Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Ode To My Boss

May my boss cease to be. Please.

What do you do when every single day, every single hour that you spend in the presence of your so-called "superior" -- a person ordained by other people, you'll note, to organize and channel your work and make sure you stay devoted to it, a person who is supposed to have moral authority over you and "keep you in line" when you're not working a hundred percent -- when every single second you spend in the presence of this person reinforces the dreadful, unflappable certainty you feel in your gut that this person is not only intellectually, but also morally, cognitively and spiritually inferior to you, in fact so utterly inferior to everyone you know in all respects that it's a wonder this person hasn't at some point in their life simply forgotten that you have to breathe a couple of times every minute, thus putting a thankfully premature end to its existence?

I just managed to say "I hate my boss" in 153 words. This is the kind of verbosity bred only by just the right mixture of seething resentment and careful tactical planning (I know now, for example, that if my boss were ever to read this, she'd give up on the post after the 20th word because her daily allowance of Big Words had been reached, turn off her computer, walk around like a headless chicken for a few minutes, fall asleep on the bathroom floor, then go to work the next morning and spend all day wondering what the toilet and the bathtub had been doing in her bedroom). She is the embodiment of the stereotypical Middle Management Nightmare. She is responsible for facilitating the flow of information and communication from our department to our department head and upper management, and she uses this position to apply what seems to have been the one gift bestowed upon her at misbegetting, which is Taking Credit For Other People's Work. You will notice I put this in first-letter caps. This is to further underline the fact that she has elevated this particular activity into a form of art so refined that it falls squarely within the first-letter caps canon, falling just short of being italicizable or even boldable. She doesn't know how to open a can of Coke without garden clippers or use a cell phone without electrocuting herself, but boy, can she Take Credit For Other People's Work. She can Take Credit For Other People's Work until the cows come home, baby.

Hmm. I'm being excessively verbose again.

Okay, forget what I wrote above. In fact, erase all that from your head the way a piece of pickled ginger cleanses your palate in preparation for the raw, uncooked truth. Here comes the sushi.

Fuck my boss. Fuck her in her stupid ass.

I've said all I need to say.