One of the worst things that can happen to a person is to be hired for a job and find out that one is not suited to actually do the work.

That happened to me in August 1995 when I was forty. For seven years I labored in the production department of a legal publishing company. One day the large corporate entity that owned my division merged with another large corporate entity. My division was sold and overnight I found that I was working at the same desk but for a completely different company.

We production people were foolish. The layoffs started from the top managers and worked their way down. We figured we were immune to all that. How would the books get published without us? Besides, we weren’t that fond of most of the old managers and we were glad to see them go.

It turned out that they didn’t need to publish all of those titles with tiny print runs, and I was one of the first production people to be let go. I think I got two or three weeks of severance pay. It was quite a shock because I hadn’t seen it coming and I was caught by surprise.

I was divorced at that point, and I had substantial child support obligations. My wife and I had purchased a house before the separation, and our two young children lived with her in it.

It seemed my luck was with me because after about three months I got hired by another division of the original company. That branch hadn’t been sold like the one I had been in. It was a long commute to an office building at the far northern edge of Bergen County, right at the state line with New York.

Things started to go wrong even before I reported for my first day. The interviews were done backwards. I was first interviewed by the department manager, a woman in her thirties named Joanne. She was quite enthusiastic about me. Then I met Katherine, who would be my direct supervisor. She also was in her thirties, and she wasn’t just quiet, she seemed morose.

She looked Irish to me, but I couldn’t tell from her last name. She was of middling height, and she usually had her reddish-brown hair down to her shoulders or tied behind her head. Objectively she was sort of attractive, but her frosty personality, especially towards me, could be rather off-putting.

I soon figured out that she took her Catholicism very seriously. It also seemed likely that she was still a virgin. What man would want to date, much less marry, this unfriendly lady? Her religion and her job were all that she seemed interested in.

During my interview, she didn’t seem that impressed with me. In fact, at one point later she admitted that she thought I was the wrong person for the job and she never wanted to hire me in the first place. Joanne made her do it. Thanks, ladies, for messing up my life. I can do that by myself quite well.

Within a few days of being there, I knew why she wasn’t enthralled with me. My previous company had fallen behind the times technologically. Print production was going entirely digital, and the photo-offset process that I had learned two decades earlier was disappearing. I didn’t know anything about Photoshop, QuarkXPress, or the other necessary software. And this new place didn’t want to spend the time and money to train me.

Usually, in situations like that, there is a probationary period that runs out and somebody replaces the problem employee. It would have been more merciful if that had actually gone it that way. Instead, Joanne and Katherine seemed to be locked into a sort of “cover your ass” conflict in which neither one would admit responsibility for the mistake of having hired me.

That was what I was able to deduce about the situation, anyway. It did go on for months in which I got very little done. I hated going to work.

In November I was bogged down in an almost impossible project that kept Katherine constantly on my back. To summarize, I had to write for copyright permissions – like over a hundred – for the illustrations in a textbook reprint. The problem was in that age before the Internet, it was very difficult to find the address of a company or institution if one had only the name.

Katherine looked through the file cabinets, but she couldn’t find the originals. I suspect that she was actually the one to lose them, but she blamed me for dragging my feet.

One day she came up with her own very weird solution that was supposed to make me more “motivated” for this miserable task. She called me to her cubicle and, instead of inviting me to sit down, she had me stand there in front of her. After a few preliminary complaints about me, she got right to the point.

“Paul, the way I see it there is only one thing that will motivate you to take your job here seriously. And that, I believe, is corporal punishment. Do you know what that means?”

“Sort of. Could you explain it in more detail?”

“I’ll be glad to. It’s simple but effective.”

She opened a desk drawer and took out a thick leather belt; then she doubled it over on itself.

“What we’re going to do is this. Later this afternoon, we are going down to this room in the basement. You will lower your trousers, bare your buttocks, and bend over a table down there. Then I will beat your behind until I get my point across.”

It took me a moment to come up with a response. “Isn’t that illegal?”

“I suppose technically it is. If you wish, try to bring assault charges against me and see if you can make them stick. I bet you won’t be able to do that.”

I noticed something odd about the belt. “It has two crosses cut into it.”

“That’s so it leaves cross-shaped marks on your flesh during the beating. It shows that I’m doing God’s work with it.”

This lady is crazier than I had ever imagined. She added, “In addition, Renée will be there so she can witness, although not participate, in the discipline.”

Renée was Katherine’s assistant, and I knew from her occasional comments that she didn’t like Katherine either. She was a short, quiet woman in her forties, and I knew she wasn’t married. She may have been married once, but I knew almost nothing about her life. Why she had to see the spanking too was a mystery, but I didn’t bother to ask about it.

Katherine said, “So we will meet back here at 5:00 PM. If you don’t show up, I will come looking for you. Don’t try to evade me by leaving the building.”

“This is only a one-time event, right?”

“Yes, as long as you behave to my satisfaction in the future.” I had never seen a belt like that one before, and I didn’t know what to say about it. It looked thicker than an ordinary men’s belt; I suspect it had been specifically made to inflict pain.

