Scorched Earth: The Legacy of the Globizent Affair

Issue 44 • Fall 2021 • Fiction

2nd Place Fiction
2021 Summer Contest

“Scorched Earth” presents itself as an essay examining cultural criticism, scholarship, and marginalia surrounding a series of increasingly ridiculous events that center on the firing of a fictional head of Quality Assurance at the Globizent Corporation. Satirizing the absurdity of late-stage capitalism via corporate quarrels, subterfuge, and online as well as intra-office gossip, “Scorched Earth” is part soap opera, part dick-pic whodunit, part darkly funny commentary on the strange afterlife of the content we consume, share, and discard.

– Zeyn Joukhadar

On 12 June 2012, Krysta Holcomb’s supervisor Shelly McDougall, head of Quality Assurance at the Globizent Corporation, was fired under mysterious circumstances. Plenty of employees at the corporation had reason to want to be rid of McDougall, including and especially Holcomb, who is said to have conducted an affair with David Jensen, McDougall’s successor. Countless articles, essays, editorials, monographs, novels, documentaries, art installations, and song cycles have explored this case, many with the intended project of identifying those responsible for the firing of McDougall, while exonerating those who are believed to have been wrongly implicated. The reputation of the woman to whom Holcomb once referred as “the worlds [sic] most shittiest boss” has undergone many changes, and there are as many different versions of the Globizent story as there are reasons to write about it¹. This paper examines the Globizent Affair and the schismatic studies that have resulted from its ongoing academic scrutiny. 

By all surviving accounts, McDougall-Holcomb relations were cordial until either late 2011 or early 2012. McDougall even attended a “jewelry party”² hosted by Holcomb, at which time she bought what she would later assert was, “the most hideous necklace I’ve ever seen, or worn, or been weighed down by, in all my goddamn miserable life I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD [three crying emojis].”³ This relative peace was not destined to last, for McDougall made the fatal mistake of confronting Holcomb about the latter’s failure to deliver the department’s mail to the correct recipients. Reports deviate here, but the majority state that Holcomb blamed the mailroom clerk, a man colloquially known as “Ronny D,” and for whom there appears to be no official employment record. McDougall countered that Ronny D brought the correct mail, and that Holcomb merely needed to distribute it “with at least minimal attention, like just about any halfwit could do.” Holcomb then dug through the latest batch and retrieved McDougall’s copy of Knit Simple magazine, which she promptly ripped apart and shredded.⁴ Years later, an anonymous eyewitness wrote in a moving account that, “The intensity and pathos of this moment cannot be overstated. It’s simply…the oddest, most hypnotic…most unimaginably cruel thing one can imagine. Krysta shredded every page of that magazine one after the other, and maintained unblinking eye contact with Shelly the entire time. I will never forget it.”⁵ 

At 2:27 the next morning, every member of the Quality Assurance Department received an email from McDougall’s account that contained no subject. The 53 words in the body of the email changed the workplace forever. The document is transcribed here in its entirety, though spelling and grammar are standardized for readability: 

This is scorched earth, motherfuckers. No more Ms. Nice Boss. I’m tired of the shit-ass attitudes in here from you shit-ass people. You think it’s easy keeping this department afloat, keeping this whole goddamned company afloat, but you’ll find out soon enough. You’ll have to knit your own fingerless gloves. I’m out, bitches. 

Shelly McDougall 

Quality Assurance Manager, Globizent Corporation 

Floor 2, Suite 10, Ext. 4492 

“It’s always darkest before the dawn.” ~Proverb 

The email was sent from McDougall’s work address, but its legitimacy was questioned immediately. In an email sent the following day in defense of his colleague, Brian English wrote, “Shit-ass people? Who says that?” Conversely, around the same time, Jeannine Barkin wrote, “I am not prepared to vouch for this email’s authenticity, as I did not see the individual writing it. But given the circumstantial details, I am 99.999999999999% confident this message was written and sent by Shelly McDougall.” ⁶ Of course, we know that McDougall was held responsible and immediately terminated, mostly due to a lack of interest on the part of HR to involve IT in the email scandal. War had been declared in Quality Assurance, and it was only a matter of time before the entire Globizent Corporation became involved. It would take an entirely separate essay, or short book even, to provide a comprehensive literature review of the theses, dissertations, articles, books, and other strictly academic texts—to say nothing of other genres—that deal solely with the contents of this email.⁷ In fact, the “Scorched Earth” email is now often used as close reading practice for undergraduates at universities all over the world, including and especially those that teach English as a foreign language.⁸ 

