Meanwhile, Back at Roswell...

I should have known there’d be obstacles when I accepted a supervisory position in a particular midtown law firm. The clerical staff of nine—comprised of secretaries, word processing technicians, and a key data operator—had been without an office manager for nearly a year, a condition owing to their uncanny talent for scaring everyone away.

Whether my predecessors were discreetly buried somewhere under the floorboards or had scurried out of the country under cloak of darkness was anyone’s guess. All I know is that even the attorneys had resorted to doing all their own typing and only emerging from their offices if free food was to be had. No, wait. I knew one more thing as well: I was the only one who had applied for the job. That should have been a sign.

They’re a little difficult sometimes,” the head of the division murmured during the interview.

Difficult in what way?” I asked. They had seemed innocuous enough at first sight, their heads all bent in purposeful concentration over their keyboards when I walked in, yet suddenly perking up in unabashed curiosity (much like lemurs) at this potential usurper of their turf.

Oh, you know,” he replied with the most casual shrug he could muster. “You just have to get to used to them.”

I probably should have pressed for details. I even recall flashing at that very moment on my one and only baby-sitting assignment in junior high. Had the Terrible Trio’s mother uttered those very same words as she and her husband bolted for the car on what would turn out to be the longest Saturday night of my life? No amount of money, I later realized, was worth that kind of torture.

The fact of the matter, though, was that I was in desperate need of an employment change. Not only was my current job lamentably tedious, but I was cursed with an assistant chief whose polyester neckties did double-duty as napkins, and a grumpy supervisor who used to xerox outfits for her Princess Diana paper doll and then spend all afternoon coloring them with Magic Markers.

There had to be more to life than this, I thought.

And so I accepted the job.

How bad could it be?

On the first day, I decided to meet with each of my new staff individually, pleasantly emphasizing my “open-door” policy and encouraging them to feel free to bring me their problems.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have specified that these problems actually be related to their jobs.

Chrissy lived in a trailer park and was pregnant with her fourth child by her fourth boyfriend. Dolores thought Chrissy was a perioxide slut and should be fired. Joelle had three children under ten who were driving her crazy. Dianne thought Joelle was a bad mother because she spent too much time yelling at her kids. Corinne was two months behind on her rent and could I loan her $54? Janice, age 40, had issues with her mother, with whom she still lived. Katrina, the Type-A receptionist, didn’t like to answer phones, in spite of the fact that this was her only duty. Margie was born-again and thought Dolores should go to hell.

And then there was Sharlene.

Elfin” was an apt word to describe her, I think. Maybe it was the Peter Pan collar on her pink blouse or the curious way her shoes seemed to curl upward at the toes. A tiny woman in her early 50’s, she had a rosebud mouth and a perpetual twinkle in her eyes as if they harbored an amusing secret. It turned out that they did.

With hands dutifully clasped like a schoolchild as she sat across the desk from me, she proceeded to explain that she didn’t mind routine tasks and, in fact, thrived on high-volume production.

I’d appreciate it if you didn’t give me any long-term assignments, though,” she added. “Any day now, they’re going to want me to come back.”

Had they done a head count at Keebler and discovered one of their senior cookie-counters was missing? “I didn’t realize you were on loan to us,” I remarked.

In a manner of speaking,” she said. “But my project here is almost done.”

And what exactly have you been doing?” I inquired, still operating under the assumption that she had come to us from another agency and was on some sort of special task force that no one had remembered to tell me about.

Oh, the usual things,” she answered. “A little of this. A little of that. Lots of notes.”

Could you be more specific?” I encouraged her.

Sharlene leaned forward. “I’m not originally from here,” she revealed.

You mean the United States?” I asked, suddenly wondering if a sticky immigration issue was about to loom large in our conversation. Funny but I hadn’t detected even the slightest trace of an accent in her speech.

Sharlene laughed. “No,” she replied. “I meant Earth.” The Mother Ship, she animatedly proceeded to explain, was due to swing by any day now and pick her up. “You can appreciate why I may not be able to give you two weeks’ notice when that happens…”

In what felt like the passage of several hours—though I’m sure it was only a matter of seconds—I weighed my options for response. What exactly should one say when one’s employee lays a zinger like that on the table? I had, after all, only just met the woman for the first time that morning and was in no position to assess whether she went around telling everyone she was an alien or had exclusively singled me out as a compassionate and nonjudgmental listener.

