Farewell Maple Nut Goodies

There is a woman that I work with – correction - that I used to work with, that I nicked named Maple Nut Goodies. I called her this because she at about a bag of Brach’s MNG’s a day. The airspace around her desk even smelled like Maple Nut Goodies. It kind of made me sick sometimes, and other times it made me crave pancakes. She is very overweight. She had gastric bypass surgery a few years ago (mind you, she’s only 27 years old) but had gone back to her old eating habits (Maple Nut Goodies, chicken wings and Mountain Dew) and started to gain the weight back. MNG has had a hard life. He mom’s an alcoholic, she has a sister that may or may not be her father’s child, ect....She is pretty smart, but makes really dumb decisions. She also has a really good sense of humor, which I will miss. When I first started working here, she was always taking about her “husband” who was in jail. Eventually, he got out of jail and they moved in together. They are not actually married, of course, but I guess he’s her old man. I think he was in a gang and got caught robbing a house. She had his name tattooed on her shoulder, followed by the words “My Love, My Life”. She had a lot of other tattoo’s as well, but I tried not to look at them. I could always hear her talking to the woman in the cubicle next to mine about how her “husband” would go out and get drunk and not come home. Or she would tell stories of how she would lie to his parole officer when he was out drinking. Sometimes I could hear her talking on the phone to companies that she owed money to. She used to carry around this clear plastic make up case with a bunch of bottles of liquid in them. She didn’t make any effort to hide them and would leave them out on her desk (she was the front desk receptionist!). One day, when I was covering for her on her break, I read the label on one of the bottles. METHADONE. Ugh. My heart sank. She also smokes cigarettes. Needless to say, she was not in great physical condition. She couldn’t even wear real shoes. She used to buy her shoes a size or two too big because her feet were too fat to fit into the size she actually wore. She would also wear flip flops in the middle of winter, for this very reason. A few months ago, she was suspended for two weeks without pay. Word on the street is that she had been stealing. I have no idea what she was stealing, but had confessed it all and gone into drug treatment (hence, the methadone). I had planned on writing about her for some time, but I thought it might be inappropriate because I still worked with her. She quit yesterday. She walked in, handed in her resignation letter, packed up her stuff and left. Apparently she wanted to quit before she got fired. She is planning on working at Wal-Mart. And, to top it all off, she’s currently having fertility treatments so she and the drunk jailbird “husband” can have a baby.