David Brent

Some people can just be summed up by a meme. David Brent was one of them. Have you seen that meme of the Shitzu terrier with the geometric hair cut? The one with the long fringe, streaky colours/shit highlights, and shaved at the back? It’s a Blacktown bogan haircut. David Brent had the exact same haircut as the dog in the meme.

David Brent was in her mid-40s and skinny. She was the sort of person who returns a 5-cent item to Coles for the refund. The type of person who demands a refund for an ‘inedible’ meal at a restaurant after eating ¾ of the meal. She’s the sort of person who would report another parent to DOCS for abuse if she hears the parent saying ‘No’ to a child trying to stick a fork in a power point. David Brent was a single mum with 5 kids, and a grandmother of 2. Some of them still lived at home, but they were in their late teens/early twenties. David Brent had been working at KRONOS for at least a decade and a half, and in that time had achieved great things, or so they said.

The only thing I begrudgingly admit I respect David Brent for, is the fact that David Brent never folded under Bertha’s violent volcanic temper tantrums. Whether David Brent saw through them or was pre-warned I don’t know. Maybe it’s a feisty single mum thing. Maybe she had a kid with a ferocious temper and learned to ride it out instead of giving them a lolly pop and letting them grow-up as aggressive entitled little shits. David Brent never stood up to Bertha, but she didn’t back down either.

At first, David Brent was nice, but the cracks started to appear fairly quickly. David Brent started to have the favourites. Before long some staff were getting favourable treatment and others couldn’t even get a return phone call. Sides were taken, lines were drawn and things began to unravel. I'm still not really sure where David Brent fits into this story. David Brent is definitely the stuff of KRONOS wet dreams, but I think she sometimes struggles with toeing the line too.

I’ve always been good at reading people and picking up on subtleties. Being gay, in a world where violent homophobia is still a thing, means you have to be good at reading signs. It’s a skill honed in the closet, but it’s a skill that never leaves you. David Brent is hard to read because she is a different person around different people. In big groups her anxiety chokes her up and she’s relatively silent, but sometimes she steps up and takes control in unexpected ways. She is headstrong and surprisingly savvy, but sadly lacking in many of the skills a good manager should be able to manage. David Brent has achieved a great deal and had a successful career in a company that would cut you up and hide the body before paying out a worker’s comp claim for a broken finger. From the photos I saw she raised 5 beautiful kids on her own. I just hope they didn’t inherit her personality. Things between David Brent and I deteriorated quicker than anyone could have predicted. We all knew David Brent was going to be the downfall of The Beaches. I can only hope that while she is fucking up an entire Sydney area arm of a multinational company that she manages to implode her career at the same time. David Brent is arrogant, rude, and almost autistic in how she relates to other people. David Brent clashes with most people. One of the most explosive clashes was her clash with Janet, and it was over a boy. Two crazy people in a room is either the start of an awesome new Netflix series (something like Feud) or the start of a war. Or in this case both.

Janet and David Brent never got on, in the way that two women chasing the same toy boy are bound to clash. Janet and Todd had a weird on and off relationship. Todd, in his 30s and still living with his mum and working 20hrs a week in a dead-end job, had an oddly blokey charm. He pursued Janet pretty hard. Janet was a recently divorced North Shore mummy in her late 40s whose divorce settlement meant she never had to work and her children could still do all the things future merchant bankers do as children. David Brent was jealous of Janet. Two skinny blonde single mums in their 40s, both competing for the attention of a frankly unimpressive 30yr old with a thing for older ladies. It was a battle bigger than either of them, a fight to establish how the world works, and what matters most. Two women, roughly equal in looks, age and family situation. One had the power to give Todd a career, the other had the money to make him her sugar baby. The sad thing is Todd is actually pretty smart. If he didn’t have crippling depression, issues with alcohol, and low self-esteem, he could do a lot better than middle aged woman’s trophy.

