monster sarcasm rally

I was reading Peeved Michelle's rants about the Smarmy Leprechaun, and it got me thinking about annoying co-workers.

And then my mind wandered a bit.

The following is a true story, but it's an old one. From back in the days when I worked for a large, international copy shop, which recently merged with a large, international delivery company... I was the customer service manager for the Canadian shops. My boss was the operations manager for the same (Executive Monkey No. 1). His boss was the operations director for all shops outside the US (Executive Monkey No. 2).

Periodically, I would have to make presentations to the upper management team (Executive Monkeys Nos. 1-5) regarding trends in customer service. I generally got about two hours notice to pull these presentations out of my arse.

On one such occasion, after spending the morning madly scrambling to create a presentation out of nothing, I passed out my handouts to the team. They immediately started to ooh and aw and make clucking noises.

Executive Monkey No. 1: Oh! It's in colour. That's nice.
Executive Monkey No. 2: How pretty!
Executive Monkey No. 3: Look, there's green, and there's some blue. Oh, and if you turn the page, there's some red!

They all thought of me as an idiot child, hired to do a make-work job, and rubbed my nose in this fact as often as possible. I ignored the absurd comments and proceeded to launch into my presentation.

Since Executive Monkey No. 2 was the only out-of-towner in the bunch and the highest ranking monkey, I began by facing him. Moments into my presentation, he began scratching his, er, package. He didn't seem to care particularly that I was watching, and did absolutely nothing to hide the fact. It seemed like the sort of process that might take quite some time.

I decided to focus my eyes elsewhere. He might not mind people watching him, but I minded being the watcher. I turned to Executive Monkey No. 1, who held the next highest rank. He had his right arm all the way up his nose and was busy digging for gold.

I turned again, and was faced with Executive Monkey No. 3, the CFO. Executive Monkey No. 3 despised Executive Monkeys Nos. 1 & 2. He saw what they were doing, and proceeded to turn a very pretty shade of red. In case there's any confusion here, this is anger we're talking about, not embarrassment.

I gave the remainder of my presentation facing Executive Monkeys Nos. 4 & 5, both of whom were asleep.