John's Assistant Resigns

Well, she resigned in the same sense that Socrates committed suicide - it was one of the only two options given.

Of all the people working at this hospital, she was the only one who even resembled something remotely like a friend to me. It's therefore ironic that, though I wasn't her supervisor, if I had been her supervisor she would have been severely punished long ago.

Oh, she was rash. She was capricious. But if they had made me her supervisor, had allowed me to use my own punitive measures on her, she would still have a job today. And in fact, in the end she would have thanked me.

How did she get away with taking hour-long and ninety minute lunches *every day* when the limit is a half hour? Each day she would arrive at work roughly at 9 a.m. (meaning anywhere between 9:15 and 9:30), leave at 4:30 p.m., and in between do about fifteen minutes worth of actual work. In the meantime there was myspace browsing, e-mail, and chatting on the phone.

Yet she could have run the Media Center better than me if she wanted to. She was a wealth of knowledge regarding every aspect of the operation. If I ever had a question (and as long as she wasn't cranky) she would have the answer in a flash, or she knew where to get it.

Nobody at work is giving me any details about her departure of course, the rats. The word on the street, however, is that she took too many days off. That's like saying there were too many hungry Russians during the Siege of Leningrad. *Every week* I would be surprised if she worked three days out of the five. The last time she called in sick, before the heat came down, she phoned and said that she had a headache.

I'm going to miss the stories of Bellflower gangland mayhem. She was kept awake the other night by her boyfriend writhing in pain. He has chronic back problems as a result of being shot by one rival gang member and run over by another rival gang member. And what I want to know is, since he hasn't worked since November, who is going to feed his four kids (by a previous baby mama) and who will feed my former assistant's one kid (by a previous baby daddy)? And indeed, I did prefer hearing stories of the current boyfriend instead of answering the phone when her former boyfriend was making collect calls from L.A. County Lockdown to *the Media Center*.

I wish her all the luck in the world, and I hope she's not reading this, but I think what would be best is if she would just ask my advice for every decision that she makes for the rest of her life. Yet she's never asked my advice about anything, so I doubt that she'd start now.