Psychopath in the Next Office

On the other hand, when Sanae first met Linda, she had a woman’s intuition telling her something strange. When Linda was not smiling, she looked wily. Linda looked exactly like the tricky woman she met when Sanae was working in Japan. That woman was the president’s assistant and tormented the other female employees officially and unofficially, until eventually she was let go. Linda’s face was etched with the same facial wrinkles as that woman. Similarly, Linda’s face looked dark and throaty as that woman’s. It was not so much the color of her skin, but the darkness was a reflection of what she was thinking. Although she spoke smoothly and sweetly on the surface during the interview, Sanae sensed from Linda’s facial expressions and gestures that Linda did not approve of Sanae.

When Sanae dropped by the office to sign the employment contract, Linda came to her, telling her that she would like to have a word with her. It was just after Sanae signed the employment contract with Luna. Inside Linda’s office with the door closed, Linda’s face hardened and she asked Sanae.

“Are you really joining this firm, aren’t you? You don’t have any problem leaving your current company, do you?” She asked Sanae.

Sanae said casually, “Of course, no worries,” while wondering why Linda used such a scary tone. Sanae was completely unaware of the drama caused by her job application. She wondered and suspected that perhaps Linda had bitter feelings about Sanae’s base salary increase. So Sanae thanked Linda for realizing the salary increase. 

Linda snickered, “Hm, I’m glad that it (the salary increase) made it easier for you to accept the offer.” Her comment was nicely worded but her voice and tone were decidedly cold.

Feeling awkward, Sanae thought to herself,

‘This is strange. This person probably doesn’t have a man to love. I can’t imagine she loving a man somehow. I may be prejudiced, but I think she may be one of the LGBT.

Instinctively, Sanae smelled something bizarre. This person could not be a normal person. Sensing that she mustn’t offend this person, Sanae said,

“My apologies for any inconveniences I may have caused and may cause in the future. Thank you for your kindness and support.

It was a humble greeting in typical Japanese business manners. Somehow Sanae felt from her gut feeling that there might be trouble between her and Linda in the future. 

Before the first interview, Sanae searched the Internet for Linda’s profile in preparation for the interview. Sanae could not forget the impression at that time. Sanae looked at Linda’s picture for a long time, but she could not figure out what kind of person she was looking at. To be frank, Linda did not look like a nice person with a good heart, but she was also not sure either if this person was horrible or difficult. Sanae, being a descendant of Ninja, had a strong intuition and can often tell people’s nature by looks. But Linda was an exception. She gave up trying to discern Linda’s personality in advance. This feeling of incomprehension continued to haunt Sanae when it came to Linda. As only witches were capable of doing, Linda’s disguise of a kind person effectively deceived Sanae very well.

As Sanae signed the contract, Linda was making the next arrangements. She would have to do everything in her power to put up a line of defense against Sanae before she would land on the company in a few months’ time. Linda, who by nature had no natural warm feelings for anyone, had only one important criterion for judging people: whether or not they were useful to her. Linda was thorough in this regard. Even if someone was nice, if they were not useful to Linda, they were completely useless. On the other hand, people who were disliked by most people could be useful to Linda. They were valuable to Linda because they could attack Lida’s enemies. If placed in the right time, right place, those disliked ones were useful to achieve Linda’s hidden purpose. In her mind, Linda called those helpful people as her lovely knives. They were the very tools to cut the heads of those who blocked Linda’s way. Even if the knives were unconscious of Linda’s purpose, if they were deployed near Linda’s enemies, they would drive Linda’s enemies away automatically. In some cases, enemies would run away on their own, and in other cases Linda hid in the shadows and operated the knife with a long handle just behind the neck of her enemy, as a decapitation knife. 