The checkered history surrounding the McDougall ousting is perhaps more interesting than the woman around whom the mythos has arisen. For example, early accounts of McDougall’s conduct and subsequent termination are, unsurprisingly, primarily informed by the departmental politics of those writing them. History has flattened this conflict into a criminally reductive “Coke vs. Pepsi” narrative, as the battle lines were originally drawn around the competing soda brands. The members of what is now known as the “Coke faction” viewed McDougall as a brave martyr for their causes; conversely, the Pepsi advocates feared a repeat performance of McDougall’s zealous Cokeist predecessor, Blanche Higginbotham, and tried their best to defame both QA departmental heads. At that time, the Globizent home office was located in Atlanta, Georgia, just 3.5 miles from the Coca-Cola headquarters. Half the QA department had been traumatized by the paucity of Pepsi products in the Coke-dominated city, and requested that all nine varieties of Mountain Dew be made available to the department. Higginbotham refused to grant this request. The department tried again after Higginbotham’s tenure ended, and McDougall only inflamed the situation by suggesting the employees take turns purchasing 2-liters to share, or, according to one email exchange, “just drink water.”⁹ 

In order to control how other employees viewed the incident, members of both campus started anonymous blogs. On one blog, a writer who self-identifies as an “Aspiring Arsonist” writes, “I hope Shelly drowns in a giant vat of Coke.”¹⁰ This post represents the propaganda of the Pepsi faction, who would later support Holcomb’s efforts in protest of McDougall’s failure to meet their needs. 

However, opponents would have their say as well. In a post titled “WTF is Wrong with You Guys,” an anonymous Coke drinker defends McDougall on the grounds that she is “actually, a really nice lady,” and someone who “was willing to look the other way when I input my paid time off as a ‘sick’ day when I was, in reality, quite healthy.”¹¹ It hardly seems remarkable that members of the department would have opinions about their boss, but what is striking is the sheer volume of blog posts and subsequent comment threads in which co-workers on both sides eventually issued death threats to one another, without knowing or apparently caring about the identity of those on the receiving end of such threats. 

Even though the writings disseminated by McDougall and Holcomb’s contemporaries tell us a great deal about the role of propaganda in office discourse, they are hardly reliable accounts of what happened.¹² Given the early partisans’ inability to see past their own prejudices, department-wide communications in the form of a series of intra-office memoranda from McDougall to the rest of the QA department would ideally speak for themselves. Unfortunately, McDougall was among the last corporate managers to continue to distribute memos in print form, and no known electronic copies remain extant. Thanks to the company’s aggressive Recycling Initiative (ca. January 2009-August 2014), all copies of these crucial memos are lost to us.¹³ Only one of McDougall’s original sentences survives the physical destruction of these documents, and indeed it was quoted in no fewer than three of the anonymous blogs: “Hourly employee’s [sic] must remember to clock in after they return from lunch—NO EXCEPTIONS!!!!!!” One of the blog entries¹⁴ that quotes this sentence focuses exclusively on the errant apostrophe. Another¹⁵ mocks the rhetorical style, particularly McDougall’s capitalization and excessive use of punctuation. While the aforementioned examples are not particularly helpful in illuminating the import of this single sentence, an untitled entry on a third blog, Confessions of a Pissed off Paper Pusher, includes a more detailed analysis of the source of this particular outrage: 

When a certain group of us from QA drives across the Parkway for lunch at the Bistro, certain salaried employees take for-e-ver to finish their rice bowls (haha sorry G, you know we all love you!), which means the lunch “hour” turns into 90 minutes, and then half of us have to “forget” to clock in when we get back. Why should I choose between eating in the break room and getting my pay docked for taking a long lunch? 

