Commemorating the Time My Boss Called a Meeting at 9AM on December 23 to Call Us a Bunch of Losers

Never forget

Today is the 23rd anniversary of perhaps the greatest crime in the history of labor: The time my boss called a meeting at 9AM on Monday, December 23 to inform the office that we were a bunch of twice-baked fuckwits dragging him down. It was the type of move that would have made Ebenezer Scrooge think “what an absolute dickhole”. And I still remember it every December 23, even though — if I’m being honest — 9/11 now sometimes comes and goes without me noticing.

In December of 2002, I had been out of college for six months. My degree turned out to not be the golden ticket to an elite career path that I hoped it would be, so a while after graduation, I knocked on the door at Failure Mode Placement Services and became a temp. After a few months of being passed around the the DC non-profit world like a bottle of lube at a Diddy Freak Off, I landed at an engineering firm. I was in the accounting department, and my whole job was entering numbers into Excel sheets. They could have trained a monkey to do my job, except that the monkey probably would have rebelled against a task so far below its dignity.

I’d like to mention one thing about that job that’s not important to the story but that seems like relevant context: Someone had staffed the accounting department with The Hottest Latin Women Who Ever Lived. It was bizarre — I worked in a cube farm with six women who made Salma Hayek look like a pile of peed-on Band Aids. If you’re thinking “Hey, nice setup!”, I’ll have you know that I was terrified of these women; they seemed like a different species, and I spent my time at that job hiding in a corner like a hamster that escaped from its cage. I never did learn what was going on — the company didn’t do much business in Latin America, and none of the women had a background in accounting. My guess is that a higher-up had a thing for Latin women, and I was a diversity hire in case the Department of Labor sued them for only hiring women who looked like they should be doing the weather on Telemundo.

On Friday, December 20, at around 4PM — which was roughly the two week anniversary of me doing a single fucking lick of work — the office received an email: “ALL HANDS MEETING MONDAY 9AM”. The reaction was what I imagine it was like when JFK was shot: There were gasps and hushed murmurs, and within 30 seconds, everyone had heard the horrible news. I immediately cycled through the five stages of grief: denial (“they must mean next Monday”), anger (“fuck this fucking job”), bargaining (“I’ll go, but I’ll be hung over”), depression (“I wish I still worked at Wendy’s”), and acceptance (“This will be the event that motivates me to finish those grad school applications”).

I asked my manager if I could skip the meeting since I was definitely the least-important person at the company and possibly the least-important person in the world. Sadly, the answer was “no”. So, at 9AM two days before Christmas — a time when Santa’s sleigh was probably already airborne — I joined 80 insufficiently caffeinated coworkers and the Panamanian Bikini Team in the greyest conference room in North America.

The ringmaster of this shit circus was the CEO, a bald man in his 60s who often wore suspenders, and the serious Michael Douglas in Wall Street ones, not the fun Robin Williams in Mork & Mindy ones. I had already had one run-in with this guy: My first week on the job, I returned to my desk one day to find a document with a sticky note on it bearing the guy’s name. I looked him up in the office directory, walked the document over, and gave it to his secretary to give to him. Ten minutes later, I got a call from the guy excoriating me for wasting his time; he thought that I was engaged in a sticky-note-based hoax to try to score facetime with the boss. I wanted to say “Look asshole, I don’t know who the fuck you are, I don’t give a rat’s ass about your fucking company, and if your time is so goddamned important, then why are spending it chewing out a guy who is less valuable to this firm than the three-hole punch in the Xerox room?” But I said “My deepest apologies, sir!” because I knew that someone with my skill set would struggle to find another sweet $11/hour gig.

The CEO’s message to his employees at that 9AM meeting was “You are trash.” Apparently, 2002 had not been a good year, and he blamed that on the thundering nincompoopery of his staff (all of whom he had directly or indirectly hired). If I had been the only person in the room, he would have had a point, but people at that firm worked hard, very much including Maxim en Español’s Seis Sexy, who could have skated by on their looks. Even at that young age — when I was only about ten percent wiser than I had been as a toddler — I grasped the irony of what was happening: CEOs command big paychecks because they’re at the helm of a huge enterprise, and success or failure is ostensibly down to them. But we had a bad year, and this dickhead of a CEO was trying to pass the buck. I also knew that even if it was true that we had scuttled his plans by making The Three Stooges look like the Mossad, yelling at us on Christmas was probably not an effective motivational technique. It truly was a Scrooge-type move, though perhaps moreso, and if three ghosts had visited him on Christmas Eve, they might have just skipped the life lessons and beaten him senseless.

The coda to this story is that it turns out the guy had been running a 20-year scam to defraud USAID. In 2014, he plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud, paid a $4.5 million fine, and was sentenced to house arrest. I sometimes wonder if I was involved in the fraud, though if I was, I certainly put the “unwitting” in “unwitting accomplice”. The CEO’s guilty plea was entered on December 14, which seems like a miscarriage of justice; he obviously should have had to wait until 9AM on December 23 in a tacit acknowledgement of his many crimes.

If there’s a lesson here — and there doesn’t have to be, but let’s shoot for the moon — it’s the old bromide that when someone tells you who they are, believe them. It was obvious from my first interaction with this guy that he was an otherworldly asshole; he’s exactly the type of person I would believe was scamming USAID. A person willing to engage in one form of antisocial behavior is probably willing to engage in another. And there probably was something up with the statistically impossible hotness of the accounting department — maybe that scam will be uncovered at a later date. The holidays are a time for memories of seasons passed, and one of my memories — not necessarily a cherished one, but certainly an interesting one — is the time a guy revealed himself to be an obvious psychopath and the law eventually caught up with him.

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