Chapter 20 – Boss: Tales from the Dark Side

Boss has been getting on our last nerves lately at the office , which is the reason he is the subject of this chapter instead of the fair Pregzilla. All of his former recalcitrant, backwards charm seems to have evaporated in the wake of the stark reality of his otherworldly union with Zilla. He has virtually ceased demonstrating any compassion or concern whatsoever toward his faithful employees, only seeming to have energy to deal with the copious and often irrational demands of his wife. He’s operating in survival mode, and while I’ve made a real effort to be patient and forgiving of his irresponsibility toward those of us who are struggling to keep his sole source of income up and running, his lack of pulling his own weight, and DOING HIS JOB is becoming almost intolerable. So there. Indulge me, please, while I get this off my chest.


All of us, I think, have a somewhat ugly underbelly of emotion. If you’re a hermit, no one ever has to know. If you’re extraordinarily lucky, only your family sees your most unpleasant moments. Unfortunately however, if we spend a lot of time in the public eye and/or have a great deal of face time with non-family members, it’s inevitable that some of the rough, unsightly borders of our psyche make themselves uncomfortably visible to others, much like an errant brassiere strap or glaring panty line.


Boss’ ragged edges of emotional inconsistency sometimes stare you in the face like that. Boss spends an inordinate amount of time interacting with others. In fact, even though he’s still a relative newlywed, with a new son, I surmise that unless he’s fast asleep, he’s either engaged in or thinking of engaging in a conversation with a colleague, client or acquaintance. He spends over 60 hours per month talking on his cell phone, in addition to his face-to-face meetings, which take several hours per day. I’m not even counting the time he devotes to text messages, which number in the several hundreds. (By the way, text messaging happens to be Zilla’s preferred means of discourse with Boss, so she’s responsible for a lot of these, which you’ll read about next time. ) So yeah, LOTS of time on communication with those outside his family.


I remember the very first time I was startled by one of Boss’ incongruous outbursts from left field. I’d been working in the office just a few weeks when Boss announced in a staff meeting that he wanted to institute a corporate fitness program. An area of the facility would be set aside for employee work-outs, and a plan was devised whereby the female staff members were to meet at 9 am, two or three days per week. The guys were to have a program too, but it would be revealed at a later time, and would be conducted in a different manner. Boss emphasized that keeping fit was an important part of the total mental/physical/spiritual wellness package where the staff was concerned, so he was going to make provision for fitness a priority. I was naïve enough at the time to consider it a wise and calculated corporate move. I realize now that it was probably an idea he thought of as it was coming out of his mouth.


Nevertheless, we girls embarked on our corporate fitness quest. A couple of our staff members were quite handy fitness instructors, so they took the lead. Time passed, and we’d developed a habit of working out for about half an hour two or three days per week, depending on what professional obligations we had going in the office. We’d even expanded our sessions so that acquaintances, family and ladies from the community could come join us. We arranged for someone to provide paid child care, the cost of which was covered by those whose children were being supervised. Boss always made it a point to stay away from our workout area, because he didn’t want to make any of the ladies’ uncomfortable, but he’d sometimes holler a cheerful “Hello!” toward our area as he entered the building. More often than not, though, he didn’t show up at our place of business until well after we had wrapped things up and returned to our desks in the office, so he was only remotely aware of what we were doing and how successful and popular our workouts had become.


The organization was even turning a bit of revenue from the sale of bottled beverages during the sessions, so we all began to agree that this was a great idea, and an excellent way to both keep fit and to reach out to the community.


Months passed. Things seemed to be going remarkably well, which I’ve learned over the years is usually a sign that there is a bizarre undulation about to take place. One day, when Boss appeared to be casually perusing our time cards on payday, he suddenly burst out with an exclamation directed toward me, but audible to nearly everyone in the building. “Wait a minute! I see that Susie has written 9 am on her time sheet on Monday and Wednesday!

“Yes….?” I replied tentatively, not sure what he was getting at.

“And so have you! But didn’t you work out on those days?”

“Yes….we did work out on Monday and Wednesday. What’s wrong?”

“YOU PUT IT DOWN ON YOUR TIME CARDS!!! I can’t be paying you to work out! You can’t put hours on your time card unless you are actually doing work in the office!”