Maybe she’s just pulling my leg, I thought. She wants to know if I have a sense of humor. On the other hand, what if she’s psychotic? What if a chuckle on my part unleashes her wrath and she brains me with the nearest heavy object before I can get out of the room?

Maybe she was just getting on in years, I also rationalized, and by the next day would either have completely forgotten what she told me or decided to be something else. Yet another scenario, of course, was the remote possibility that she really was an extraterrestrial. Would I honestly want a creature of indeterminate strength and galactic mind-power to be pissed off at me for treating her disclosure as trivial?

Then again, if being a clerk-typist was the best job that someone from a distant planet could sign up for, maybe she was perfectly harmless.

Suffice it to say, we were an equal opportunity employer, coupled with the philosophy that I have always found it wise to give wide berth to people who claim they are witches, angels, or Elvis. When the words finally did come out, I vaguely recall it was to ask her what she thought of George Lucas’ STAR WARS.

Harrison Ford’s a cutie-pie,” she happily chirped, “but they got all those creatures in the bar scene completely wrong…”

It was the beginning of a strange but tremendously entertaining relationship.

It should probably be mentioned at this point that Sharlene had an absenteeism rate of 25% when I first came on board (and why-oh-why do employers always use a shipboard analogy when welcoming new staff?).

Twenty-five percent is rather high,” I remarked to her.

Perhaps,” Sharlene coquettishly agreed, “but it’s not like I don’t have a good reason.”

Among her more interesting excuses:

“I sat in front of the window over the weekend and got sunspots on my brain.”

I was up all night reading a treatise on black holes and I was so outraged at the author’s sloppiness, I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

The neighbors are painting their house and I need to ask them some questions for my report.”

The atmosphere is causing me to grow a third breast and I have to monitor its development.”

There’s a special on PBS about Saturn’s rings at 1:00 and I don’t want to miss it.”

The weather was so nice is Tijuana that I decided to stay until Wednesday.”

Suffice it to say as to this last defense, she would always come back with sombreros, jumping beans, and salsa for all; it was hard not to like someone so generous. In the same vein, we could each count on a See’s Valentine sucker, a Nut Tree pumpkin at Halloween and a Harry & David fruitcake at Christmas.

Aren’t these wonderful?” she’d chirp as she bounced from desk to desk making her deliveries, never expecting a single thing in return. Compared to Dolores (whom I secretly nicknamed “Madam” for her resemblance to the brash Las Vegas puppet) and Corinne (who continued to spiral into further debt), Sharlene was, curiously, a breath of fresh air.

It was also hard not to ignore that she was one of the fastest typists I had ever known. Page after page of single spaced statistical data would fly from her fingertips, error free. One of my associates whimsically commented that it was probably because there was no interference on the part of her brain.

So did this woman have a personal life, one might ask. She had alluded to her hapless earthling husband only once in my recollection.

He was afraid of my powers,” she confided. Having supplied the requisite sperm for three lovely children, they had long since gone their separate ways. The offspring—a trio of stunning brunette daughters—were proudly displayed in a silver frame at Sharlene’s work station. One of them was a prominent corporate attorney, she told me. The other two, respectively, had become a brain surgeon and a scientist.

You must be very proud of them,” I said, silently opining that the three had surely inherited their stunning good looks from the paternal side of the equation.

Oh, I am,” she beamed, relating that all three—the oldest having just turned 32—still lived at home with her.

I, of course, never let on a couple of months later when I saw that very same photograph in frames for sale at Macy’s. I suppose one could assume that, because her three daughters were so strikingly lovely, Macy’s saw the marketing wisdom of using their image to sell more frames. Either that or she just felt a photo of three attractive strangers was a more prudent choice for display than her three offspring—the ones with green skin and multiple heads.

I miss Sharlene. I eventually transferred to a different office. Curiosity compelled me one day to look her up in the state directory. The disappearance of her name from the roster affirms what she had told me from the very beginning: her mother ship finally came in.