Commenters on this post added, “If the bitch has a problem, she can just say it to my face,” and, “ugh she cornered me by the bathroom about this bs and i was like yo let me pee.” It is unclear whether employees were more incensed over the suggestion that they manage their time, or the means of communication. One of the early sources on the Globizent Affair does mention a blog post titled, “why Im so mad abt this RN,” but the blog that contained this post appears to have been deleted shortly after publication. 

In the study of this issue, much attention has been given to the pursuit of one question: Was Shelly McDougall a good Quality Assurance Manager? It is certainly true that McDougall was not prepared for management. Although she was the daughter of an executive assistant and CPA, she received a B.A. in Art Education and spent her early career teaching the craft of silhouette-making to fifth graders in Decatur, Georgia. This is important to note, for McDougall’s lack of experience in adult-centered workplaces—and, consequently, her later failures as a manager—can be attributed to the expectation that she would instill the concept of time into pre-adolescents. Nevertheless, McDougall’s position was cut due to budgetary reasons, and she was forced to use the skills she had inherited from her parents. A number of writers have claimed that McDougall lost her job for other reasons. Theories include (but are not limited to): McDougall pocketed the money otherwise intended for the students’ art supplies; McDougall used corporeal punishment on students who failed to grasp spatial relationships; McDougall attended an end-of-year art fair high on peyote. No evidence exists anywhere to support such claims, but some theorists insist that McDougall’s partisans colluded in a massive cover-up. The likeliest explanation remains the simplest: no art teacher who began work in the United States on or after 2008 remained employed as such for more than five years before “budget cuts” intervened. 

After McDougall had been working at Dynient for some time as a data entry clerk, a position opened rather suddenly at Globizent when QA matriarch Blanche Higginbotham unexpectedly retired at 57. Had she been given a chance to learn corporate statesmanship and diplomacy, McDougall might have acquired the skills necessary to rule her department competently and maintain control of her employees. In his sympathetic biography Shelly McDougall, the Best Department Head Globizent Never Had¹⁶, Stephen Gray challenges the traditional view that McDougall was an incompetent manager, arguing instead that she deftly handled “the astonishingly dim-witted lackeys over which she had the misfortune of presiding,” and “made the best of what was clearly a hellscape beyond what any of us today can even begin to imagine.”¹⁷ In any case, McDougall was doomed to be measured against Globizent’s other department leaders at that time, whether or not she was prepared for it. 

While McDougall did not quite demonstrate the diplomatic prowess of Facilities Manager Alex Chapman, or the celebrated intellect of Inside Sales VP Blair Eckhouse, or even the street-wise savvy of Miranda Adams from the Legal Department, McDougall nevertheless remained afloat longer than anyone expected. Initially, she was a popular leader who was known for her benevolence. She allowed her employees to keep plants at their desks and dissuaded belligerent anti-plantists from reporting to HR on the issue.¹⁸ She relaxed Casual Friday to “Casual Friday-and-a-half,” whereby employees were free to wear jeans as early as Thursday afternoons after lunch. McDougall also implemented a filing system that was eventually adopted by every employee at Globizent, and maintained peaceful relations among several departments within the division.¹⁹ 

It was not until 2010, around the time Krysta Holcomb became Quality Assurance Office Administrative Assistant, that, according to Mikhail Nielsen’s provocative six-volume work A Genealogy of Holcomb-Style Office Warfare, “McDougall’s troubles began,” and “she started to lose control of her department.”²⁰ Such characterizations are not uncommon, and have also appeared in other works.²¹ Unsurprisingly, Holcomb’s sympathizers have always resented such interpretations of the situation, and tend to argue such views are too simplistic. Dom Bradford, the last Globizent survivor, put it most pithily when he commented, “Correlation is not causation.”²² 

