My boss, Irwin, hired an assistant for me who, he said performed well on the editing tests. Irwin also told me that this candidate was the one most likely to enter the building bearing arms and firing.
Jay turned out to know little about working in an office. When I asked Jay to make copies and told him to darken the pages a little, he came to me four hours later with over 100 pages he had copied: all were completely black.
Jay was the president, founder, and sole member of his own religion. He had magnetic signs on the sign of his car advertising his religion.
He wrote me long, single-spaced memos of ideas he had on how to improve the company. They were, as he continually reminded me, written on his home computer during his leisure time. He offered suggestions about how to improve our textbooks:- "[A] mini-profile on the U.S. president who during his childhood had the worst case of acne of any president in American history would be very helpful and grab the interest of many high school students of today who might otherwise regard American history as a dull subject."
- "Another inspirational Lifestyle profile might highlight the United States president who improved his eating habits the most over the course of his lifetime after eating lots of junk food and high-fat food during his childhood and teenage years or earlier years."
- "We should include more pictures of smiling adults in our books." He seemed to have particular issue with Sandra Day O'Connor. In his memo, he wrote that her picture made her look, arrogant, vain, selfish, impatient, abrasive, misanthropic, pessimistic, snide, ill-mannered, unfriendly, and unkind. (These memos sometimes offered too much information and too many opportunities for armchair psychology. )
At other time he provided ideas on office management:
- We should fix the toilet by the wall in the men's bathroom that was spewing water. (I told him whom to contact and suggested he not wait until his next memo to report such a problem.)
- We should change the company name: it was too hard for him to remember.
For months, I told my boss that Jay wasn't working out. Irwin didn't believe me. I told Jay to start giving all of his work to Irwin to review. Finally, my boss ended Jay's contract a month early but gave him two weeks notice. Every day for the next two weeks, I worried that Jay would enter the building bearing arms and firing. Luckily, I survived.
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