Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft

“Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth!  We weren’t meant to spend it this way.  Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” – Office Space

“That’s what she said.”

I had just gotten the greatest performance review of my life.  It was outstanding in every way.  My boss (let’s call him Miller, it goes with the song) went on and on about how I was a stunning example of every possible good quality a person could have, and how I was universally loved, admired, and generally made women fertile just through a fleeting glance, and made men better than they thought they could be through the slightest example.  If the company needed someone to walk across a pond, on the top of the water, John Wilder was your guy.

For about a second, I bought it.  Flattery works because your mind really wants to believe all those nice things.  It’s like a horoscope, keep using nice adjectives, and you’ll find one that the person is already predisposed to agree with.

Then I thought about it – this guy Miller, my new boss, has been with the company about a month.  He barely knows where his office is and he’d only visited my office once.  For him to write a performance review like this?  I didn’t believe it.  As much as I’d like to think of myself in such glowing terms, I rejected his flattery.

Beyond mentally rejecting his praise as an attempt at manipulation, I also made the mental note never to trust Miller.

Why?

Anyone who will be quick to praise will be quick to condemn.  Besides, when I looked at him while he was smiling, he only smiled with his mouth – never with his whole face.  He was smiling because he was “supposed” to be smiling, not because the smile was genuine.  During those smiles Miller had the dead, flat eyes of a predator, like he was attempting to see if you were fooled and really believed the smile.

I never did meet Miller’s wife – I think her invisibility suit worked pretty well.

I was careful to document every conversation with him.  Always trust your gut, people, unless your gut says socialism is a good deal.  If your gut says that, remember:  never go full Bernie.

I worked pretty far away from the company headquarters, where Miller’s office was.  I set up weekly calls to keep him informed on what I and my team were doing.  I’d done this in the past for my previous bosses.   These calls allowed them to understand what we were doing, and digest it for top management if they needed to.

Except.

Except I found out from a colleague that during these meetings, most of the time Miller was shopping for things online, teaching himself to play the banjo, translating Garfield® into cuneiform (did they even have lasagna in ancient Sumeria?) or, in general, not paying any attention to what I was saying.  My colleague noted that Miller generally wasn’t listening at all.

If you get the cuneiform wrong and accidentally translate a passage from the Necronomicon© this is what you get.

Normally, that’s not a problem, I ran had been running my end of things for years, and after a few years you get used to the usual problems – and are expected just to handle them.  But my boss had a boss – call him my Grandboss.  When my Grandboss wanted to know about some aspect of what I was doing, he’d ask my boss, Miller.  Since Miller had literally no idea (despite weekly written reports and the phone call mentioned above) what I was doing, he did the simple thing:  he made it up.

Most of the time, it worked fine.  My Grandboss generally had an idea of what was going on, even if the specifics were a bit off.  But when the results my boss made up promised didn’t happen?  The Grandboss got mad.  Very mad.

So mad, in fact, that my Grandboss called me up one day and was yelling.  I explained, calmly, the real situation and the plan, and that seemed to calm him down.  He checked up a few more times to make sure what I said was really happening, and then went away.  But the troubles with Miller continued.  Our conversations became a random affair – one day he would be polite.  The next day, he would be literally yelling over the phone.  What had started out as a bad feeling based on that too-good-to-be-true performance review had morphed into a full-blown sitcom level bad boss.

I mean, can you imagine such micromanaging?

I had one or two advantages – first, I had been at the company much longer and had several well-placed friends, and second, I wasn’t a deceitful sack of weasel meat.  I’m certain that my boss was lying based on my informants at headquarters, and I’m equally certain that the things Miller was saying weren’t very positive. It’s been several years, and my career is still recovering from his “help.”

I’m ashamed to admit it, but one of the happiest days of my life was when Miller got fired.  “But, you can’t fire me!  You don’t even know what I do!” were his comments as they took away his keys and allowed him to pop his personal possessions in a box and gave him a complementary cement bag (for the weight, dear).  And, he’s right – the Internet sure won’t surf itself.

As near as I can tell, the company didn’t skip a beat in his absence.  I’ll also admit that on the day he got fired, I had one of the best workouts of my life.  The entire time I worked out that lunch, I just listened to Mack the Knife on a loop for 45 minutes of the best treadmill time I’ve ever put in.  I smiled every second.  Why Mack the Knife?  I have no idea.  I rarely listened to it before, and haven’t listened to it even one time since that day until tonight.  As I write this, it’s on a loop in the background.

It may be a song from a Marxist play written by a Leftist, but it makes me happy that it made so much money – after the Marxist author died.  Also?  The most upbeat song about multiple murders.  Bonus trivia:  Lotte Lenya, mentioned in the song, played Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.

As you can see, she’s the perfect Bond® girl for 2019.

I’ve tried to feel bad about feeling so good because Miller was fired.  Even years later, it’s still a pleasant memory.  Yeah.  I shouldn’t feel good about that, but I do.

Okay, the choice was a single post that was twice as long as this, or this broken into two parts.  I chose two parts.  Next part is on Friday.