“Hi Wallace my name is Paul and I’m calling because my boss is a complete idiot and he makes it impossible for me to get any work done.”
“Okay, Paul, slow down. You sound really worked up. What’s the problem?”
“He isn’t respectful of my time, has me doing tons of little mundane things that only benefit him personally and thinks that I’m at his beck and call. He has no qualms about phoning me at home, any time of the day or night.”
“What kind of work you do, Paul?”
“I’m the Director of Information Technology for a large…organization. I’d rather not say where I work, is that okay?”
“Sure, most callers to this show don’t.”
“It’s a huge bureaucracy and I’ve been here for about ten years, but only got promoted to this current role about eight months ago.”
“What happened to your predecessor?”
“He left after about a year. His boss, that’s my boss now, was driving him crazy. In fact, they’ve gone through about five IT directors in the last six or seven years.”
“Wow, your boss must be a real tyrant.”
“I guess. The thing is that he has a real stressful job and ordinarily I would respect that there are a lot of demands on him. But the stress never affects him because he delegates all of his work to me and everyone else in the office. He ends up taking a ton of vacation while we clean up after him, so to speak. I expected him to be a bit more techno-savvy too, given his position.”
“Is that a requirement of his job?”
“No, I guess not. But a lot of the stuff he has me do is kind of basic. I mean, there are more than 800 people who work here, and we have multiple millions of dollars of projects and infrastructure that I am supposed to be overseeing. But in reality, I waste most of my week doing totally time-consuming, mundane stuff for my boss.”
“Can you give us an example?”
“The other day he called me into his office and asked if I could separate the music on his iPod so that country and western were two separate genres. And this was right in the middle of me leading a meeting of about fifteen project managers and some consultants who are overseeing our conversion to Linux servers—“
“Let me stop you there before you get too technical on me and our listeners, Paul. Does he do this kind of thing often?”
“Oh yeah. Last summer he had a big meeting in Europe and he made me go with him so that I would be there in case anything went wrong with his PowerPoint presentation. Hell, I don’t even think he created the presentation himself. He had our co-worker Karl do it; it seems like that guy does everything. My boss told me that he doesn’t trust the French version of Windows, so I had to go to Europe, just to press the Next button when he said ‘Next slide.’ He also never remembers his Blackberry password, so he calls to ask me for it about five times a day. I mean how hard is it to remember TX underscore rox?”
“Uh, Paul, I’d recommend changing that to something else tomorrow.”
“I don’t care anymore. I’m at my wit’s end with this guy.”
“One theme I’ve found with a lot of callers is that these CEOs and high-level executives are having their IT staff, even their highly paid IT staff who should be concerned with top-level strategic initiatives, do mundane chores for them like they used to have their personal secretaries do. It’s a real problem today.”
“That’s totally the deal with him. Last fall, he had me come over to his house and set his Tivo to record West Wing and Commander in Chief for him. And then he called me at home one weekend and said I needed to get into the office immediately. He sounded serious, like it was a national emergency or something. I get there and he’s sitting at his desk with his cell phone. It always makes me nervous when he has questions about his cell phone. Anyway, he wanted me to set a special ringtone for this guy named Hugo he doesn’t like who is the head of another, um, organization. So now when Hugo phones, it plays La Cucaracha, because the guy is Hispanic. It makes my boss laugh every time.”
“He sounds like a bit of a simpleton. Makes you wonder how some of these executives get hired in the first place, doesn’t it?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Is this a large company? Are they successful?”
“It’s more of a government…agency, actually. He also has me do all this stuff that I think is really inappropriate. Every time he gets into spats with this guy named Tony, he has me remove Tony’s address from his AOL Instant Messenger contacts list, only to change it back a few days later after they make up. And he’ll call me at least once a month with these totally outlandish ideas for startups that are really stupid, and ask my technical opinion on them. One was a site where you could enter your favorite Bible verse and then use that to meet like-minded Christian singles.”
“He sounds like a whack job.”
“Oh yeah, completely. So what should I do?”
“Have you ever told him that these kinds of things aren’t in your job description, and that by wasting your time on these projects, more important things are not getting done?”
“I’ve mentioned it to him a couple times, but he always just repeats some platitude to me, like ‘Paul, we’re fighting a bigger fight here, and it requires sacrifice from all of us. You do love freedom, don’t you Paul?’ I mean, how am I supposed to respond to that?”
“I sympathize with you, Paul. It sounds like he has real delusions of grandeur. Seems like you need to find another job.”
“I’ve thought about looking, but it’s really hard because they’re so suspicious of everyone who works here. When I got hired, I had to undergo an extensive background check that was just a few steps short of an anal probe. They probably snoop on my Internet connection at home. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re monitoring this phone call.”
“Don’t get paranoid on me, Paul. Have you considered—”
“Excuse me, Wallace. I just got a text message from my boss.”
“Really? What does he want now? I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“Boy, this is embarrassing.”
“How bad could it be? Come on, Paul, share it with the listeners. I mean, it’s not like any of us know this guy.”
“Well, maybe not personally. Here’s what his text says. I’m just going to read it verbatim. Man, he’s a bad speller. ‘Paul, is humidity bad for the football with the launch codes in it? Just about to jump in the shower and I usually take it with me all the time and I had left the water in the shower running for a while, so I was worried that maybe all of the extra, ya know, sublimation, in the bathroom might affect the inner circuitry and whatnot. Paul, you there?’ Jesus, I need to get a new job. I’m sorry Wallace, I have to go.”
