Page 46 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

ing her because of another woman in the office, who’s an executive, not a
secretary.
It turned out that Oscar was not only in the middle of a nasty divorce,
but also sleeping with two coworkers at the same time. It was like Big Love,
the HBO show about polygamy, except that I didn’t think there was any
“living the principle” here. This was more “unprincipled living.”
I didn’t want to seem cold, but the last thing I wanted was to be involved
in was this quadrangle. I now know that I have to call the law department
to look at the financials to make sure that Oscar is not using company
money on either of these women. And I’m not happy about it.
So, after Brenda dried her tears and left, I called Oscar to my office. We
were not friends, but I knew him well. He came in, all smiling.
I said, “You are not going to believe what happened to me after lunch
today. Brenda came to see me.”
His smile fell.
“I don’t need to know any details, but are you having a relationship with
another woman, too?”
He said, “Yes. I’m trying to get rid of Brenda.”
“How is she going to go away? She’s your secretary. She sits twelve feet
from you every day. And this other woman marches in and out of your
office a dozen times a day.
“Personally,”I said,“I don’t care. But what are you, stupid? This is going
to be a mess now.”
So he told me that he would take care of it.
A week went by. I came back to my office from a meeting, and sitting
in my foyer is somebody new. The executive Oscar’s been sleeping with.
Angry as a hornet.
Oscar had decided that the way to solve this problem was to erase the
blackboard. So he dumped both of them. And the executive was now furi-
ous with me,convinced that her ouster from Oscar’s affections was my fault.
I didn’t want to punish the women in this case, so I had the lawyers
work out transfers for the secretary and the executive. They actually

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