Okay, so this had pretty much been my gut feeling, months ago, when he first told us he WANTED us to work out on company time. I thought that probably wasn’t the best use of corporate resources. But he seemed so enthusiastic, and he had made a good a point about the well-rounded, healthy employee thing. He even kind of talked it up as a peace offering to the staff from our organization, since we can’t afford corporate health insurance. So quite naturally, since Boss has the authority to determine whether or not we employees should be paid for whatever he chooses, I went with it. I even double-checked with him and confirmed it before I handed over the first round of time sheets claiming our corporate work-out time. But now, Boss’ tone made me feel quite shady, and a lot like a thief.


I wanted to retort, “But, at the staff meeting, you said….” I didn’t. I rationalized that if Boss had suddenly become so alarmed about the money coming out of the company coffers for something he had previously authorized, the financial situation must be dire. I didn’t want to stress him out even further and sound like a whiner, when he was obviously concerned about funding. I didn’t know him that well at the time, so I backed off without even a question.


From that point on, I DID vow to begin taking detailed notes at staff meetings, which had never been done before, but is a practice that I began and continue to do to this day. I informed all the hourly employees who had been joining us for exercise sessions that fitness was no longer a part of our employee package. Say la vie. Some employees subsequently decided that if they weren’t getting PAID for it, they would rather stay in bed and come in later. Others decided to focus their limited workday hours on more businesslike pursuits. Non-staff participants sensed the change in attitude and enthusiasm, I think, and gradually stopped showing up. Finally, the gals who had been instructing picked up some “real” evening classes in other locations, and decided that an additional morning workout was too much for them. Anyhow, before long, our workouts dwindled away to nothing.


At about this same time, we were in habit of frequently going out for lunch as an office. Maybe once every couple of weeks. Most of the time, they were impromptu instances of taking our staff meetings on the road. We’d all be invited to have a “business lunch” together, for which our organization picked up the tab. Boss had made a point of wanting us to be cohesive as a staff, and desiring for us to build relationships with one another, so we viewed these power lunches as an outgrowth of that. Besides that, as I’ve written before, our staff meetings NEVER started on time, so by the time they were even half over, lunchtime had come and gone and we were all RAVENOUS. It was either go get a bite to eat or scrap the meeting. Boss would NEVER scrap a staff meeting. NEVER.


Once, to my surprise, and by Boss’ suggestion, we went to a popular, but fairly pricey local eatery. We discovered after we arrived that we were there to celebrate a staff member’s birthday and encourage an employee whose husband had just lost his job. We didn’t conduct a huge amount of business during that lunch, as I recollect, but we were under the impression that it was “mandatory” that we go, so we all did. We ordered, ate, and spent a short time chatting about office stuff and personal stuff. When the checks came, Boss grabbed his own and the check of the birthday celebrant, and put their meals on the corporate card. The rest of us paid for our own meals. I didn’t realize we were going dutch until the checks came. I was shocked. I wouldn’t have felt I should afford to go had I known, but whatever.


So, at the end of the week, we all turned in our time cards and I submitted them, with the paychecks to be signed by Boss. While he was busy in his office, the rest of us took a few minutes and ran to a local fast food restaurant for a quick bite, since our computers were temporarily down, and the IT technician who was reconfiguring our system needed some “empty office” time to get things reworked. Boss stayed behind to sign the checks and confer with the tech. When we returned to the building, Boss and the tech were bent over a flowchart of some sort. Boss interrupted the meeting long enough to call my co-worker and I into the office where they were.


“I saw that you put 9-5 on your timecards last Tuesday. That’s the day we all went to the local café.” He raised his voice a little, inflecting a little indignance. “You both claimed that on your timecards. I can’t be paying you to go out for lunch!! You have to sign out every time you leave the office. I don’t have the funds to pay employees to eat.”


Wow. This had never even been an issue, especially since we almost always ate while we worked at our desks, unless we were required to accompany the rest of the staff to a restaurant for a meeting. For our typical mid-day meals, we’d either brown bag it or make a run to a nearby fast food restaurant. If one of us did happen to leave the building, we were ALWAYS back in the office within 10 or 15 minutes, where we distributed the food and got back to work. In fact, this day had been a rarity, because we’d all gone out and taken a half hour, since we had been asked to clear the building for the computer tech.


