Office Space

My boss is a dick.

I realize this isn’t descriptive so let me clarify:

• my boss has the interpersonal sensitivity of gravel;
• he has no sense of professional boundaries in that he seems to want us to all be friends, something I believe it’s not possible to be with your direct supervisor (yes, you can have a good working relationship, even one that seems friend-like, but there must always be that semi-visible membrane between you that acknowledges that one of you in the relationship has the ability to drastically affect the livelihood of the other);
• my boss can not distinguish between important and urgent which makes everything a crisis;
• my boss only thinks through decisions far enough to get to the point of considering “how will I defend this decision to my boss” which leads to a lot of short term, anti-strategic thinking;
• my boss refuses to acknowledge that as Director of Communications one of his fundamental responsibilities is to set communications policies and procedures and enforce them;
• and, lastly, my boss is conflict avoidant with people he believes have more political clout in The Organization than he does and inappropriately confrontational with people he believes he has less political clout than he does.

His inability to think passed having to defend a decision to his boss and his inappropriate approach to conflict explain his unwillingness to enforce policies that are well within the purview of our department. They also explain why he made yesterday the stupidest mistake he’s ever made: he screamed at me.

See, my boss and I have a fundamental disagreement about policy and procedure. I am a one-person shop with upwards of 60 internal clients. The people I work with have next to no communications training which means thinking about outreach to our supporters is usually step 9 of an 8 step process; it is the boil stuck on to the butt end of any project planning. This is why our web site is usually stale and why I’ve had to set up a process and make actual forms for work requests.

To be more explicit, I web geek for a environmental non-profit that engages its supporters in online citizen advocacy (aka: the online action). Every day I work with a piece of software that requires certain pieces of information to build these online actions and send out the blast e-mails asking our supporters to participate by sending a message to their state legislators about this issue or their Congressional legislators about that issue. And every day I get requests on unreasonable deadlines.

To ameliorate this I’ve set out some really simple procedures. Mostly people follow them but it’s always tight. I ask for two working days to process requests which functionally ends up being a day and a half because people don’t understand that two working days’ notice means they get their finished product on the third day after they submit their request not the second day. Half the time I don’t get the forms I need and have to chase people down to get the information out of them to do what they’ve asked.

Multiply that by 60 plus clients and you’ll understand why I’m often frustrated and why I tend to insist that people follow the extraordinarily simple rules and time lines I’ve asked them to plan for.

Now that we have a content management system in place, it’s time to start training other people to post content, which opens up an entirely different can of worms. We spent a good chunk of time, money, and organizational effort to design our new(ish) web site and come up with a visual brand. Letting other people into the system means that someone is going to have to follow along behind them like the clean-up crew follows the elephant in the circus parade correcting their mistakes and making sure we don’t get headings that are the wrong color, links that blink, and other atrocities still available to the dangerous person who knows a little bit about HTML. And yes, one of the people most excited about getting trained and getting access to the system to post content is highly likely to need special attention in this area as for the past two years I’ve been correcting her code, and about a year ago I stopped explaining why (well, do you like talking to a rock?).

Last week I sent out a memo to a moderately large group of mixed staff and supervisors announcing this training, what it means, what the implications are for their work going forward, when the first set of training would be starting (the week of the 9th), and asking if they would please follow a link and fill out a simple sign-up form. Filling out the form takes less than a minute. Filling out the form gives me vital information – who is interested – and provides me with an essential tool – a centralized, trackable way to contact all the people who are in this role.

The people in our problem office didn’t bother to do this, and they didn’t bother to meet my boss’ reminder deadline. So yesterday when I sent out the training memo, their staffer wasn’t on it. My boss wanted to know why. Because they didn’t fill out the form. Go ahead and send them the materials. I’ll be happy to when they fill out the form which I’ve already asked them again today to do.

Now, I’m a fan of heated discussion. Voices get raised when people get passionate but there’s a tone, an indescribable aural shift between heated discussion and inappropriate conversation. It’s a little bit like the U.S. Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: virtually impossible to describe but you know it when you come across it.

Perhaps my mistake was telling my boss that I thought he was conflict avoidant. Perhaps it was responding to his shouting by raising my own voice (a difficult thing not to do for any human being). Regardless, when I raise my voice it is both insubordinate and unprofessional but when he raises his, because he is in a position of influence over my employment status it is abusive.

I don’t do abusive.

We have a strain of OCD in my family. Mine, fortunately, manifests itself in problem solving; I will pick and pick and pick at a problem until I find a solution that I think is viable. The only solution I can come up with for this is to walk into my boss’ office this morning and say, calmly, the following:

We need to find a way to move forward in our working relationship. My basic ground rule for doing that is this: You will never again speak to me in the tone of voice you used yesterday afternoon.

