Can I Have the Rest?

No female wants a boss that creeps them the hell out. Every woman everywhere can agree on this topic. This is especially true if the boss is a male. This is even more true if the female is in her early twenties, starting a new job and just moved to a new city where she doesn’t know anyone. That’s right… this girl is me and I have never been more weirded out by another individual in my entire life than I was by my boss at the Labor Board.

During my first few weeks of employment, people kept saying to me, "Wow New York has to be quite the change from Indiana!" I would laugh and agree completely. I kept saying to myself how nice it was that people actually knew that my hometown was near Indiana, PA. Yes that's right, a town by the name of Indiana in the state of Pennsylvania. One day, I was speaking with one of the attorneys that was helping me with my first case and he says, "So how does a girl from Pennsylvania end up in Indiana?" I was super confused and responded, "I am not sure what you mean. I don't even think I've ever been to Indiana." He laughs and says, "Oh very funny!" He then mocks me by saying, "I've never been to Indiana, but I go to Indiana University for grad school." He continues to laugh. I really had no idea what to do at this point. Somehow these people in this office thought I went to Indiana University, like some high roller, when I really went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a small state school in the middle of nowhere, google that too. Fuck. I asked him who told him that and he says, "Oh [insert creepy boss name here] told everyone before you arrived that you went to Indiana University." This is the first instance that I realized that my boss, Creepy Boss Man, was an idiot.

Creepy Boss Man did me a marvelous favor by assigning me a "mentor" for my time at the Labor Board. Since I never knew when he was in the office until he popped his elf like body onto my desk (Literally, he did sit there. He would let one leg hang down over the desk and prop the other one on his thigh. SO. DAMN. GROSS.) he found it beneficial to have someone else assist me in case he wasn't around. He told me how great she was and how much we had in common. He said we would be a perfect match in his eyes and we would learn so much from each other. I cannot tell you how much this scared me. A lot. After we were introduced to one another, I wanted to ask Creepy Boss Man this: What on earth made you think that I would have a lot in common with an older, black woman born and raised in Queens. Her attitude was worse than mine, and if I ever wanted to feel like a total fucking idiot, I knew coming to Queens was the solution. Queens was much more comparable to the bad bosses that I mentioned above. After working with her a few times, I decided she wasn't worth my time and became a hermit in my office doing my own work and asking for help from no one. Thanks Creepy Boss Man for your wonderful assistance.

One day, Creepy Boss Man swings in my office and asks if I can go to lunch with him. I really wanted to ask if I even had a choice in the matter, but instead I smiled and agreed to go. He takes me to some small, intimate place in Tribeca. It was dimly lit and had candles on the table even though it was 1:00 PM on a weekday. This is the last place any female would want to go with her much older male boss for lunch. Of course Creepy Boss Man orders a cocktail and insists I do the same. I kindly refused maybe 10 times before he let it go. The lunch chat was about Creepy Boss Man's daughter and his days as a boy scout. He told me that he thought I would be interested in his boy scout days and camping trips because that is what people do in Indiana. I bet it is, I thought. I ordered a chicken sandwich and I ate probably 3/4 of the sandwich. After Creepy Boss Man had a few more cocktails, I noticed him eyeing up my sandwich. A few minutes later, his hand reaches across the table, grasps what is left of my sandwich and says, "Can I have the rest?"

　

I wish I could tell you what happened when I turned in my two week notice to Creepy Boss Man. I have no recollection of this at all. According to Wikipedia, clearly an excellent source (lol), my behavior is technically referred to as Motivated Forgetting. That's right people, motivated forgetting. It is a psychological defense mechanism in which people may forget unwanted memories, either consciously or unconsciously. After all of the awkward office chats with Creepy Boss Man, his weird eating habits (I avoided sitting anywhere near him at any work events where food was served), and his "quirky" (quirky was the nicest word I could think of using here) habits, I repressed my final days at the Labor Board because they were clearly too awkwardly painful for me.