My friend Keith works for the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn, and he's worked there for - other than a six month hiatus - years. Keith is a very responsible, reliable worker - he's the type of guy who speaks what he means, but is always respectful, he gets his job done efficiently and well, and he has no patience for slacking.

Anyway, he's been super frustrated at work the past couple of months because there's three women he works with who have been making it a point to make everyone's life miserable. They're bitchy and snotty and rude, and slack off like hell, and make the rest of the keeper team miserable. Yet management won't do anything about it because their work gets done (even though most of the time it's because they're pawning it off on others), so it's out of their hands.

There's this one woman, we'll call her BitchJen (I've never even met her, so I don't particularly care that I'm using her sort of real name) - I'll give you an example of her bitchiness. At the zoo, a vacation schedule is passed around in order of senority, and each person picks two weeks until the last person gets it. They've been doing this for a long time and everyone knows how it goes - the more seniority, the more flexibility. So the guy with the most seniority picks his two weeks, passes it on to BitchJen, and she runs to management to say, "but I NEED those two weeks! I've already bought my plane tickets for those two weeks!" Knowing all the time how the vacation scheduling worked, of course. And then management goes to the first guy and tells him that he can't take his weeks, cause she needs them! (And it wasn't for anything pressing, either.) If I were managment I would have said something like, "listen, you know what the procedure is, your plane tickets aren't our problem." But they buckled.

So anyway, this whole big explanation is because Keith and BitchJen (and some outside people) interviewed for a senior keeper position back in October, and they kept putting off the announcement, and today they called Keith in to tell him that they chose BitchJen. Even though she's mean and lazy and rude to all the people she'll be supervising, they dont care - they just wanted to pick her because that way they wouldn't have to change people's schedules.

So I'm so mad for Keith. He didn't really care about getting the position; he just didn't want her bad behavior to be rewarded. He says he sees no reason to work hard at all, or be considerate, when management obviously doesn't give a shit. I just hate that he's going to be miserable every day he goes to work.