A woman in an office

There is a woman, who is a phony. A phony in the sense Holden Caulfield used the word in The Catcher in the Rye. I just spoke to her. I had laughed at a football joke which appeared suddenly and out of context in a piece on history and politics. She asked me what was funny. I told her. But as I spoke she kept on moving around me, and as I added my final sentence, explaining the jest, she laughed. But she laughed before I had finished the sentence, before I had made the point.

She is a phony and a self-aggrandizer. She is particularly nice to people whom she thinks can help her. She makes out that she works hard, while doing little and spending much of her time hanging around, being one of the girls or one of the gang. She's smug; she's conceited; she's pretentious. She works for an organization where she can have influence and do good. She feigns interest in this. But her purpose is self aggrandizement. She wishes to look good herself, to proceed for her own good. Nothing else comes close in importance.

She resents the intern who's been sent to help her, cuts him out of meetings, gives him little to do and tells him as little as possible. She tries to keep him out of the way. Meanwhile she is continuously chummy with him, though she'll never invite him to eat with her and others in the office.