David Brent had had the hots for Todd from day 1. She told me she thought he was hot at the Christmas party. Obviously, this was before she set my psycho alert alarm bells ringing. Everyone knew that Janet and Todd were bumping uglies. They ‘tried to hide it’ and publicly proclaimed to be ‘just friends’, the way people do when they want to shout about their sex life to the world. Janet was a 40yr old single mum being quite aggressively pursued by a man 15 years younger than her, and Todd was a 30yr old who had scored with a sugar mummy. It was an odd coupling, but like all broken people it was the attention they found intoxicating. The sexual attention from each other, and the attention they attracted from others with their ‘hiding our relationship’ games. Their relationship made David Brent jealous. Janet was pretty much the monied up version of David Brent, and she had snagged a boy toy. Probably because David Brent was a bitch. Janet was the opposite of reliable. She was constantly and reliably late to every shift. David Brent probably assumed malice or stupidity on Janet’s part, but to be fair Janet’s kids were all school aged and were probably the reason she was always late.

It all started when Janet requested a transfer to the Upper North Shore so she could be closer to home. She had recently bought a house with her mega divorce settlement and wanted to work closer. Presumably she would be able to turn up on time if she didn’t have to travel so far. KRONOS is not big on making people's lives easier, but this meant that Janet would be further away from Todd so David Brent agreed. David Brent would still be Janet’s supervisor, but Janet would work most of her shifts on the upper North Shore. Everything was going fine for the first few weeks. But it didn’t take long for things to turn sour. David Brent seemed to call Janet at the last moment to move her to other rooms far more often than she did other people. The way she spoke to Janet was often plain rude and Janet had had enough of David Brents childish mind games. Janet reported her to Napoleon, somehow, Napoleon agreed with Janet. Napoleon called a 1 on 1 meeting between David Brent and Janet, and Napoleon played referee. David Brent apologised to Janet directly and David Brent agreed to be more careful about her tone. A slap on the wrist basically.

A few months later David Brent was moving staff right left and centre. She had designed a horrible roster that just didn’t work and was digging herself a deeper hole. She was moving the people she liked closer to her office, and messing around with the people she didn’t like. Moving them at the last minute, rostering them as far from home as possible etc etc. It was clear David Brent was favouring certain people over others. To no one’s surprise David Brent offered Todd full time work, a job as a trainer, and moved him to the collection room next to her office. Other people had been asking for more hours and were denied them, others who had been around longer had applied to be trainers and had been refused. People started to resent Todd because he was receiving all kinds of perks simply because David Brent wanted to do him. Despite him complaining about people not liking him anymore, he never stopped claiming the perks that made people resent him, in fact he ramped it up.

Staff knew when David Brent was on a bitching rampage. David Brent liked to keep a tight knit group of people around her. She gossiped and bitched, and gave them what they wanted. In return they fed her dirt on everyone else. This allowed her to keep on top of the rumours. Her mistake was trusting the people who shared her office space. The staff kitchen was opposite David Brents office. One quiet afternoon, Todd and a few other staff were sitting in the kitchen. David Brent was in her office with the door open, bitching to her Upper North Shore counterpart about Janet. The conversation turned very dark and bitter, very quickly. The staff in the kitchen couldn’t believe two clinical supervisors were talking about an employee’s private life like that. If it had been about her work performance, fair enough. Before I leave you with the impression that these accidental eavesdroppers were on the side of the righteous, not one of them confronted David Brent, but every single one of them repeated the story ad nauseam to anyone who would listen. Janet being thrown under a bus by her boss was an opportunity for them to gossip. Todd was live messaging Janet about everything David Brent was saying. As expected, Janet was livid. Firstly, that David Brent had spoken about her like that, secondly that she had done so, so publicly. Janet called Napoleon to make an informal complaint, not yet ready to put it in writing. It was a pretty serious complaint and if Janet had chosen to pursue it, David Brent would have been in a fuck tonne of trouble. David Brent was shitting her pants.

