I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties—call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job, she seemed knowledgeable and reliable. She knew the names and general attitudes of lawmakers (a great advantage in that position), and she seemed to know a lot about the state budget. She was a tad abrasive, to be sure. At the first staff meeting Leena attended, she talked a great deal and at one point loudly used the word “tit.” But apart from the loudness and occasional impropriety (“Do these loafers make me look like a lesbian?”), she was friendly and seemed capable.
Then the disappearances began. She would come in two hours late and say her power had gone out as a result of a storm no one else had been aware of (and anyhow, we wondered, why should a power outage make you that late?). There were endless excuses to leave work early. Once, she said she and her boyfriend had ridden on an amusement park ride and her tailbone was too sore to sit at her desk. One morning around 10 she said her cat had vomited and she needed to attend it; she didn’t return that day. And then there were the funerals—for friends she’d known at school, for her parents’ friends, for family members. You wondered how she could endure so much death.
Colleagues in her department began to complain of mistakes. Legislation is almost always complicated, and the agency depended on the analysts to know exactly what bills would and wouldn’t accomplish if passed. Once, in an analysis of the budget bill, she stated it would increase spending on one state agency by 1,300 percent. Manifestly she was wrong, but she refused to admit any mistake. When a more experienced colleague explained why she was mistaken, she just said, “We’ll have to agree to disagree.” A few weeks later she made the same mistake and blamed it on another analyst, who called her “stupid” and a “liar” to her face. The two nearly came to blows.
At last I realized: Leena had no idea what she was talking about. She spoke fast and loudly and it was easy to miss what she was saying, but if you listened carefully, almost every work-related statement was wrong; she’d refer knowingly to a “$3 million unfunded liability” when the figure was $15 billion, or speak of a “bridge loan” as if it were a loan for the construction of a bridge. Eventually she stopped working altogether. She would go into her office and lock the door, or leave for the day without bothering to give a reason, or else say she was going to a “committee meeting” that, as we’d discover later, had been canceled. Occasionally she would submit work products, but these were incoherent.
The boss wanted to fire her but feared she’d take legal action. Some kind of documentation of deliberate wrongdoing was needed. Of course, there had been plenty of that, but it was hard to prove. Had she stolen money or defaced property? Well, no. One of the IT personnel hit on an idea. He could place a device on her computer that would “grab” images of her screen at pre-set intervals throughout the day; say, every five or ten minutes. These images would be sent via email to her supervisor and would document what we all knew.
The trouble was that Leena had put a password on her computer and made sure she was present any time IT personnel installed updates. So at an appointed time, the IT guy told her he needed to update her virus software, and when he began working on it—Leena watching over his shoulder—her supervisor buzzed and asked her to come to the conference room for some purpose. The deed was done. When the results came in, the images were peremptory. On a typical day, she watched YouTube videos and Hulu sitcoms, read blogs, fiddled with her Facebook account, researched area apartments, and played games. She almost never worked.
Leena was let go the next day. When the news came, she took it nonchalantly, as if she wondered why it had taken so long. By this time I had developed a reluctant admiration for her. It took some cleverness and ingenuity to land a job for which she had no aptitude, put forth no effort in it, and collect a paycheck for almost a year.
A liar, yes. But stupid? I’m not so sure.
