A Really, REALLY Fond Farewell

I've intended hundreds of times to write about a boss, but the time passes, and it doesn't seem so important, and I have an awful memory.  So, even though his backside has not actually passed the door for the last time, it appears we will not be working together again, and I will take this time to say good-bye.


I don't know what he did in his office all day.  He sat in front of his computer, and rarely came out.  I was fine with that.


One of the best things about the man was that he didn't do much.


Any attempts he ever made to manage were, honestly, awful.


He had, I was told before I came to work for him, been promoted so that they wouldn't have to keep turning him down, and moved to a branch where he would leave them alone, and, because that branch had always been a disaster, he couldn't do much harm.


Surprise, he ended up with a team of employees that were smart, and responsible, and liked each other.  There was cooperation, there was friendship.  AND, best of all for him, they completely respected authority.  Compliance and adoration.  It was hog heaven for a boss that didn't know too much and pretty much wanted to stay under the radar and not have trouble.


Shortly thereafter, I came along.  He was pretty much pressured to hire me; how he hired me a year earlier for a better position and then gotten me demoted again before I could ever work a day is a long story and certainly one of my most bizarre work experiences, ever.  So when I applied again for an entry level (lateral movement) position for which I was highly overqualified, he basically had to do it.


And sadly, I knew more, had more experience, more education, more training, and tended not to keep my mouth shut.  The ideas I had were good, but were met with suspicion, as he spread his feelings about me among the staff (I know this to be true because he actually spread some false words to me about the assistant manager he'd been pressured to hire, indicating that she was "a plant".)


So occasionally, there was head-banging.  The ridiculous annual evaluations were punitive, annually quantifying my bad attitude, which after a while became true, even, most absurd, my "lack of initiative", which was never true.


I did learn after a while to shut up.  I was working with some very nice people who allowed me to push my way into a niche in which I was doing work that I was actually qualified to do.  But there was also giving tasks that should have gone to me to the person below me, and it was hard to swallow that, but eventually I realized that there was nothing I could do about it, and as I burned out, I cared less.  That was what actually made it easier, last year, to reduce my hours to part-time, knowing that nothing I could do would move me up in that little fiefdom.


But enough about me.  There were moments that should be remembered.


The times a light bulb would burn out in the staff bathroom, and he would wait till the other one burned out and we had to pee by flashlight before alerting the maintenance supervisor.  The sluggish sink in the staff kitchen that over two to three months finally just stopped draining altogether.  The time some wiseass turned the sprinkler on and after a couple of weeks of it running nonstop, I went outside to find the faucet and turn it off.


We worked with one computer for six staff members, because he hadn't the desire -- or the clout, I believe -- to get us a second computer.  He did not have what you would call a working relationship with the head of technology, another infamously mean and burned out individually that he had bumped heads with often in the past, so it tended to be a combination of his refusal to call when we needed help and the other dude's refusal to give us what we needed.


He had pretty much the same working relationship with the head of maintenance.  So when a cart broke, she would refuse to replace it, and when it could no longer be repaired, she just kept it.  She would "yell" at him (by email) when he had the nerve to ask for something, once accusing one of us of stealing a very large case of bottom of the line quality toilet paper, which we had in fact moved out of the way in the back room.  It was pretty much a case of the war of the idiots, with the staff (and the branch) suffering the consequences.


So, ever complaint and protective, the staff would ignore problems, like burned out light bulbs and standing water, roaches in the microwave, inadequate computers and supplies.


And because the King of Tech and Queen of Toilets could not be addressed by other than management, we muddled along.


There was the one time I met with the acting director, to talk about the physical burdens of the cost-cutting, and she actually found two carts for us.  And the time when the maintenance worker came in and I told him how many books had been damaged because the old bookdrop had been moved from under the eaves and retained water.


After that, I was told not to talk to the maintenance staff, and if I had any complaints they were to go only to our boss.  And he would decide what to do about it.


When he first became manager, there was a woman there who was gruff and a bit scary, but good-hearted and quite the character.  She was a lower level manager, and had been there for years.  It took him a year, but he got her to quit.  I hadn't realized how he had done it until just a few weeks ago, when we learned he was taking early retirement, and I was feeling the first waves of relief.


He had shut her out.  Not given her information.  Worked around her.  Excluded her from any decisions.  Took a job that had meaning for her, that she had been proud of, and made her invisible.


He did that to me.  He took away work that I had done for five years, even giving it over to a volunteer, a friend of his, just because he wanted to do it.  He excluded me from decisions about the work that I had  been doing, acting not just as though he had no idea I had been doing it, but acting as though I had not been doing it.  It was about this time that my evaluation indicated that I "lacked initiative".


Had I not been around the block a few times, employment wise, I might not have stuck around.  I realized that the people I work with are at least good people, and in some ways have become family.  It also helped that I worked part-time.  Part of the squeezing me out was giving me absolutely ideal hours, so that I wouldn't complain I think, but also making me not as much a part of the team.  The whole package made it easier to tolerate.


And then, when I learned he was leaving, it was as though a boulder had been taken off my back.  As I told a friend, it's a bad news/good news thing.  The bad news is that with him gone I'll have to work some night hours; the good news is, well, he'll be gone.


Just on the chance that I might miss him, he wrote up my vacation hours in such a way as to give me two less hours of additional leave that we were being awarded, as two days off.    Anticipating this, I had clarified the number of hours I should be awarded with the head of Human Resources.  So that when I saw the schedule, I made the corrections, and told him that I was entitled to two-five hour days, not two four-hour days.  He exhaled, grabbed the schedule and said, "Part time is four hours.  That's what I was told," and took off to his office.  Fortunately I had the email confirming the number of hours, and forwarded it to him.


He changed the schedule.  And by the time I saw him on the next day (our last) he was acting quite sweet and innocent, again claiming that he had been told something different.  I knew he would lie if cornered, but I wonder if he even knew it was a lie.


So, it would be naive to believe that things couldn't get worse; we have had quite a Hall of Fame of managers at that branch.  But for now, I am going to enjoy a sense of relief, and the freedom to do a good job.