At 9am today Bjorn was given a matter of hours to clear his desk and bid his farewells.
Now I like a flutter, and if Bill Hill’s had created a market for gambling on the corporate capers of the beauty industry, I’d have been the first filling out a slip for a ton on Bjorn being out of a job before summer’s end. And whilst I've been casually undermining him and stitching him up to senior management for months, even I found yesterday evening's news of his imminent demise something of a shock.
More shocking still was walking in this morning to be told that by noon he would be out of my life forever. Bjorn free, so was I to be. With spring having well and truly sprung in London town I made the assumption that his long-overdue sacking was a sign of a culmination of sunnier horizons in my life. But once in the C.O.O.'s office, I found there much more juice to the sorry tale of the fall from grace(?) of Captain Incompetent.
It seems that as opposed to low cloud masking a clear view of the business from said C.O.O.'s ivory tower she in fact uses her point of elevation to maintain a really very clear picture of the goings on upon the ground beneath. Bjorn, she informed, was due to be suspended this Friday with a turbo-charged Big Hire consultant primed and ready to assume his role come Monday morning. The C.O.O. had, apparently, no less than 6 counts on which to implicate this; I'm happy to report I've brought to light 2 of these counts. They include: bullying, dodgy expenses, time keeping, pseudo-working from home, all set amidst a glorious backdrop of general inability to perform his mega-buck paying Marketing Director role. All of which, I believe, I've been charting across this particular part of the world wide web.
With all of the afore b(j)orn in mind, the week's main shocker came to the C.O.O. when Bjorn tendered his notice yesterday afternoon. He, quite mystifyingly and if to be believed, has a new role at a principal competitor. Bad news you'd think for the company kingpin who had no doubt carefully prepared her 'you're fired' speech for Friday. Yet au contraire dear readers. For in fact, right now she will be toasting a quite beautiful scenario. Via his resignation, not only has she just been spared the potentially complicated legal wranglings and general mal content of her Marketing Director's dismissal but unbeknown to Bjorn his successor is twiddling her thumbs prior to Monday's planned joining of the company. And the icing on this rather wonderful corporate cake is that in the process, the boss has just offloaded the beauty industry's biggest red herring to said principal competitor.
Never have so many colleagues commented on my overall good humour and laid back demeanor in one day. But where exactly does this leave the Coordinator (Assistant in standard English) to both Bjorn and Trophy_Wife?
In the interim I assume Bjorn's role for the week as I attempt to clear up his trail of spilt milk before it all goes off, with a mop of limited capacity. There's only so much one man can do. Bjorn, in his inimitable manner, seemed baffled by having been put on (uphill) gardening leave. His bewilderment at this (when going to a key competitor durrr???) was perhaps the most amusing part of the whole year long soap opera. He'd already been locked out of all systems this morning and his Out Of Office points correspondents towards my good self. It was with some glee that I received a 'I had no idea [Bjorn] was leaving' email and before I even knew it I'd responded: neither did he semi-colon hyphen close bracket.
But is this really the good news I've been waiting on. Will my days be as amusing? Perhaps not. Will I have a moron signing my expenses form without even looking at it? Unlikely. Is the new Big Hire replacement going to run a tighter, tougher ship than Bjorn? Undoubtedly. And of utmost importance: what now will provide the creative, the incompetence, the anger, the frustration and the real life nuggets of comic gold that fuel this very blog?
Fear not. PR-adise is a fickle, bitter little world. And yet when life is as fruitful, varied, tumultuous and as gratifying as my own, the blog really does write itself.