The George she assigned to Michelle was Okay, but not as sharp and deadly as Linda wanted it to be as a knife. A more powerful knife would have made things interesting. Linda decided to go ahead and put the sharpest knife possible here. Statistically speaking, these knives were usually male, very incompetent but good talkers, narcissistic and overconfident. They were disliked by their subordinates and peers. Yet they tended to be liked and protected by upper management, thanks to their eloquence and confidence. And those knives were useful in hunting down other women who would block Linda’s way. It seemed to be a good idea to introduce Linda’s hidden knives into the Strategy department of Carl, who was getting blind thanks to his desperate wish to survive. That damn Sanae, Michelle, and Greg were all there in that department. Moreover, Linda had ambitions of becoming the Head of some sort of Customer Strategy Department herself in the future. It made sense to use some powerful knife and scrape off the parts Linda didn’t like and to clean it up.

Linda was well aware of the rules of the game she was playing. Using her position as a HR responsible, Linda was able to eliminate her enemy, but she could not do it solely on her own. She had to move the target’s boss to eliminate the enemy on the chess board. Therefore, it was important to deploy useful tools around the target to make any wicked moves possible, by leveraging them. The game was how to get the decision makers to issue the key decision of firing Linda’s target, or to set up the target to surrender and drop out. The major limitation was that Linda herself cannot be the decision maker on personnel actions. Through years of cunning practice, Linda had developed all kinds of methodologies and tricks to drive away her opponents to the level that no chess master or Super-computing AI could ever match Linda.

However, no one must realize that Linda herself was playing the game as a player. Furthermore, no one must realize that Linda had accumulated so much expertise in the dark chess. Linda must be a powerless pawn on the chessboard, far from playing the game by herself in her own will. When someone was fired, it must not be seen as Linda making the decision, but a king, a queen or a knight. Loyal to this principle, Linda hid it well when she fired her own people in the HR department and made it look like they left voluntarily. The fact that Linda fired her subordinates easily must be covered up. Linda shouldn’t tarnish her image of being generous and can get along with all types of people.

Objectively speaking, since Linda became HR manager, many people have been laid off or left the company, but Linda continued to pretend that it was not because of her. The mass layoffs were a management decision by Joe, and Linda faithfully carried out his decision as a servant. With respect to the mass layoffs, those employees shared surprises and horror that no one had ever had a slightest hint of what was coming just before the Day X. However, that was all thanks to Linda’s shrewd operation and ruthless execution. Since Linda was the sole planner and executor of the mass layoffs, it was easy to keep it under wraps. Without consulting with anyone else, Linda alone had meticulously calculated who to fire. Then, she put the decision into a plausible company document and, using Joe as a cover, enforced it as an order from the top. Since no one else was involved in the whole process, there was no way the secret would leak out. When it came to disguising oneself to be a good person, Linda was the best of the best, preparing for a massacre and playing innocent.

In fact, Linda fired her own employee, Luna, regarding the job offer to Sanae. Luna, who was from a Latin American country and had been in HR since the time of Linda’s predecessor, was also in charge of recruiting for the Strategy Department. Luna was the first to screen the applications they received for the position of Customer Research Manager. She marked more than a dozen of applications in the system as interview candidates, including Sanae’s. However Linda, in her own decision, had deliberately left out a few other applications including Sanae’s when she forwarded them to Greg, the hiring manager. At that point, Luna was not aware of those few candidates who had been excluded by Linda. But then Greg went through all the applications and contacted Sanae for an interview, realizing that this application was dropped by HR. A second interview was then set up for Sanae, which was more than usual, and Sanae’s background and work experience were brought into focus in the process of getting Sanae an offer. It was highly likely that Luna, who was running the administrative tasks for hiring for this position, was aware that Sanae’s application had been intentionally dropped by Linda. Luna did not say anything about this, but it would be inconvenient if it would be known that Linda intentionally did not share with Greg good applications from well-qualified women. Linda was wary of the risk that Luna might be aware of Linda’s evil plot. It was better off to take a precautionary measure. Linda set a meeting with Luda on a Friday afternoon and told Luna,

