Elaine Benes - Employment

Employment

Elaine works several steady jobs throughout the show's entire run, mostly as a writer or editor.

• During season two to season five, she works at Pendant Publishing under her boss Mr. Lippman, where she served as a copy editor before losing her job at the end of the fifth season when the company went bankrupt, and a merger that would have saved the company was thwarted by a misunderstanding resulting from her penchant for chewy, speech-impairing Jujyfruit candies ("The Opposite").

• She later becomes a personal assistant to the eccentric and demanding Justin Pitt, starting in "The Chaperone", but later is fired when Pitt thinks she and Jerry are conspiring to kill him in "The Diplomat's Club". Her duties for Mr. Pitt included largely mundane tasks, such as buying socks for him or removing the salt crystals from his pretzel sticks (as featured in "The Mom & Pop Store").

• After her dismissal from this position, she meets J. Peterman on the street ("The Understudy") and becomes an editor at his J. Peterman Catalog, where she remains employed for the rest of the show's run. Starting in "The Foundation", she takes charge of the catalog when Peterman suffers a nervous breakdown and flees to Burma. She goes on a spending spree on the company account (she buys George an $8000 sable hat in "The Chicken Roaster"). Once Peterman returns to find an ineffective reshuffling of employees in "The Money" she is demoted back to her former position. She is also fired twice by Peterman: first when her penchant for poppy seed muffins cause her to fail a drug test in "The Shower Head" and then in "The English Patient" when she expresses her hatred for the movie The English Patient. She is able to recover her job by agreeing to live temporarily in a remote cave in the desert of Tunisia.