I noticed that the top of Katherine’s blouse was open, and I could just get a glimpse of the place between her breasts. This insane chick really needs to get laid, good and hard, and soon.

I considered showing my belted ass to Joanne afterwards and complaining about it, but I had trouble imagining how that would go and how I would explain it. It was possible I wouldn’t be believed, and she would think, as unlikely as it sounds, that I got the marks somewhere else – maybe as a patron of an S&M club. I also thought about simply resigning on the spot, but I really needed the money from my salary.

I decided to go through with it, as absurd as the whole event would be.

All three of us met at Katherine’s cubicle at the appointed time. None of us said anything on the elevator ride down to a sub-basement

We entered a medium-size room down there. It continued a bit of furniture, including three chairs, a table, and a desk. I wondered what the room’s purpose was, or if it had ever had one. Katherine closed the door and locked it.

Katherine took her whipping implement out of a shoulder bag she was carrying. She explained, “Renée will stand over here and witness the discipline from start to finish.” Great, so two ladies would see my ass and probably my dangling balls too.

“How many strokes am I getting?”

“I’m not sure. In Scotland, they used to give thirty-six to wayward schoolboys. We’ll have to see.” She went on, “God will forgive me for seeing a man’s exposed behind because I am doing his work for a good cause and also for His satisfaction.”

I caught Renée’s eye, but she appeared to be completely impassive to this nuttiness.

Katherine swung the belt so I could hear it swish through the air. “All right, there is no point in delaying your punishment any longer. Expose your buttocks; lower your trousers and underpants below your knees and bend over the table.”

When I was in place, she stepped forward. “I expect that you will take this like a man. No excessive yelling; try to stay in position. If you don’t follow my orders, I will simply give you a few more. Have you ever been spanked before?”

“No, never.”

“Well then, you are going to learn something useful today.”

Bent over as I was, I knew she was looking at my hindquarters. My balls hung down between my legs. I hoped her aim was good and she wouldn’t strike them by accident.

I also wondered if she, perhaps unconsciously, was sexually aroused by both the sight of my private parts and also by the beating itself she was about to inflict on me. I was secretly feeling excited about the whole scenario myself. This bitch was going to clobber my ass and deeply redden it.

“So, are you prepared to take it?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

Without any further discussion, she swung her belt and whapped my ass with it. I think I heard the crack of the stroke a moment before I felt the pain. I yowled and stood upright, grabbing my own ass without even thinking about it.

“Come on Paul, you can do better than that. I specifically told you to keep your voice down and stay in position. Hold onto the edges of the table if you need to brace yourself.”

With the second one, I may have done a little better. I tried to control my voice, but a strangled cry came out of my mouth anyway. I pushed my hips against the table and actually tried to get onto the tabletop, but I couldn’t get up there.

I then whispered, “Oh, God.” It felt like my flesh was on fire. Katherine’s strokes were hard by not too fast. After more of those, I suspected that I was being bruised by the swishing leather.

At one point, she stopped for a moment and looked at my front. “You dirty boy, you have an erection, don’t you?”

“I can’t help it.” I was indeed stiff. The blood going to my buttocks was also affecting my genitals. Despite the pain, my cock went up and stayed up for the rest of the session. I lost count of how many strokes I got, but it was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. My hips rotated around and I clinched my buttocks, but there was no escaping that relentless belt.

Katherine did make some more comments to me, most of which I barely heard. They were on the order of, “You are learning your lesson now, and I suspect you will work harder unless you are prepared for more of this.” Finally, she said, “That should be adequate. Stand up straight and put your hands on top of your head.”

I attempted to grab my aching ass, but I was rebuked, “I did not give you permission to touch yourself. Put your hands back up.” We were both breathing heavily at this point. I had a vivid fantasy of using the belt on Katherine’s bare behind as she was bent over the table herself. Then I’d fuck her hard whether she wanted it or not.

She said, “My bus leaves soon, so I’m going to go now. Stay the way you are for fifteen minutes. Renée will stay here and watch you to make sure you obey that order.”

Then she turned and left the room. Immediately, of course, I put my hands down to rub myself. I didn’t get much comfort from that, but it’s almost instinctual for most people to do that after they have been spanked hard.

With my hands back on my head, I was chagrined standing there with my pants down around my ankles and Renée standing just a couple of feet away. Katherine had only been gone for about a minute when Renée moved closer to me.

“Paul, it’s all right, you can take your hands off your head now. That’s pretty ridiculous; this isn’t middle school,”

“How about my pants? May I pull them up too? It’s a bit awkward standing here with everything hanging out.”

Her answer surprised me, “Not just yet. If you give me a moment, I’ll explain it all for you.”

I was dumbfounded as I lowered my arms. “What are you talking about?”

“First of all, I want to say that Katherine has not treated you fairly since you first got here. And what she did to you today was simply cruel.”

“It certainly hurts like hell.”