Depictions of Holcomb have been as polarized as those of McDougall, with the former emerging as both a cold-blooded opportunist and a romantic figure. Due to the alleged sexual nature of Holcomb’s relationship with David Jensen, McDougall’s successor, wild and fanciful accounts have captured the imaginations of even the most serious academics. In one particularly famous case, preeminent corporatist Zachariah Beckstrom retired from his coveted Ivy League position to work full-time on Unbidden Synergy, the now immensely popular erotica series based on the Globizent Affair. Imitators quickly followed, but Beckstrom’s narrative remains the urtext of Globizent-related erotica, largely due to a particularly vivid scene during which Holcomb and Jensen construct a privacy screen out of empty toner cartridges in the supply room and engage in frottage atop cases of unused goldenrod yellow paper. Physicist Andrea Szanter argued this was not physically possible, and challenged Beckstrom to a debate on the matter. The live televised event ended when, after having verbally sparred with Szanter for two hours, Beckstrom said, “It’s a fucking book,” and exited the stage.²³ 

Returning to real life, the main Holcomb-related controversy remains the question of whether Holcomb had a romantic and/or sexual relationship with Jensen, and if so, whether that relationship had any bearing on Jensen’s 2012 Quality Assurance Department coup d’état. According to court documents, Krysta Lynn Holcomb filed for divorce from her first husband, Jacob “Jack” Minchin, on 22 October 2011. However, Holcomb did not sign the lease on her new apartment until 8 April 2012, and did not formally restore her original surname until 19 September 2012.²⁴ In a transcript of instant messages exchanged between Holcomb and Rachel Borman, the Globizent front desk receptionist, Holcomb stated, “You know I can’t stay away” (17 Nov. 2011 15:34:28) and, “He’s Colton’s father” (2 Jan. 2012 8:43:56). Marco Boselli’s work on the office instant messaging systems includes a chapter on Holcomb and Borman’s conversations, which were fairly lengthy, immensely private, and rarely involved any pertinent business matters. In his examination of thousands of digital workplace exchanges between Holcomb and Borman from 2010-2012, Boselli concludes that Borman’s primary objective was to convince Holcomb to leave her husband, thus indicating a one-sided romantic attraction on Borman’s part.²⁵ Boselli’s “unrequited love” thesis has since been widely discredited as an early 21st century scholar’s impulse to, as phrased by Danica Rogers, “project the homosexual onto the homosocial.”²⁶

Although it is impossible to determine the exact date or time Holcomb extricated herself from her relationship with Minchin, an internal document recovered from Globizent’s Human Resources Department indicates that Holcomb was disciplined for showing Borman an image of an erect penis on her cellular phone in the second floor breakroom in March of 2012. Digital images of disembodied parts that were normally covered began to gain traction as a courtship ritual around this time. While “dick pics” were fairly common by the time of Holcomb’s divorce from Minchin, they were frowned upon in public life—especially the workplace.²⁷ Holcomb and Borman were insufficiently discreet and caught the attention of Maureen O’Shaughnessy, executive assistant to the company’s Chief Financial Officer. O’Shaughnessy filed the complaint the same day she inadvertently viewed the image. The existence of the image suggests Holcomb had moved on from her relationship with Minchin by then. 

Was the image of Jensen’s penis, as so many have asserted? No one knows, and we likely never will. Frustratingly for historians, the HR report says very little on the particulars of the image, nor does it detail Holcomb’s motives in capturing and sharing the image. It is possible that Holcomb had been sent the image by someone else with whom she had sexual relations, in which the image is of no consequence other than to demonstrate that Holcomb did not conform to standard workplace etiquette of the era. In 37 and Counting, a juicy tell-all on Holcomb’s love life, self-described junior high “bestie” Rebecca LaPierre claimed to reveal the penis’s owner. However, so many minor chronological details were botched in this text that historians have dismissed the veracity of the entire account. 

Were it conclusively determined that the penis was in fact Jensen’s, however, the new information could have far-reaching implications for the case. First and foremost, such a discovery would confirm some of the central premises of the most outlandish conspiracy theories about Jensen’s takeover.²⁸ Scholars engaged in serious study of the matter must remain objective, however, and must furthermore avoid engaging in what amounts to little more than salacious gossip. Again, we know nothing of the size, shape, or dimensions of the penis captured in the image on Holcomb’s phone. We do not know if Holcomb and Borman found the image aesthetically pleasing in any way.²⁹ We do not even know who captured the image. What we do know is that the subsequent, gleefully alliterative utterances about Holcomb’s “phallic photo” have enabled the McDougallists to paint Holcomb as, put most harshly by Blake St. John, “The filthy, insatiable, thirsty Pepsi-guzzler every office has and no office needs.”³⁰

Conventional wisdom holds that the rifts in public opinion and fragmentary source materials have obscured the “real” truths of this case, but conversely there is perhaps an informational overload. Various revelatory projects have been attempted, but none have succeeded as of the publication of this essay. Was the Globizent affair truly the “grave, catastrophic national disgrace” of legend?³¹ We might never know, but what is evident is that the Globizent drama has given us the foremost love story in the annals of corporate American history. 

