Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [50]
The truth is I hadn’t been completely successful in quarantining my unhappy marriage from work and family. Ultimately a few self-esteem issues had leached over and I felt I lacked the ability to cut it, to be the person in charge.
This all came to a head after I’d been back at work about eighteen months or so, when Edward got promoted to marketing manager. He begged me to apply for his old position, claiming I’d be a shoe-in if I did, but I squibbed it. He understood but was disappointed, I feel.
Stupid, stupid me - because when all the interviews had taken place the successful applicant for the position, my immediate superior no less, was announced to be one Amanda Smith.
Like Melanie, Amanda Smith’s reputation preceded her. Unlike Melanie, Amanda’s reputation preceded her for all the wrong reasons.
9
A lucky scrape
Amanda Smith turned out to be just as bad as everyone had predicted, if not worse.
Amanda had come through the sales force ranks, like most people in marketing. I was a rare exception to the rule. The cream always rises to the top, as the expression goes, and so the best and most ambitious sales representatives do end up in marketing before too long. Sometimes, however, the interview panel gets it wrong and elevates someone who is a good salesperson, but lousy at marketing. Amanda fitted this bill completely. She was lazy and unimaginative, paid scant attention to detail, and seemed to have a very hazy knowledge of how the drugs actually worked, which is a bit of a disadvantage when you’ve chosen a career in pharmaceutical marketing.
But by the time she took over the reins I knew a lot about working in the corporate world. Stuff you are never taught at university. One particular lesson I’d learnt was that:
Incompetence is no barrier to a successful business career, if combined with:
• a complete lack of ethics
• a shameless ability to suck up your superiors, and
• a penis.
Now as far as I’m aware, Amanda lacked the last of these qualities but she certainly had the other two in spades. She also had another attribute - or rather attributes - that she used to excellent strategic effect. Yes folks, Amanda had big boobs.
Dear Amanda was a freak of nature. She was a natural blonde, and good-looking in an over made up sort of way. But she was tiny. Tiny little head, tiny little waist and hips, little twig arms and legs, and teensy-weensy feet that were permanently encased in sky-high stilettos, no doubt to compensate for her lack of height. Everything was in miniature except her ego and those enormous boobs of hers.
I have to hand it to her, though. She really knew how to work those breasts to best advantage. Unlike Melanie she never wore really low cut tops, I think feeling that, if her most important assets were over exposed, they would lose their value. So, whenever she had an important meeting she would wear a white half-size-too-small t-shirt under her suit jacket or, if it was a really crucial gathering with her male superiors, a silk blouse with an extra button undone. The latter was definitely her trump card. All the middle-aged guys in suits spent so much time trying to catch a glimpse of that Aladdin’s cave of mammary tissue that they failed to notice that not a word of wit or originality ever ushered forth from her mouth.
If you’re wondering why a lack of ethics is so essential, it’s because you have to be able to simultaneously:
i) take credit for other people’s good work, and
ii) blame others for your mistakes.
This was another area where Amanda was the master; she was absolutely shameless. I often wondered how she could possibly sleep at night, but I guess if your brain is an ethics-free zone these things don’t trouble you. I think she functioned purely on rat cunning; I certainly wouldn’t have called it intelligence.
In the end, Amanda was my immediate supervisor for just over one