A month after Sanae joined the company, Danny joined the company. It was somewhat strange because he reported to Max, Director Strategy & Controlling Europe, but Danny himself was also in a Director position. Besides, he had no direct reports under him. For Sanae, it was strange enough to see somebody with a director title without any subordinates. Of course, it was Linda, the HR Head, who offered the Director position to Danny, seeing through his problematic personality, while appearing to be a sincere supporter of Max, trying to boost Max’s power. It was more effective to give the pretty knife Danny as high a position as possible in order to attack the German betrayer Greg and the damn Sanae.
The moment Danny first showed up at the office to greet her, Sanae’s heard somebody muttering in herself,
“On the surface, he is polite now but he may be a wolf in a sheep costume. He may well be an aggressive person.” Sanae had the ability to intuitively see through people. It was possible that Sanae had a Ninja ancestor as a guardian spirit to warn her of danger. Unfortunately, Sanae often suppressed this intuition with her rational thinking.
Ever since Sanae saw Linda’s scary face at the time of job offer, Sanae had noticed Linda had two sides. Cheerfully smiling side and dark severe side. On the first day at the company, she had lunch with Linda along with a German colleague who had joined the company at the same time – at the usual canteen. At that time, that German colleague asked if those who joined the company in the month of October would get performance bonus when the year changed.
Linda suddenly became serious on his question and said,
“Oh, that’s a good question. I’ll check it and let you inform – whether we can really get a percentage of the bonus for those who joined the company in the middle of the year.”
It seemed that Linda took their question seriously, but no answer came from Linda at all after that. Sanae felt strange that they had received no response from Linda on this simple question, who had promised them so earnestly for her answer. Just when they had almost forgotten about it, Greg said to Sanae and that colleague,
“A nice surprise for you! They pay you a bonus based on the length of time you’ve been with the company, even if you started in the middle of the year.”
Sanae looked at Greg’s face and thought. “If that’s the case, why didn’t Linda tell us about that from the beginning?” Sanae remembered the conversation with Linda clearly; something didn’t add up.
Of course, Linda knew that according to the company’s rules, bonuses are paid according to the length of time worked in a year. But she saw a sweet chance of manipulation here – a blind spot of knowledge about company regulation by the new comers, and a chance for her to take advantage of it. Linda had secretly whispered to Greg that the boss could decide not to pay the bonuses – it’s their discretion to save the costs and use them for other purposes. It was Linda’s ploy to give Sanae a small nasty kick indirectly, but unfortunately Greg chose to go along with the principle. Linda was of course disappointed and didn’t dare to give any verbal or written communications on this to Sanae and the others.
Another thing Sanae noticed was that Linda seemed to be a completely different person in front of Joe, the General Manager in Europe. That was the time when the new hires at the Swiss office were invited to meet Joe in his office. It included Sanae, Danny and Marcia. There Linda seemed to be a totally warm-hearted person, almost to the extent of Mother Teresa. In shot, she looked a completely different person. It was as if the scary face Sanae had seen earlier when they were alone in Linda’s dark office was an illusion. Sanae even thought that this smiley and kind face is the real Linda, as she was just relaxed.
Linda’s reputation within the company was not bad, either. Since Linda became the Head of the HR department, many thought it had become a lot more stable. They tended to share the impression that she was managing the HR division well, coordinating with Rachel, the Global Head of HR, who was famous for being difficult.
Sanae heard Greg once talk about this point with a colleague who was in the company for a long time,
“The head of HR in Europe changed so often – amazingly short cycles. But since Linda has taken over, it’s been stable.”
As it turned out, Linda was the one who had been behind the scenes, using dirty tactics to have Rachel get them fired or push them to voluntarily leave the company when another woman was in charge of HR in Europe. That was the secret behind the short tenures and the high turnover of the position. If the turnover had not been so high, Linda, who was young and without an outstanding career, would not have been offered the job. But now that Linda was in the position she wanted, there was no need for Linda to cause a storm in HR any more. Of course, Linda’s lies and manipulation of Rachel continued, but the direction was changed toward cleaning up women in other departments than in HR. Thus the innocent HR predecessors were disgraced and gone, while Linda, the evil one, was finally able to get credited for bringing stability to European HR. Nobody analyzed objectively what was the cause of the strange situation at HR as well as who actually benefited the most from this. They were easily fooled in front of Ms. Witchcraft, not knowing the basics of crime investigation.
Linda was also not blamed for the lay-offs, thanks to using Joe as a cover for the massive downsizing that resulted in many female employees leaving the company. It may be thanks to Linda’s timely and swift reaction to suppress a riot by a female employee who first started speaking up about the unnatural dismissal patterns. In fact, Linda failed to fire this woman, but she had informed the entire office that she should have been fired for going against management. People who were afraid in general after the massive lay-offs did not raise any more voices. To Linda’s ultimate convenience, another talented Swiss woman in the Finance department voluntarily left the company, seeing what happened. Linda learned one thing, there was not only one way to get rid of other women who would stand in Linda’s way. If those women realized that the workplace was somehow unfavorable to women, the bright ones would leave on their own without Linda having to fire them. For example, making them not promoted for a long time by manipulating their bosses would discourage them enough for voluntary departure. Alternatively, Linda could make men surrounding the target woman get promoted while keeping her in the same position; this would also push them to start looking for external opportunities and to leave eventually.