“Joe’s reorganization has finally hit our department. Your current position is no longer available, unfortunately. Instead, there is a mandate from the upper management that we need to hire an assistant for me to support us in the hiring process. The new position will be at a lower level, as this will be my personal assistant, and the salary level will be lower, too. I don’t think it will be a pleasant job for you. I wish there were other positions available in the Swiss office, but there are none that fit your profile right now after the large-scale reorganization. We will give you a 5-6 month notice period, as we have done with all those who had to leave the company due to the downsizing. So please don’t take it personally and take your time and look for a new job. I’ll inform your colleagues in HR that you’ve found a new job and decided to leave voluntarily. It should make you feel better. I am sure you will find a job soon; I did as much as I could here.”

As usual, the decision to fire Luna was made under the guise of an unavoidable management decision to restructure the company, a decision that was beyond Linda’s control. In fact, Joe’s massive downsizing exercise had barely affected the HR department, leaving most of the existing HR jobs in Switzerland untouched. While other departments were eliminated by nearly 30% of their staff, the HR department led by Linda didn’t change. The reason for this was simple and straightforward: Linda did not want to see her power reduced. She was excited to see her sphere of influence rather increased in the relative terms before and after the restructuring”. To justify Luna’s dismissal, Linda used it as an excuse – what happened in the other divisions of the same company recently.

She then made an announcement in HR that Luna had found a new job in Switzerland and would leave. A replacement for Luna should be found, but in order to cut costs, the profile was changed to an assistant who could help Linda with recruitment. As a matter of fact, Luna did not say anything offensive to Linda but she was afraid of Luna’s character of being fair and her ability to see through the truth. There was no reason for Linda to bother keeping Luna, who was from Latin America and not a German, and might know the truth about Linda. Luna left the company just after finishing Sanae’s employment contract. Luna’s original duties of payroll were taken over by another female employee in HR. The replacement of Luna was soon found. Marcia, who was also from Latin America and had worked in Germany for a long time, was hired as Linda’s assistant. An important criterion for Linda of this hiring was whether or not the person looked worse than her. Marcia was short, much older than Linda, and was not particularly attractive. She was friendly and easy-going, as is often the case with a Latin woman, and was easily fooled by Linda’s manipulations. To ensure Linda’s security, the assistant’s lack of ability to recognize people’s truth was prerequisite. Just like Linda’s pet Taro, it was of paramount importance that the new assistant be good-nature, easy to fool and obedient to Linda. Thus, Marcia began working  for Linda, believing the lie that her predecessor, Luna, had found a new job with better conditions and had left. Poor Luna was the first victim of Linda’s anti-Sanae measures and to get fired. At this stage, it never occurred to Linda that she would have to fire more and more people around her as measures against Sanae.

As Linda was planning how to combat Sanae and Greg, it was a perfect opportunity to hire a new strategist under Max, who was the son-in-law of the CEO, Ben. Linda had learned from the bitter experience of Sanae’s hiring, where she used Max wrongly and backfired to Linda. Once Max said yes to hiring someone, it would be impossible to turn down the decision. The men in the company lived in the corporate hierarchy. All the sensible managers in this company would simply nod and accept Max’s decision, no matter how terrible it was. Expressing any concern about the decision of the CEO’s stepson would mean the end of their career.

This would be the perfect place to deploy a knife, Linda thought, and grinned. That anger at being fooled by Sanae and Greg was fresh. However furious Linda was, she couldn’t be “Linda the Ripper” by herself and needed to delegate the role to someone else who would function as a sharp knife. And the stage was being set. Linda should deploy a crazy knife right next to them in the same department under Max. It would be a hilarious spectacle. Linda should hire this knife-man to torment her enemies while pretending to be sincerely helping Carl and the others in the Strategy department. They would never dream that she was the one who was setting it up, and the situation should get worse and worse. The invisible “Hand of God,” should play the game on the chess board. Linda made a croaky laugh again.

_{This story is fictitious and is not based on any real persons or organizations. Copyright: Kunoichi4You 2024}