The Office in Real Life

So Mrs. Cornell and I are watching The Office on DVD every night, and I realize that one of the reasons I like the show so much is that it seems to defy plausibility, but it doesn’t. It is, in many ways, frighteningly accurate. I’ve had a boss that’s every bit as awful as Michael Scott, if not more so, and I’m willing to bet that quite a lot of you out there have, too.

I want to give details, but I also don’t want him to sue me. (I think he’s too stupid to Google himself the way Richard Dutcher did, but someone else may bring this post to his attention, and he’s vengeful enough that he’d likely go out of his way to make my life miserable.) So I will change his name to Myron Felgewater, and I will try to be as oblique as possible.

Myron became the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company just prior to his 30th birthday, despite having no academic or professional background of any significance. (Directly prior to being a CEO, Myron was a collection agent for a credit card company.) The fact that the Felgewater family owns the company, I think, somehow figured into the equation, although one can never be sure.

Like Michael Scott, Myron is completely oblivious to how he is perceived by those who work for him, many of whom refer to him as “Lettuce” or “Hair.” (As in “He’s as dumb as a sack of lettuce,” or, “He’s about as bright as a box of hair.”) He would cheerfully wander the halls whistling like a bozo, and everyone wondered what, exactly, it was that he did all day. I didn’t, though – I knew his primary purpose was to make sure that everyone was at their desks at 8:00 AM and stayed until at least 5:00 PM. One salesman who worked for the company and spent most of his time out on sales calls was fired because, in Myron’s words, “he was never at his desk.”

Given that mindset, it wasn’t startling that the company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on an annual basis.

He got irritable if I lingered in the office past five, because he always wanted to be the last person to leave so he could look important. But since he had nothing to do, he would twiddle his thumbs and make cheerful moaning noises in the office down the hall, just to let me know he was still there and wasn’t happy about it. I would often leave to let him drive his company car about five blocks to his house, and then I’d come back to work late, so I wouldn’t have to worry about him barging into my office to announce his latest paranoid conspiracy theory, most of which involved invasions by the Chinese as a precursor to the Second Coming. (Seriously.)

Everyone was out to get him. The press; the government, and, especially, the gays. Homosexuals terrified Myron, and at one point, he asked me what we could do to avoid hiring them. I reminded him, as gently as possible, that it would be illegal to do that.

“We wouldn’t have to tell them that was why we didn’t hire them,” he replied.

Brilliant.

I asked him what he intended to do about the homosexuals who already worked for him. He looked like I had hit him in the head with a two-by-four. “There aren’t any homosexuals who work here,” he insisted, much the same way Mahmoud Ahmidinijad promised that Iran is a gay-free zone.

 I wisely neglected to mention that Herb, one of our most effective managers, was openly gay, and, later I gave Herb a heads-up about the clandestine gay-bashing meeting. Herb just chuckled and said, “That sack of lettuce couldn’t spot a gay man if he had bells on.”

Myron didn’t like women much, either. He fired every female executive within six months of their hiring date, usually because “they’re too focused on home, not work,” or, my favorite, “I can’t give her any criticism without having her start crying on me.” I think he kept hiring women to see if he could be open-minded, and then he’d can them when reality set back in.

Myron loved staff meetings, all of which would spiral wildly out of control and accomplish nothing. So the topic of most of our meetings became “What can we do to make our staff meetings more productive?” I suggested that we don’t have them. Maybe that’s why Myron tried to fire me twice. (He was overruled by older and wiser Felgewaters, who usually stepped in when Myron actually tried to do anything significant.)

We used to love the holiday season even more than most, because for two months, Myron spent all of his time outdoors, hanging Christmas lights on the office building and in the parking lot. On more than one occasion, several of my co-workers noted that most people who hang lights don’t earn a six-figure income for doing it. Still, no one really complained, because it kept Myron out of the office.

Perhaps the one defining moment that gives you a sense of who this guy is: he wanted to do a corporate event and hire the Broadway touring cast of The Lion King to entertain. When that proved to be impossible, he suggested we do our own version. I told him Disney probably wouldn’t allow that. “No, you don’t understand!” he said. “We could do something different, something special!”

“Like what?” I asked.

“We could do The Lion King with real lions!”

It took some time to explain that real lions have a tendency to eat people more often than cartoon lions do.

Enough time has passed since my Felgewater days that The Office just makes me laugh. If I’d been watching it while I was working for Myron, I don’t think I could have stopped crying. (And then he probably would have fired me, because that would have been proof that I was gay.)