Balls

For the past eight months I've been working with someone that wouldn't cut it in the private sector.  She's fifty.  It takes her too long to catch on to new things, she's tremulous and doesn't listen and over-talks you when you try and teach her something new.  She doesn't take much of an interest in your life, but she'll tell you all about hers.
Her hands shake a little bit and I think twenty or thirty years ago she was likely quite beautiful, but something happened and now she is divorced and her kids live in a different province and don't talk to her much.  The car she drives, apparently, belongs to her parents (who live here).
She lives pay cheque to pay cheque, and yet she will go to Starbucks and bring us all something to eat from time to time.
She tries, but in all the wrong ways.
I'm not an exceptionally kind person, and god knows I'm insufferably impatient, and this woman frustrated me to no end, but I felt sorry for her.  She was, maybe, a fearful reminder of what can still happen to us at work.  Fifty years old, looks faded, job skills shot to shit, divorced, broke and with adult kids that didn't seem to want to give her the time of day, while trying to curry favour with her coworkers by offering them castoff clothing and Starbucks oat bars.
This just writes its fucking self, doesn't it?
Today they let her go.
The finance department was allowed to leave about fifteen minutes early so we didn't have to see her after she had had her meeting with HR.  In the union world that's big news: fifteen minutes off work and with pay.
She didn't pull her weight within our department.  She would talk over you when you tried to show her how to do her job.  She didn't take responsibility and blamed others for her predicament (she wasn't adequately trained, we went over things too quickly).
She also had a picture of her son and daughter on her desk.  In her stunted attempt at camaraderie, she confided in another coworker today about the plumbing issues she was having in her suite.
The kicker, though, was that last night her twenty or twenty-two year old son flew in from Alberta to visit her and was sleeping on her couch.
Today she got to go home to him and tell him that she'd lost her job.
I tell myself that there is reason why she is where she is at fifty years old.  Why she has a sadly lacking social life and is divorced and alone.  And I think about the animal kingdom and in that kingdom she would be the animal that was falling behind and that was torn apart by the lioness.
We tore her apart.
But what choice did we have?