While Janet was letting David Brent stew in her panic juices, David Brent dug herself into a guilty hole. She banned the staff from using the kitchen, making herself look more guilty and more paranoid. Staff from other collection rooms were not allowed to visit Gateway or spend their lunch breaks with Gateway staff. The staff toilet, which was outside David Brents door was now off limits and staff would have to use the patient bathroom. David Brent locked the outer office door and installed a doorbell, so that you could not enter the outer office without her opening the door for you. What a fucking deranged, paranoid, psychotic bitch. The irony in this all is that she was allowed to do this under KRONOS confidentiality rules. She was not only allowed to but obliged to ensure the confidentiality of her conversations, even when her conversations involved the violation of her staffs right to privacy about their out of work life. David Brent violated the company’s core values, and used the same core values to save her own skin. That is how the strong stay strong, they have their cake and eat it too.

In November I had a cyst on my lower back that returned twice in 6 months. I eventually had it surgically removed and have now recovered. Throughout the process however, I was on and off pain killers and during that time I made a mistake. 1 mistake in 2 years of undeniably brilliant and compassionate work, but that was what they chose to focus on. Definitely no bias here.

KRONOS pathology decided to make an example of me and gave me a formal warning and made me complete retraining. I agreed to the retraining. Throughout this retraining process however, I have never felt more singled out, bullied, isolated, victimised, intimidated, and discriminated against by senior staff.

The first part of my punishment was to be sent to a two-day training session at the lab. It was to do with the computer systems we used. I was told that it was a refresher training course, and would go into more depth about the current system that we were using. I was told this would help me get a better understanding of the program, and therefore make fewer mistakes during data entry.

The training was scheduled for the week after my cyst surgery. The doctor had given me a medical certificate for this time because the recovery from the surgery could be quite painful, but I went to the lab anyway. I went to the lab, dosed up on heavy duty painkillers. I told David Brent I couldn’t sit for long periods of time, due to my surgery and she said that wouldn’t be a problem. She told me she had informed the training staff of the issue and they would accommodate it.

The training group was not a refresher course, it was a course for people new to the system. They were rolling out e-collect in regional areas, and I was in a class with people who had never seen e-collect before. I had been using e-collect for a year at this point. I was in serious pain and decided to give David Brent a call as Bella could not be found. David Brent is notorious for not answering her work phone. When she didn’t answer her phone, I texted her explaining the issue.

David Brent told me to find another training officer and to discuss the situation with them. I found Penrose, a lovely trainer, and probably the only person in the training department with a soul. Penrose was a lesbian, so maybe that was why she had a heart, unlike the miserable fucking heterosexual. Penrose told me that if I had a current medical certificate, I actually wasn’t allowed to be at work. If a Dr had said I was unfit for work, insurance would not cover me in the event of an accident, because medically I was not fit to be there. She told me that if I was feeling unwell, I should leave. I called David Brent and asked if I could go to one of the collection rooms to finish my shift. She said no and told me to go home. Soon after I received an angry call from Bella. She yelled at me that I did not have permission to leave without speaking to her first, and that I should not have been at work if I had a current medical certificate.

I was called to a meeting with Napoleon, Bella and the head of HR. They had printed my text messages to David Brent and accused me of returning to work deceptively. They told me I was not allowed to come to work while I had a medical certificate stating I was unfit for work. I told them that David Brent knew about the medical certificate and had told me to come to training anyway. Bella asked me when the medical certificate was valid until. I told her it covered me until the end of the week and she told me that I was not allowed to return until then. I tried to explain that it was a ‘just in case’ certificate that the Dr had written because of potential pain issues after the surgery but she wouldn’t listen. I had no sick leave left and they wouldn’t let me use my annual leave for the time off. I had over 100 hours of annual leave owing, but they wouldn’t let me use it. Bella told me that I could not go on a Dom run until a surgeon signed me off. Not just fit for work, but fit for the lifting/patient transferring requirements of a Dom run. This is bullshit. No Dom has ever had to lift or transfer a patient.