My Shadow Gal in Australia
She was always nearby, always unexplained and got me fired three times. She used three different names, dyed her hair frequently and altered her appearance at each company.
Right around 1996 according to my resume, after I’d been in Australia a couple years working contract jobs in various programming languages, a new female employee joined the company I was at for a three month short term job - a bank in Sydney called Suncorp I think I was doing some Visual Basic programming for. I worked for them several times over the years. I didn’t make much note of her after I was introduced to her as “Sharon.” She was a mousy brunette, a little crazy in her expressions and wore wireframe glasses that looked like they were twenty years out of style. I could tell before she said anything she was rabidly left-wing. Her face was screwed up into a rictus that I believe leftists think means “friendly” but it tends to be frightening. No animals smile like this in the wild for any reason and if they do while they are showing their teeth it’s always a sign of fear. I don’t remember speaking to her again for any reason other than occasionally to walk past her in the break room after making a coffee. I nodded my head as I passed once or twice.
About a week after she started, I had forgotten all about her. She sat somewhere at the far end in another department. In thirty years, I never found an Australian woman attractive in the least. In the end they all seemed to look like Dame Edna Everage to me and they all felt really flat. I think that mankind would go extinct with women no more attractive than Australian women. They lack something just like the men but you feel it more when the woman lacks something. There’s just no warmth or passion or humor or much of anything real in them … and they know it, too. Something vital there in the warm blooded that is absent in them. Worse, there’s always that low grade hostility. You can feel the barely suppressed snark in every single word they say. It’s common to people who have not known real hardship in their lives, I would guess.
I thought it was weird my whole life how I was supposed to be the misanthrope but I often went out of my way to be kind to the individual. They see that as weakness and that’s not just in me. They see civility as weakness in almost anyone who extends that generosity towards them. I saw them treat others that way for being good natured. I don’t know that any of them are bright enough to understand how that will quickly destroy office morale to the point it can’t be recovered. They don’t know how to lead and they also don’t know how to follow. They just clench their jaws through all of it and keep “smiling.”
So I tended to forget them all right after being introduced to any of them. I had forgotten about “Sharon” in a week or so.
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