Fredericton — According to her colleagues, local office drone Jenny LeBrun has been too swamped to so much as reply to an email for at least a decade now.
“I don’t think she’s ever had a free moment in as long as I’ve known her,” said Jerome Peters, who’s worked with LeBrun for the last eight years at a Fredericton-based marketing company. “She’s always ‘swamped,’ to use her favourite word. If it’s not her kids’ soccer practice right after work, it’s an extra project she’s taken on out of the goodness of her heart. I don’t even know what she does, but she never stops doing it, whatever it is.”
LeBrun, who was too swamped for an interview with The Manatee, is reportedly always rushing into her cubicle, holding a stack of papers and looking stressed-out.
“She’s always somewhat out of breath when I see her,” said her boss, Lindsay Duggars. “She’s getting these intense worry-lines in her forehead that are actually fairly alarming if you look at them for too long. I try not to give her many assignments, so I don’t know what it is she’s ‘swamped’ with, exactly. She certainly does appear to be working hard, so I don’t question her.”
Colleagues say LeBrun is especially busy after a long weekend, or if she’s been home sick for a couple of days.
“Oh man, if it’s the Tuesday after a long weekend, you can’t even catch her eye in the hallway,” said Rachel Smith, who has worked alongside LeBrun on various projects for nearly 11 years. “She’ll blow right past me, muttering to herself about ‘playing catch-up’ and ‘wading through emails’ and being ‘bogged down.'”
“I emailed her like two weeks ago and she just got back to me today,” said Bill Evans, whose cubicle is less than a metre from LeBrun’s. This is what her reply said:
“‘I’m totally swamped, but I’ll get to it as soon as humanly possible. I’m absolutely drowning in work over here. I’ve been just straight out lately.’
“The thing is, I only asked her a yes-or-no question about a fundraising potluck we were having a week ago. I was trying to confirm that she could bring forks. She didn’t. She didn’t even show up to the event in fact. It’s interesting that no matter how busy she says she is, she always seems to have time to explain in detail just how swamped she is.”
At press time, LeBrun had reportedly forwarded her calls to the machine so she could “really hunker down and get some work done,” whatever that means.