My Boss is a Serial Killer by Christina Harlin

not
for me.”
    She looked crushed, which made me feel bad.
“Why not?”
    “ I’m sorry. I get a real bad vibe…” and
here I almost said “from him” but instead I finished, “…that the
two of us have different work styles.”
    Something flickered through her eyes and she
confided, “He can be pretty high-maintenance.”
    Bingo. I knew it. “High-maintenance” is the
code-word for “asshole.”
    “ We do have another position open,”
Donna said, with an undertone suggesting she hated to even mention
it. “Our estate attorney needs a secretary.”
    I wondered what worried her so, what made her
shy away from showing me to this next guy after the
high-maintenance monster she’d just pushed me toward. Could the
estate attorney possibly be worse? She saw my expression and said,
“It’s just that Bill is very detail-oriented, and he’s gone through
a lot of secretaries. It’s been difficult to find someone who’s a
good match for him, as he has some peculiar tendencies.”
    This was significant. Donna, as the office
manager, was overstepping a huge boundary by confessing to me
outright that an attorney was hard to work for. I wanted to meet
this guy now, strictly out of curiosity. “I’d like to talk to him,”
I said, “if he has time.”
    He had time. But Donna was unconvinced. She
took me to Bill Nestor’s office and said at the doorway, “Just call
me when you’re finished,” with the implication that we’d be
finished with each other very soon.
    The first thing I noticed was the neatness of
his office. The lack of files and paper could make someone think he
didn’t work at all. It took me a moment to find the man behind the
desk, who was as neat and bland as his office and blended fairly
well into the wall. He rose and came to shake my hand, looking
embarrassed that he’d been forced on me.
    He said, “My secretary just quit because I
drove her crazy.”
    I blinked in surprise.
    Bill said, “I’ve been through three
secretaries this year. They all end up quitting or transferring
away from me.”
    Okay, I was willing to play along. Obviously
I’d caught him in that state of utter honesty that only comes about
after extreme frustration. I was in the same state, being newly
divorced and unemployed, and I was willing to bet I could match him
frustration for frustration. So I asked, “Why do they quit?”
    “ Because I’m inflexible, this last one
said.” From his desk he produced a document so neatly formatted,
right down to its precisely parallel staples, that I yearned to
touch it. Dryly he went through a list of requirements for his
paperwork. I found it all rather fascinating. The man knew exactly
what he wanted.
    We spoke for a while about what he wanted.
And it didn’t take me many minutes to begin to see the source of
his problem. He wasn’t just detail oriented. He was detail
obsessed, to the extent that I guessed, correctly, that he had an
actual mental disorder. Yet what I also saw was that the parameters
of his obsession didn’t change. That can be a seductive quality to
a woman who’d just quit working for a guy who contradicted himself
almost hourly and shouted when she couldn’t keep up. This one
didn’t seem like a shouter.
    “ I don’t adapt well to change. I don’t
cope well with stress.” Bill continued to list things that would
convince me not to work for him. His last secretary must have
really done a number on him.
    “ Do you yell?” I asked. I had no fear
of screwing up this interview. With our relationship screwed from
the beginning by our own frustrations, Bill and I had nowhere to go
but up.
    He was quick enough and honest enough not to
pretend that he didn’t understand the question. “I don’t think I’ve
ever yelled at anyone in my life.”
    “ Heavy on the sarcasm? Like snide
comments?” I folded my arms and practically glared at him. “I just
quit working for a sarcastic sonofabitch who enjoyed making asides
about how little he liked me. I