I was a little speechless. Boss had just revealed his ignorance about common business practices. Don’t even minimum wage jobs require a paid 20 or 30 minute lunch break? In addition, don’t they also offer a couple of 10 minute regular breaks within an eight hour shift? Our staff never TOOK breaks, as we were always loathe to interrupt our project momentum. We were also, as a group, very conscientious and wanted to make sure our time spent on the clock wasn’t squandering precious funds. Had we REALLY just been scolded about one hour-long lunch out after working through countless others at our desks? I believe you’ve treed the wrong squirrels there, Rover!


The most disturbing thing to me was the fact that this scolding had taken place in front of a complete stranger instead of being pulled aside and counseled privately. I had to work with that computer gentleman at a later time, and it took him a long time to realize that I wasn’t a lazy, money-grubbing bum, but actually was someone who had been placed in a trustworthy position.


I ended up appealing and securing a paid 30 minute lunch break for employees, and, as a bonus got an apology for Boss’ strident treatment of us in front of a stranger too. So that was good, and I appreciated his humility, short-lived though it was. He continues to call employees out in front of others, for things they may or may not have done.


See, Boss gets pretty stressed out sometimes , and he doesn’t always remember exactly what he says, and to whom. He will sometimes make a comment, phrased as an announcement, indicating that there is a new office policy. That office policy will be effective immediately, only not everyone will be aware of it, and it takes quite a bit of time for the information to trickle down to everyone on payroll. Due to the lag, Boss gets frustrated , because he assumes that the employees are deliberately ignoring his directives, when the real truth is that they’re simply underinformed. The truth is, he’s told maybe ONE MEMBER of the staff the NEW policy, the new policy which trumps the OLD policy, but since he sometimes makes the announcement as an offhanded comment to someone the new policy doesn’t affect, we assume he’s already spread the word to the parties who would be vitally interested. Humph. Not so.


Case in point. A few months after the tongue-lashing about paid lunchtime, somebody scored at a Best Buy Black Friday sale, and our organization was blessed with a new laptop computer. (For those especially alert readers, yes, this is the same laptop Boss later briefly bestowed upon “Eddie” when he joined our staff this spring.)


Because Boss had just purchased a corporate laptop, and the other office computer needs were primarily for desktop stations, Boss decided that the recipient of this shiny new machine should be……..ME! I was pretty stoked. I didn’t really NEED a portable computer, but he touted at length how handy it would be, and eventually sold me on the idea. It had a wireless card, so I’d be able to check and respond to emails even if I was away from the office at a remote event. I’d be able to create and save corporate documents, even do on-site invoices, if necessary. Perhaps most attractive to me, I’d be able to work on an educational program for clients that I’d been itching to flesh out and implement. What a great thing! What a blessing!


So I went out and bought a cool new laptop case, a small wireless mouse, USB cables….everything I’d need to take my portion of the corporate show on the road. I even signed up for a correspondence course that would give me some additional certification in the field of the program I wanted to develop. I took the laptop home almost every evening and most weekends, too. If it was particularly late when I left the office, or if I knew my weekend would be otherwise full, I’d sometimes leave the laptop on my desk for the next workday. Boss made the suggestion once that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to leave the computer out in plain sight, since my desk is in a relatively easily-accessible area and could conceivably be swiped. The possibility wasn’t very likely due to the configuration of our office and the hours I worked, which is why it wasn’t a no-brainer, but still, his caution made perfect sense to me, and besides that, the tall nephews had been logging on and messing a few things up, so I started being diligent to take the computer home EVERY day.


This arrangement worked well for nearly a year. On a weekend sometime after the wedding, Boss called me in a veritable panic. WHERE was ” ‘the’ laptop you use? “ Boss had always referred to it as “ ‘your’ laptop” previously, so I had the presence of mind to sense that something was up. I assured him that it was with me at home, thinking that knowledge would calm his fears. It seemed to only stir him up more. He grilled me as to why I had it at home, which was to do some online studying for the class I was taking. Boss wondered aloud why I hadn’t asked for permission. Hmmmmm. Okay, he KNEW I was taking this class, he knew I’d paid for it out of my own pocket, but that I was hoping that it would benefit our organization. He knew I was using the laptop, at home, for that purpose, and that I wasn’t claiming ANY of those study hours on my time sheet. I’d made that quite clear. I was just using the laptop. The one he had DISCUSSED with me as being so versatile and handy. The one I’d be able to take with me anywhere, and use for a variety of purposes. Yeah, that one.