Behind the smiles, Linda was also thinking terrible things – how to push away Swiss women to establish Germans’ superiority as the official ruling class in the Swiss office.
In the Swiss office of this company, there were many Germans who could be Linda’s supporters, Turks and others who respected Germans because of their immigrant backgrounds to Germany. On top there were some women who were not good enough in terms of looks or competence to make Linda look good in comparison. They should be Linda’s core employees. On the other hand, Linda didn’t need any Swiss women, especially good ones. The Swiss tended to look down on the Germans as if they were low class foreigners and migrant workers for higher wages. They would criticize the Germans for the arrogant direct attitude, speaking ill of the Germans. The Germans’ image in Switzerland was not particularly good. Linda had no interest in Swiss culture, Swiss languages or people. Swiss people would speak Swiss-German even if they could speak High German, showing off that Switzerland was not a part of Germany. They must be trying to exclude Germans on purpose, which was totally unacceptable. One of these days, they should be all sent to a concentration camp in Germany and forced to speak only in standard German. If they should ever speak Swiss German or German with a Swiss accent, they should be given electric shocks or sent to a gas chamber. By the way, Danny is Jewish. Since it was not Hitler’s time, and Linda should present herself as a Saint Linda with generosity, she should cooly use Danny as a nice tool to drive her enemies away. Of course, Danny’s mission should be fighting for German superiority and the establishment of Linda’s superiority in the company.
Sanae, who had no idea that she had come to such a horrible company, heard that there was a Women’s Association in this company and attended the first meeting. Michelle, as I mentioned before, invited her to the meeting. Although Michelle seemed to be quite active in this group, another woman, Nancy, was the head of the women’s group. Nancy had worked for the company for many years, but her rank had remained as Manager. There was a somewhat hysterical tone to her voice, perhaps due to accumulated frustration. At one meeting, they were discussing women’s ratio in hiring and women’s ratio in management rank. As Sanae listening, one important piece of information came out of Nancy’s mouth.
“We talk about hiring women or promoting women but this company has already laid off a lot of talented women. Even if they have had a good career, as soon as they have a bad boss and a bad relationship, they will be fired immediately. They don’t take into account their past performance and try to move them to another position or anything like that. HR doesn’t care at all.”
Sanae thought, this should be a normal way in any typical Swiss company. Unfortunately, HR usually didn’t care about employees and would just take the decision of the boss, to conduct administrative tasks only. Still, it was shocking to hear the vivid statement from the mouth of a long-time employee. This company was not going to be a heaven. It was clear to Sanae in the first few weeks that the mainstream of this company was clearly male by gender and German by nationality. No one could match Sanae in terms of being a minority in terms of demographics. She was female, Japanese, Asian yellow, Buddhist, and incidentally had two children. But she couldn’t help it. With all these challenges, she was going to make an effort to get integrated in the company. Come to think of it, Sanae had read on an Internet review site before joining the company that this company was particularly political, and that one had to be in a certain core group to get promoted.
Promotion based on gender and nationality was one thing but getting fired because of gender would be extreme and was almost unbelievable. Sanae thought Nancy was referring to the massive layoffs that took place before she joined the company. Sanae spoke up.
“Are you referring to the massive layoffs earlier this year? At that time, both men and women were laid off?”
With her face down and her voice slightly trembling, Nancy answered to Sanae’ question,
“That’s the thing, Women were disproportionately affected by the lay-offs.”
Sanae also asked,
“You said, Women in Management Ratio went down compared to a few years ago, but what happened to those women who were in management rank a few years ago?”
“They were made redundant,” Michelle said somehow bemusedly with her eyes shining.
They all fell silent. It was enough for Sanae to understand the situation in the company – the weaker ones, women, were sacrificed in the face of restructuring to save costs. Probably they were not so costly compared with senior men but they were less protected. As in statisticians in social science studies say, everything else being equal between a man and a woman, a woman had a significant disadvantage in hiring, promotion or salary. Well, in this case, more precisely, Even if the scores in performance and personality were better for a woman than a man, she was sacrificed as she was not in the same group as the power holder.
At the same time, one thing hit Sanae vividly, Michelle’s ambitious look of seeing other good women laid-off as her own future opportunity. Sanae thought she should keep distance from Michelle, even if she looked friendly. She would be driven by her selfish needs and might start attacking Sanae, when she got somehow jealous of Sanae. That was Sanae’s experience with other ambitious women so far in her life, sadly.
This story is fictitious and is not based on any real persons or organizations. Copyright: Kunoichi4You 2024
Psychopath in the Next Office 