One more thing! Someone on the Knitter's Review forum posted a saga about getting yelled at for knitting at work, and the upshot of it is that a female co-worker caused the trouble. (Gee, what a frickin' surprise!)

And that reminded me that I didn't share the latest from my Former Workplace, Home of the Queen Bee, Mrs. Know-It-All, and the Diva. There's a long Lifetime Channel Movie's worth of Chickdrama saga there but I can't share most of it, so I'll cut it down to a sound bite.

My friend and former assistant L has another job. She was hired away by a very prestigious law firm - not as a secretary, but as a real estate paralegal. I did the happy dance for her - she's totally qualified and it's no less than she deserves. When she got the job and announced her departure, Queen Bee and Mrs. Know-It-All shat full-grown moose with a full rack of antlers at the news. A month later, they are still passing antlered woodland creatures every time they think of it, and it hasn't improved their already sweet dispositions any. Panties are tied in tight knots these days. Awww, ain't that a damn shame?

Let's remember, Queen Bee didn't want to hire L at all, because she wasn't a legal secretary, let alone a paralegal at that point, and I was told, and I quote, "She has no law firm experience!!!" My response was, and I quote, "So what? This isn't a law firm! She's smart, she'll pick it up!" (It wasn't a law firm, it was a corporate legal department, and she was smart, and she did pick it up fast.) The lawyers saw it my way, and L was hired and quickly turned out to be the smartest person in the office. Time passed, my husband required me at home much more, L took over most of my job and did it with great skill, and then I left last fall, and they went outside to hire another paralegal, passing her over for the promotion. Mad? You damnbetcha - she was mad, I was furious, it was stupid. The job should have been hers, it was already hers, it was insane to hire outside. But they did it. It was politics.

But good triumphed over bitchy female evil, because when a very prestigious outside firm was looking to add a paralegal, they passed right by the Queen Bee and Mrs. Know-It-All, and hired the smart chick, even though she was "just a secretary" and was never going to be anything else in that place. So my advice: Buy stock in Preparation H, they'll be passing those moose there for months.