Boss said he’d made a comment to another member of our staff months ago about my desk being empty all the time when I wasn’t there, and that it shouldn’t be so. (Sorry, I didn’t get the memo. ) He went on to say that I’d NEVER had blanket permission to take my laptop out of the office, and that he was concerned for its safety because he had a notion and was pretty certain that my children were using it when I was at home, and downloading viruses and spyware. He was serious. Only…my kids had never used that laptop at home. In fact, there is no need, since we have no fewer than five other computers available at our house, which works out to one for every student in middle school and higher. We also have DIAL-UP internet access, which means that only one computer can access the Web at a time – and the only one with a cable is our main desktop.


End result? I had to leave the laptop in the office permanently without SPECIFIC, special permission to remove it. It turned out that my desk is empty anyway, because while leaving the computer in the office solved the possibility that the laptop would fall victim to evil devices or improper uses, it DIDN’T address the original issue of being safe from theft. So I now lock it in a filing cabinet when I leave the office, and things are mostly good with that.


Boss has a habit of getting really possessive about “stuff.” He didn’t have a lot of “stuff” growing up, and I have concluded that he kind of had to jealously horde and protect what he did get. When his folks got stuff, he wasn’t allowed to touch it for fear he’d break it. This very guarded, very possessive attitude is still prevalent in his family. Boss’ nephews live in a home with a computer that has internet access, but they aren’t allowed to use it. The boys, regardless of the fact that the youngest is a senior in high school, are NOT allowed to log onto that computer for ANYTHING. There’s an outside chance they might break it, or mess it up, so grandpa made it off-limits, permanently.


Totally understandably, when the nephews come to our office, which usually has several unattended computer stations, they are absolutely SALIVATING to use our computers with high-speed internet. (They even bent the drawer on my locked filing cabinet in an attempt to get at my laptop when they were bored and all the other facility computers were in use. ) Over the years, they’ve gotten into some pretty hairy situations by using office computers. Crashed individual computers and even our whole network a couple of times with some bugs from Limewire. They have, on occasion, accessed some taboo websites. I mean, they’re human, they have lots of unsupervised idle time when they’re there, so, to me anyway, it’s kind of a “duh” moment when it’s discovered that they’ve done something unseemly because they have nothing else to do. Setting them up for failure, in my opinion, and the primary reason why I rarely EVER bring my boys, except the youngest, with me to work anymore.


We used to all be there DAILY, but over time, I began to see that I was, by permitting them too much idle time there, allowing the finger of blame to be pointed in their direction for every mess that was made; for every misplaced or broken object in the facility. They’re not perfect, and they DO sometimes break things, lose things and make messes. It was wearying though, to feel responsible by default for anything that happened to go wrong in the facility. I diligently have tried to make sure they cleaned up their messes, replaced anything they broke, and found anything that was lost – even stuff THEY didn’t lose.


Not letting them “hang out” in the facility anymore has worked well, for the most part. The only hiccup was a few weeks ago, when Boss made a remark during staff meeting about an area of the facility he’d had to clean up himself, and stressed that he was VERY unhappy about it. It was a rather generic comment, except for his pointed use of the phrase “make sure your kids…..”. Well, my youngest had been the only staff child who had been in the building that week, and is the only employee’s child in general who regularly comes to the office, so I realized immediately that Boss was talking to me. I hadn’t remembered a mess in the area that Boss mentioned , so after the meeting, I asked on what day this had occurred. (Boss rarely pauses DURING the meetings long enough for anyone else to get a word in edgewise when he gets on a tear. ) The day Boss named was a day I hadn’t even been into the office. I told him so, and walked away. Go pin the blame on somebody else. Later, I found out that some of his sibling’s children had visited on the day in question, so they must have been responsible. But they’re family, so we’ll let it go , and at the next staff meeting, there will be no public apology for Boss’ jumping to conclusions. As far as everyone else knows, my kid made a mess, and I wasn’t responsible enough to clean it up. Whatever, only everyone knows I wouldn’t do that.


It’s all SO like Boss, going off all half-cocked like that, and showing the tattered, threadbare edges of his unsettled mental state. The frazzled, jagged edges we’d all hoped his eventual wife could help him slough away. The ragged, hurtful edges that his characterless wife has only caused to be more raw, brittle and pain-inflicting. Poor Boss. I’m afraid, at this point, it really might be hopeless…