Unfiltered Story #310618

I work for a small company which requires us to wear many hats. The senior manager, “Stacey”, is a pathological liar and a smidge sexist. She has never met a woman who doesn’t allegedly hate her because she is threatened by my coworker. She constantly refers to other women as “b*tches” and tries to disparage them by calling them bitter, angry old hags despite typically being younger than her. It takes all of a minute of meeting the woman she has such a low opinion of to find out they are quite lovely.

Our office space belongs to one of our stakeholders and is rented out to us at 10% of what we should be actually paying + the cost of utilities. He owns the entire building and his wife manages it.

The office has been rented out to us for seven years with me being in the office for six of those seven years. For years, Stacey insists that we are moving, and for years she insists that his wife, “Gina”, is this nasty piece of work as an excuse any time we have a maintenance issue like the AC going out. She also uses it as an excuse for why we cannot ask them to repair a hole in the wall that literally leads to the outside world.

Over the past five years, I have mentioned this hole a dozen or so times anytime we have crickets and lizards entering our establishment en masse to escape the desert heat. Over the past five years, Stacey brushes it off as it is really just us and a couple of part-time contractors.

Over the span of a year we went from three women – Stacey, myself, and another coworker – and one man – the owner – to three women and seven men in the office. The hole gets brought up again by one of the more “attractive” men. She finally breaks down and calls Gina because she can now not just do something.

As it should come to no surprise, Gina is a wonderful warm woman who gets it taken care of right away by calling the building handymen. On top of it, she apologizes for the inconvenience, tells me if there is ever an issue like this again to contact her to get it resolved immediately, and notices a few other needed repairs that Stacey has refused to call about.

The handymen come and Stacey is right there, intently watching them fill in that hole (aka sexually harassing these men). I am doing my best to ignore her crude remarks as if I call her out on them I know she will say she is “just joking.” But then she drops this little bad boy.

Stacey: “Wow. You can really see daylight there! I cannot believe it. I wonder when this happened?”

Well, by my calculations and the trajectory of the sun and the moon, it happened at least seven years ago, Stacey, but you already knew that.