A/N Warning for drugs, alcohol and mentions of bullying.
JUDGED TEN – IAN AND MAX
Iain Dean should never have been a manager in a busy office. He would have been far better suited to a career in the forces, as he was later to realise. He was the kind of boss who, if he took a liking to a member of staff, usually female, would slyly promote them. The females he expected a special reward from, but the men he promoted were expected to spread the word about "good old Iain" and to buy him drinks at office parties.
Conversely, if he disliked somebody he could make their life a misery. Iain believed in working by the book and would clamp down on any kind of innovation. Poor Max Walker, the latest team member, and the last one Iain was to be in charge of, learned this to his cost.
Max tried, he really did. He was like a puppy, eager to learn. Iain's flesh crawled when he met men like that. Girls, yes, he liked girls who were eager to please but not his male staff. On the few occasions where he found a reason to praise Max, his employee's eager "Thank you, Mr Dean!" would grate on Iain's nerves. He began to withdraw the praise and sought to criticise Max's work instead.
"Max, did I ask you to complete that spreadsheet by midday or not? And didn't I ask you to do it on your own? Why have you bothered Wayne?"
"It's no trouble, Iain" Wayne said quickly, "There were just a couple of queries he had that he needed sorting."
"He should have come to me, then. Thanks, Wayne."
Max struck up a friendship with pretty Zoe Hanna, the head of one of the other teams. She was reasonably sympathetic to Max's problems, but when he started to complain about Iain's attitude to him, she laughed it off.
"It's because he thinks you whine, Max" she confided after a couple of drinks one night.
"I don't mean to whine; I just get upset if I feel I've let the team down."
"Oh don't be so intense, it's not healthy at this time of night!" mocked Zoe.
Max, who'd been intending to ask her on a date, felt rebuffed and just smiled weakly.
The next evening, Iain, who'd witnessed Max's feeble attempt with Zoe the previous evening, made his own move on Zoe and was successful.
Max took to drowning his sorrows. Not to the point of being ejected from pubs but to the point of sometimes needing two painkillers before he set out for work because his hangover was making him feel nauseous.
Then one evening he was out with a friend when he saw Iain and Zoe entering the same bar. He hastily looked away, but heard Zoe shouting his name loudly. Clearly the worse for wear already, she was dragging Iain over to him.
"NO, Zoe" chuckled Iain, only half-joking, "I see enough of this one every day as it is."
"Aw, he's all right, aren't you, Maxy?"
"I don't think we have anything to say to each other, do we, Zoe?"
Iain noticed Max's belligerent tone.
"You can pack in that attitude, lad, because in a couple of weeks we're having a team-building weekend where we all have to bond. An army-style boot camp. Soon make a man of you!"
"If it's the weekend it's not compulsory. I'd be better off not coming to this" Max said hastily.
Iain held out his hands with mocking defensiveness.
"Of course you can choose not to come, if you really have something better to do. It's just that it would look so much better on the annual appraisals. If you ever want to move into a higher salary bracket, lad, make an effort!"
Max made an effort. He tried as hard as he could on the boot camp weekend, but everything was too much for him. Iain enjoyed trumpeting his failures to the rest of the team.
"Oh look, Max is stuck again. Come on, lad, get into shape! Look, Zoe's doing much better than you! How does it feel to be beaten by a woman?"
"I'm not aware that the word 'woman' was an insult, Iain" Zoe had said coldly, and that had been the end of their relationship. Zoe felt mean about her previous treatment of Max and did her best to build bridges, but Max, too deeply hurt, had refused to forgive her mistakes, and would barely speak to her, except when it was necessary at work.
The final betrayal came when the appraisals were given. Max actually felt his colour draining when he'd read his. "Could try harder but only makes the minimum effort needed to perform mundane tasks…. Refused to bond with others in the team building exercise… resents me as a manager and deliberately makes obstacles." Needless to say there was no chance of Max moving up into a higher salary bracket.
Drinking became his only friend but whereas once he could manage to attend work even with a splitting headache, now he would ring in sick when it suited him. Iain enjoyed having him in the office and telling him to get his act together before he was fired. Max would go home and indulge in fantasies of killing Iain, stabbing him over and over, snapping his neck, running over him in a secluded lane near the office. But his bitter laughter at these thoughts was always interrupted by the shriek of the alarm clock. Time to get up and face his tormentor once more.
It was a 'friend of a friend' who offered Max the final temptation.
"Drugs? I don't smoke" he had said naively, and the man had laughed and told him there were other ways to 'get happy'. After one of the nights where he 'got happy' he'd realised that he had to go into work later. He'd had a written warning about his attendance.
Iain was giving instructions to the team about the new files he'd set up on the computer. Figures and symbols danced before his eyes. Suddenly the nausea was too much for him, and he fled the office, hearing Iain's outraged bellow behind him. He received a phone call from Iain's superior that evening telling him his employment had been terminated and that his final salary and any belongings he'd left behind would be posted on to him. As an added twist of the knife, the manager had given Max the telephone number of a drug rehabilitation centre.
Max never bothered. He drew out some of his savings, and found the 'friend of a friend', demanding something more effective than the substance he'd previously used. It was when the something more effective was fully in his system that Max decided that the water in the river near the office looked inviting. He didn't so much jump in with the intention of drowning himself, as walk in, laughing like a child at how nice the water felt. Even when it was right over his head.
He might have been happy to know that Zoe had gone to his funeral and had spent almost a week crying, wishing she could have found the right words to say to get him to forgive her. When Zoe found the courage to suggest that Iain's manager looked into the office records, he found evidence of bullying. Because of the firm's image, the official reason for Iain's dismissal was 'redundancy.' This meant that there was no record of an actual disciplinary sacking, which made it easier for Iain to join the armed forces six months later.
His last living thought, crazy as it seemed to him, was that the guy in the foreign uniform who confronted him looked a little like Max in his face. That was a split-second before the man pulled the pin from the grenade and threw it.
"I never asked the fool to drown himself" Iain snapped.
"And Max didn't kill anybody" said Alicia in puzzlement.
"So you see taking your own life and throwing away what a powerful force has created, as blameless?"
Max actually looked like a chastised schoolboy as he muttered:
"I'm sorry."
"Be that as it may, it's time for you all to choose your doors. Choose carefully, friends-" David actually used the word 'friends' – "As this is where you will be for eternity."
Alicia began to cry. Ben patted her shoulder.
David pointed to the doors, one on the left and one the right, which were glowing with faint light.
"Time to choose, Alicia."