Thank goodness Chaos Boy is 'working from home' today. If he didn't do that a couple of times a week, I don't think I could take it.
He got progressively wiggier yesterday, until by the time he left, we were both on the ragged edge of a meltdown.
He's one of those people who doesn't think he's getting through to you unless you have some OTT emotional reaction to what he's saying, so he keeps winding himself tighter and tighter trying to make the people around him as upset as he is over...whatever is bothering him at the moment. No amount of, "yes, I hear you, I understand you, and this is how we might be able to handle this" works.
And, although I informed him in short, clear words that the likelihood of me responding with any kind of emotional outbreak of my own was zero ("That isn't going to happen," I said. I think that's pretty clear.), he continued to whip himself into an ever-greater frenzy in an attempt to get me angry over some stuff that wasn't done last week and which he now things we're dead without.
No, it wasn't, but no, we aren't. It will take 30 minutes to fix. Unless you continue to fan the flames of your insecurity and ignorance with diatribes about you've been robbed of the money you paid your employee because she spent the time working on the other five "critically important" projects you handed her last week. Because if you continue to do that, no one on the planet is going to be willing to work with you and you're actually going to be screwed, business-wise.
(Maybe my return to fandom is less about having found a new fandom than it is about me needing a place to hide from Ugly Reality again, for the first time in a lot of years? Do I have to be suffering the miseries at work to generate the emotional energy required by fandom? For someone who's as much of a fluffy bunny, fandom-wise, as I am, that seems very odd and unlikely, don't you think? And yet...here I am, with a lunatic boss for the first time in seven years and here I am, dabbling in fandom again for the first time in seven years.)
Anyhow. I think I figured out what part of Bernie's problem is. He doesn't actually want to be the boss except in the sense that he wants to be able to tell people what to do.
He doesn't want to make the decisions or take the responsibility or follow-through on anything. He wants to just tell someone what to do in the sketchiest possible fashion, and then have it magically happen out of his sight and without costing him any further thought.
And, you know, I can totally operate like that but not until I really have a handle on the stuff that needs to be done.
Except...I can't, because he laid DiamondGirl off and it's just ludicrous to think that any tech work we need to have done can be done by outside contractors who also have other commitments.
I mean, yeah, they can, but one of Chaos Boy's big hot-buttons is having things done Right When He Wants Them, which you can sometimes get from employees and almost never get from contractors. You can't suddenly decide you need to build a 15-screen flash-based web presentation for a client meeting in two days and be sure a contractor will have the slack in their schedule to do it.
All of which would worry me less if he'd actually hired someone to do the website-related work we have for our own site and for the client sites we dink around with, but he hasn't so far.
Oh. And the famous database person he's contracting with to do the db stuff DiamondGirl couldn't do? Apparently he worked here before and was let go on account of extreme flakiness. Which I found out from DiamondGirl yesterday. So that's already another problem brewing.
As it happens, he's already informed me that the motley collection of contractors he's cobbled together will be my problem to manage. Considering that he wigged out over how I was spending too much time managing DiamondGirl because fifteen minutes a day was spent talking with her about tasks we were both working on, I can just imagine how he's going to respond to a time-card that shows six hours a day trying to coax this bunch o'nuts into forgetting Bernie's tirades and focusing on the money he's paying them.
And, yes, of course I will now be managing five contractors in addition to being the office manager, bookkeeper, HR person, coding surveys in both pieces of proprietary software, handing box inventory, shipping and receiving for clients and repairs, and...wait for it...learning to do some of the simple repairs myself so he doesn't have to pay the repair people to do them!
Okay, maybe it's just me, but this is insane, right? Am I crazy, or is this sort of a lot of hats for one person?
All this in addition to the job I was hired to do, which was to be the account manager for all clients. Yes, I'm also the sole point of contact for all clients on all projects. Once they've signed a contract, Bernie doesn't want to talk to them any more. (That's what he does, by the way. In this scenario, he gets them to sign a contract. I am, thus far, unable to discover any other jobs that he's got his own name on.)
Okay, I'm just not going to think about it. Because last night I dreamed about the data servers in St. Louis and worried over how they were labeled. And if I'm dreaming about servers, I want them to be an entirely different kind of servers, if you catch my drift.