Gross Incompetence

So today I was fired. It wasn't really a surprise, because I was pretty bad at my job. I had been doing the books for a doctor in the West Village, but I'm not exactly sure how I got a job doing math. But as notoriously bad at math as I am that wasn't really what I was doing wrong. Every week when I would come in there would be a laundry list of things that hadn't been entered in the computer/ cashed by the bank/ charged correctly in the weeks preceding. Things that I had overlooked or done wrong; I've never been so bad at a job or taken so long to catch on.
The girl who had the job before me had done it for five years and they had become friends during those years. They knew all about each other's personal lives. We, on the other hand, never clicked. I was always cheerful, but I wasn't about to share the personal details of my life. I could tell I annoyed her from the way she smiled at me with her mouth but not with her eyes, and this was before my inadequacies became apparent.
The only time I've encountered that same kind of annoyance was in the time after my grandmother became too sick to watch my sister and me and before my mom stopped working permanently. We had a string of babysitters and nannies, all of whom I hated. I was so resentful that they weren't my mom, and everything that they did differently from her, I couldn't stand. They were all immigrants who my parents found through agencies and paid cash. Some were from Russia so only my mom could communicate with them, and others were from various Asian countries so none of us could communicate with them. They came into our house not knowing the carefully choreographed routine that we had cultivated. Some had never seen modern appliances. One was afraid of the washing machine.
I'm not afraid of washing machines, but at this job I was in another world where I didn't quite know the careful system that had been worked out. Whenever another nannie was fired, I would always be relieved, secretly hoping this one would be the last and we would return to quiet normality. As disappointed as I am with myself and as worried as I am about looking for something else, secretly, I'm relieved.