1. See also, But Her Emails: A Contrarian History of Women’s Workplace Writing in the Long Twenty-first Century.

2. One of many multi-level marketing schemes, mostly targeted at women, in which cash-strapped participants were encouraed to manipulate friends and co-workers into buying goods priced high above typical market value. 

3. The Lost Drunk Texts of Shelly McDougall 

4. Human Resources Records Pertaining to the Globizent Memos 

5. The Day Globizent Stood Still” 

6. Ruth Adebayo, Timeline of All Electronic Correspondence in Globizent’s Quality Assurance Department, 2008-2013 

7. Scores of sources explore this particular mystery, but preeminent among them are (in alphabetical order): Sam Baranski, “Yes, She Went There (But Which ‘She?’”); Paolo Gennaio et al., Shelly’s Emails: Texts and Contexts; Melinda York, “Shit-ass Attitudes from Shit-ass People: Women’s Invisible Crafting Labor in Corporate America” 

8. Harriet Martinez’s I’m Out, Bitches: 101 “Scorched Earth” Reading and Writing Exercises for Beginners is considered the preeminent pedagogical text in this vein. 

9. Dafydd Merywen, Corporations in Crisis 

10. Burn It All Down (A WordPress Site) 

11. Why Is Everyone Mad? (Blogger) 

12. See also, Dale Wasserman’s fascinating, if not woefully inadequate, chapter in the essay collection, The Post-Truth Era at Work: Case Studies. 

13. As described in S.E. Beukaler’s Cheating the System: Academia’s Most Forged Documents, supposed “copies” of these memos have occasionally surfaced, typically by underemployed academics eager to publish on this case. 

14. “My Boss is a Stupid Bitch,” from the blog They Don’t Pay Me Enough for This Bullshit 

15. “Get A Life, Cokewhore,” from the blog Quality My Ass 

16. The latest volume uses the revised title Shelly McDougall, A Life. As Gray notes in the Preface to the Second Edition, “I have been made aware that ‘Best Department Head’ was not a wise choice of words” (ii). 

17. Ibid, xxi, 332 

18. Ibid, 41. 

19. Ibid, 57, 551. 

20. Vol. 4, 667-668. 

21. See also, Brianna Rankin, The Globizent Inheritance: A Teleological Perspective. 

22. “An Interview As Extraordinarily Rare As It Is Extraordinarily Brief,” Globalization Today, vol. 33, issue 9 

23. Toner and Titillation: Points and Counterpoints 

24. Government Documents Pertaining to Krysta Holcomb, Vols. 7-8 

25. Backchannels of Interpersonal Intraoffice Communications 

26. Retro-fitting Gayness: How the Scholars of the Second Sexual Revolution Tried to Make Everyone Queer, and Thereby Made No One Queer 

27. László Iváncsik’s groundbreaking Wiener’s Wiener, which is considered the foundational text on Dick Pic Studies, includes a chapter on the Globizent incident. 

28. See also, “‘It Was Probably Aliens’ (And 19 Other Theories About David Jensen’s Accession to QA Department Head)” 

29. Work Friends, a television series based off Holcomb and Borman’s circumstantial friendship, includes a scene in which the women spend four minutes of screen time declaring their arousal at the sight of this image. After the now-infamous episode aired, the all-male writing staff was promptly terminated. 

30. The rhetorical implications of the syntax in this sentence have been explored in some depth in Amitava Pemmaraju’s all-too-brief essay, “When the Object Becomes the Subject: Offices with Agency.” 

31. Gregory Defenestraum, “Post-Holcomb, A Decency Deficit Remains in the Workplace” 

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry