I can not be angry at Kaylee for leaving my company. I can be angry. Am in fact angry. But I can't be angry at her. I can't even be angry at myself. I can only be angry at the world and the unfairness of the cold uncaring universe.

She told me when she renewed her contract a year ago that she didn't think she'd want to work for me for a fourth year. She gave me something like six weeks notice when she actually found a new job a bit ahead of the curve. She went through making a job posting and winnowing resumes and talking to people on the phone before finding me people to interview. She even decided that a particularly important and fussy task was too important to hand over to a new employee and continued handling it for a month after I was no longer obligated to be paying her.

So yeah, last person in the world I can be angry at is Kaylee.

Grumble grumble ... using the things she learned working for me to get a substantially better job with more career advancement opportunities while simultaneously managing not to burn any bridges in the process of leaving my company. Grumble grumble ... how dare she! Grumble.

The replacement, who I interviewed and I hired, was a nightmare. The shyness and the utter terror of foreigners were things I figured I could work with. In fact, when she was super scared of everything and tried to quit a week into employment, I talked her out of it. Partly because I actually thought there was a chance she could be trained but, more realistically, because the process of finding a new replacement was going to take a while and I had this bike tour I wanted to go on and the idea of having to get someone on board and trained while I was out of town seemed like a bad one.

Some (maybe even perhaps many) of the things Replacement did wrong were things that could be blamed on a lack of training (from me) or a lack of clear instruction (from me). Others were so magnificently an example of a total lack of common sense that one finds oneself idly wondering how she hasn't accidentally killed herself yet.

When she delivered my new camera that she helped me buy off of Taobao for slightly less than twice her monthly salary, she left the box downstairs in the front hall where my neighbors park their ebikes. I had previously told her that she could leave things like coffee beans or a repaired shoe down there instead of taking it up to my apartment because it was silly to walk up to the fourth floor when you don't need to. Luckily, no one stole it.

Then there was the time she contradicted me in front of a client. Virtually in front not physically in front. We were using WeChat to coordinate the delivery of something so there was no reason for her to say anything at all without checking with me first. But no. After a dozen messages of my telling the client that his specific illegal request was illegal, why it was illegal, and that I wasn't risking my business credentials on his illegal request, she jumps in on the basis of 4 whole weeks in my industry as a gofer and says "I'm sure what he wants will be fine".

The past few days, while discussing employment with potential hires to replace Replacement, I used screenshots of our conversations as ways of telling whether or not they'd also be total fuckups. Wanting to believe in karma, even though I know its not true, I've decided the universe did this to me so I'd appreciate Amazing Candidate #1 (hereinafter referred to as "Tyra" cause, well, that's her name) even more.

At today's interviews, Amazing Candidate #2 and Amazing Candidate #3 were actually good enough that I'm going to find them jobs with friends of mine because my friends shouldn't have to suffer through people like Replacement.

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