t like Nicole, in my twenties, with avenues of possibility still open. And all that passion.
Possibilities narrowed each year, and it had come to this: a cat and a double-wide trailer in a bedroom community with a Dogpatch image. And the Brownes in Hawaii couldn’t even give out a hundred dollar Christmas bonus to the employees who worked the hardest.
It had to be because of Sean Browne. That was the difference between this year and all the others—Sean had finally joined the family business as a junior manager like Nicole. Sean’s salary. And I’d bet that missing one hundred dollars that Sean’s salary was a lot more generous than Nicole’s. Who did the same job as Sean, but did a lot more work, and was much better at it. It just didn’t seem fair.
By mid-January, I’d updated my resume. I could come in early. By seven-thirty, I could use the company printer and copier. By eight-thirty, it’d be in the mail if there was anything promising. My New Year’s Resolution.
Susan wasn’t happy, either. Susan, admin extraordinaire, had worked at Browne’s for fifteen years. Fifteen years, and they couldn’t give her a lousy one hundred dollar bonus. She’d told me that when her manager retired, she’d move on, too.
You overlook the secretaries at your peril, I thought, watching our managers arrive late, leave early, and go out on “appointments” that involved things like haircuts, buying specialised groceries, and having the BMW serviced. While we stayed at our desks, and worked. And polished our resumes.
And watched Sean Browne flounder.
That made me smile—it sounded like a recipe—Sean Browne Flounder. He was a fish out of water. He’d not been in the company business before, but there was a desk for him. But he didn’t like what he was learning to do, and couldn’t seem to master it. He just didn’t have the ability. But he had been given a portfolio, and I’d bet a pretty nice salary, too. Because his last name was Browne.
I didn’t like him. Sean was the only person I’d ever met who literally walked around the office with his nose in the air. I thought it was just an expression, until I saw it for myself. I think it was an effort to make up for his weak chin. He had an air of entitlement that grated on my nerves. He was always “too busy” and we had to do his work.
Sean was supposed to be the new breed with Nicole, working on their smaller portfolios without an assistant. But Sean wanted a secretary once he realised just how much administrative work there was. He was “overwhelmed” with his six properties, never mind that I was doing most of the work of my own manager’s twenty-four. Sean’s last name was Browne, and that put a Browne in every department of the company. Three departments, three Brownes. The future had arrived.
But he was being trained by an idiot. Dumb was training dumber. Our department manager Garry was stupid.
Three Browne, blind mice. They couldn’t see that things were going downhill, had been for years. They didn’t seem to care when we pointed it out. The head of our department was incompetent, and his assistants had been doing his work forever, keeping him afloat. But now he was on his own—that new idea: smaller portfolios, no assistant. But it wasn’t working out very well, and there would be a new admin hired. For Sean and the department head.
The least competent get rewarded, propped up by the rest.
It was a busy spring. I felt like that donkey in the picture someone had forwarded to me one morning, one of those joke emails. Overworked. Burdened with a load I could never pull, no matter how hard I tried. But I still made time to check the want ads at lunch, to keep tweaking my resume. Just in case.
My manager was counting the days until retirement, and did very little work. He couldn’t even be bothered to make phone calls, but he’d ask me, so he could surf the web or go buy lottery tickets. It made me steam. My desk had paper I had to put in piles just so I could work; his was pristine. I worked, while he hung around the reception desk, making jokes and killing time. Talking about how bored he was. Meanwhile, I was swamped. And seething.
I wondered if the managers got a Christmas bonus.
My manager bought lottery tickets—it was one of those “appointments” that would take him out of the office—and we all went in on the dream for $5.00 a week. Simple dreams. Just a nice house in town, and maybe a holiday of my own every second year. It would be a nicer life than the one I was leading.
A life where that missing hundred dollars really meant something.
Everyone wants the finer things in life. Some people had them, and took them for granted. Sean Browne once said he only stayed at five-star resorts. He said that me and Susan, who hadn’t gone anywhere on holiday for years. Some people trudged into the office every morning, and made it possible for people like Sean, just started and was not working out well, to be off vacationing in Hawaii with the rest of his family, while the people who made the business work didn’t get a small Christmas bonus.
December stayed on my mind. By summer, I’d sent out resumes. It was easy enough to say that the drive in from Dogpatch was tiring. Susan confirmed she would leave when her manager retired. Neither one of us would work for Sean Browne, we knew that.
By August, Nicole had slammed the door one too many times, had lost a shouting match with idiot Garry one too many times, and finally made good on her promise to quit. She couldn’t take being treated so differently from Sean, and finally realised it wouldn’t change. Her last name wasn’t Browne.
Things went downhill from there. Sean took over her portfolio, and mucked it up pretty badly and quickly. Clients dropped the company. The Brownes didn’t realise just how hard Nicole had worked, and how much work there was in her book of business. It was too much for Sean, who finally got the courage to tell his family that he hated the job. Family business or not, he was leaving soon.
I tried to keep my head down and stay out of it. I couldn’t help much, being as I had my own work to do. That didn’t mean I wasn’t asked to drop everything and help Sean and Garry out. I seethed. And I still remembered that if I was so helpful, and the Brownes were relying on me so much, I still didn’t deserve a lousy one hundred dollar Christmas bonus. I did the absolute minimum for them, murmuring I really had to take care of my own manager’s properties first.
Susan’s manager got sick. And when she came back, she announced her retirement. Susan and I spoke at lunch. “They don’t care about us. Look how many assistants they’ve lost. All the good people that care, they leave. Because they get so fed up. And they go to Dan and Bob Browne, who don’t do anything. It’s their name on the company business. I just don’t understand it. They think Garry walks on water…”
We all knew Garry Fielding was incompetent. Training Sean, who’d come from construction into an office job, we’d joked, was like our very own version of the blind leading the blind. Nicole called them Dumb and Dumber. And that’s the future of the company? She’d snorted in derision. Sean can’t even figure out how to manage his email. They’re putting him in charge of budgets? Of planning? It’s only because his last name is Browne.
And now Sean was going, and Garry couldn’t even work a simple spreadsheet.
By September I’d found a new job. It wasn’t the end of the world, after all. I’d moved before when things got unbearable. I just hated doing it, that’s all. Feeling like a beginner again, the ‘new girl’, when I was far from a girl.
But it was all right. And it was a lot closer to home, that dumpy doublewide I was secretly fond of.
By October, the first rumours had reached me, like tendrils of fog. Browne’s wasn’t doing well. Sean and Garry’s spectacular incompetence had finally caught up. The company was being sued for negligence.
By November, my old manager retired. He went early. He’d been counting down the days, but he knew what a sinking ship felt like. He leaped off.
In December, Browne’s, established 1923, closed. There’d be no Christmas bonus this year, either.
It didn’t have to be that way. All they had to do was listen to the people who actually did the work—the admins. We’d told the Brownes that Garry was incompetent. That all the good employees left because of him. All the people who cared, left. We told them, but they didn’t want to hear. They wanted to go to Hawaii.
It didn’t have to happen. All they had to do was pay that lousy one hundred dollar bonus to me, Susan and Nicole. We’d have stayed, despite everything. Because we’d have felt appreciated. We would have done Garry’s work and even Sean’s, and maybe the two senior managers wouldn’t have retired early. Maybe there would have been time to let Nicole flourish and mature. To get Sean to a minimum level of competence, and more than six properties to look after. Maybe.
It doesn’t matter now.
It’s December again. And I’m just curious what Edgewater Investments does for the secretaries at Christmas.
[/spoiler]
Savannah