Shortly after she assumed the purple in 1995 I was summoned up to an audience with the “Big Rig,” as she was already known (she had begun her career in San Francisco a quarter of a century earlier, and I knew her by reputation: she’d left for the mothership before I ever joined the payroll, and upon her departure made it clear that she intended to return one day in a position of authority, and that she’d have some scores to settle).
It didn’t help that at the time I shared an office, my little art department, with a guy who’d been on that vast shit list in the early seventies, so a certain amount of ca-ca by association was clinging to me by the first time I was admitted to the Presence.
I found her initially off-putting, but I gotta say that over the next seven years of our association that initial impression ripened into genuine hatred and fear. Upon her retirement she left a memo to her successor advising that my little art department be shut down (she had been constrained from doing this owing to the political protection I still enjoyed from her boss), a memo which her acting successor, for whom I’d done a few solids, discreetly shitcanned.
She died a few days ago. Some of my former colleagues are already saying nice things on the bush telegraph. Me? I’m unable to summon up any measurable regret on this occasion, and I’ve got a tunneling electron microscope in the next room, so I’ll STFU.
cordially,
It didn’t help that at the time I shared an office, my little art department, with a guy who’d been on that vast shit list in the early seventies, so a certain amount of ca-ca by association was clinging to me by the first time I was admitted to the Presence.
I found her initially off-putting, but I gotta say that over the next seven years of our association that initial impression ripened into genuine hatred and fear. Upon her retirement she left a memo to her successor advising that my little art department be shut down (she had been constrained from doing this owing to the political protection I still enjoyed from her boss), a memo which her acting successor, for whom I’d done a few solids, discreetly shitcanned.
She died a few days ago. Some of my former colleagues are already saying nice things on the bush telegraph. Me? I’m unable to summon up any measurable regret on this occasion, and I’ve got a tunneling electron microscope in the next room, so I’ll STFU.
cordially,