It seems like there is never a dull moment in my life. Now, I am going to summarize you what I have to deal with:
The company I work for is a small company with a very pleasant young boss in his late thirties whom I will call BossMan. There is an assistant who is a nice woman in her early forties whom I will call Irene. Irene is an old friend of BossMan's wife whom I will call Olivia.
Apparently, Olivia started to work in this company many years ago and had Irene hired as an assistant. Then Olivia and BossMan fell in love and got married. Olivia left work.
After the marriage, Irene was asked to help with the matters of the home gradually such as finding handymans, painters and such. BossMan's mom got friendly with Irene too and she too started asking her assistance in certain matters. (One may argue that none of these were Irene's job but, mind you this is a very small company and as an executive assistant, she was expected to comply with these tasks).
At one point, the MIL and Olivia had a falling out in their relationship and both of them confided in Irene who says she tried to keep her distance as much as she could. Of course, she got sucked into it and meanwhile, demands of the two women multiplied. Right about that time Irene and Olivia also had an argument over how Irene was favoring the MIL instead of Olivia. I am not going to argue if that was true or not. Who knows? That is when Irene talked to the BossMan to say that she no longer wanted to deal with the home stuff anymore. BossMan did not like it but he told Irene to stay out of it as much as possible and use the driver to run errands for both of the ladies.
This was about two years ago. Olivia and Irene were not talking to each other at this point.
Up until now, Irene utilized the driver to take care of many errands without a problem. We have hired a new driver about 5 months ago and the new guy is a bit different than the old one.
The new driver is a nervous fellow and is truly being ill used by Olivia and the two helpers working at home. Last week he had been asked to do something which he did not want to or could not do. He asked Irene to do it and Irene blew him off. So, apparently he complained to Olivia about this and Olivia sent a very stern and mean message to Irene. Irene operates on a somewhat short fuse and sent an equally stern message back to Olivia, keeping the BossMan in cc.
Come Monday, BossMan came in to work, noticeably upset. He really likes Irene and they had been working for almost 10 years together. He wanted to talk to me and said that he is compelled to let Irene go because of the way her message was worded. He felt stepped over.
Now, I do not want Irene to be fired because, Irene has two kids at 4 and 12 years of age. Has a mortgage and a car payment. She is well liked by the team members and her leaving would be very upsetting.
I told the BossMan that he should not take what Irene fired back personally and that we should figure out a way to keep Irene. He was reluctant at first but since he is a good guy, he somewhat relented.
More on this tomorrow...
No comments:
Post a Comment