When I raise my voice to you it is insubordinate and unprofessional which I am willing to admit, take responsibility for, and offer my apologies. But when you raise your voice to me not only is it unprofessional it is, because you hold power over my employment status, abusive.

I don’t do abusive.

Now, if you can accept that ground rule we can move on. If you can’t, we have a problem.

The only good thing to come out of yesterday is that I finally managed to engage my brain quickly enough to come up with a comeback.

I left the office early and walked to the farther subway stop because, well, the subway aggrivates me anyway and I figured I needed to let go of some of my anger before engaging in the hell that is the evening commute otherwise I’d be posting bail at DC Jail.

As such, I had to walk by the worst McDonalds in the city. The sidewalk is huge next to this McDonalds which is good because it allows people to successfully dodge the population of drunkards and stoners that seem to congregate there. One of said denizens was weaving, hand raised like he was waiting for the teacher to call on him so he could ask for a bathroom pass, in the middle of the sidewalk yesterday as I was getting ready to stalk passed.

I dodged right to avoid him. He stepped in front of me. I dodged left to avoid him. He stepped in front of me again. Right as I approached I jigged to the left and as I did that he slapped me on the shoulder to which I said, “You need to get the fuck out of my way, asshole.” And then I crossed the street.

New York Avenue is six lane divided road for most of its length. Not entirely easy to cross all the time but jaywalkable if you know how. This guy followed me across the street at what I can only assume was a jog because he caught up with me on the other corner demanding “What did you say to me?”

I looked him dead in the eye and said, “I don’t care if you’re drunk, or high, or just plain stupid, but you don’t fucking touch me.”

He had to the good sense to back off.

Not my finest moment but in an otherwise really shitty day (oh, did I forget to mention we got news yesterday that one of our former coworkers, a really nice man who, yes, was in his 70s, died unexpectedly Wednesday night because he was having chest pains, called 911, but the EMTs were unable to reach him because his front door was locked and between making the call and when they arrived he’d collapsed and become unconsious?), I consider it an achievement that managed to come up with something more articulate than “fuck you, asshole” and didn’t just burst into tears.

Maybe today will be better. Maybe I’ll come home unemployed tonight. We shall see.

Later that same day…

So the speech was a little softer than I wanted. Less Ripley in Aliens act 3 (a little less “get away from her you bitch”) and a little more Ripley in Aliens act 1 (a little more “All this…all this paper won’t mean a damn thing.”)

Me: After yesterday we need to find a way to forge a working relationship going forward. I admit that raising my voice to you is insubordinate, inappropriate, and unprofessional and I’m sorry I did that. But when you raise your voice to me it’s not only is it inappropriate and unprofessional but because you hold power over my employment status it’s also abuse. I don’t do abuse. I won’t tolerate it, or brook it, or let it slide. So if we’re going to continue to work together we need to agree that it will never happen again.

BossMan: I’m hearing something new in what you just said which is that I raised my voice yesterday. I don’t think I raised my voice. I don’t recall doing that.

For the record, I checked with our office manager who sits at a desk just outside his office and overheard our entire conversation. She agrees: he screamed at me.

And what I learned from this was that my boss is not only a dick for all the aforementioned reasons he also engages, for better or worse, in classic abuser behavior.

See, an abusive relationship goes through several easily identifiable stages and features several identifiable behaviors. The isolation piece, usually the first stage, doesn’t really apply in a work relationship. But with the next stage the abusive partner will then engage in abusive behavior of a low level, usually emotional or verbal, and if confronted maintain innocence so the abused partner starts to question her recollection of the events. The next stage, of course, is the “well if you didn’t provoke me I wouldn’t…” and that usually comes with physical abuse, also not really applicable in a working relationship.

I also learned that even though he’s a director of communications he’s virtually incapable of communicating and will attempt twist into any shape so that he can convince himself he’s right.

During our “conversation” he “invited me” to explain to BigBoss why there would be a delay in doing what was being asked. After I calmed down last night I wrote an e-mail that included the following:

We are having a disagreement regarding the application of policies and procedures. [BossMan] has stated that he believes standing on form will cause trouble and that enforcing policy is not our job; I believe that policies and procedures bring structure and ensure quality and allowing people to circumvent them both degrades quality and undermines the reasons the policies and procedures were developed in the first place. I also believe that ignoring instructions, policy, and procedure should have ramifications.

Now, today, BossMan stated that in this e-mail I told BigBoss that he didn’t believe that we should be enforcing policy and that was inaccurate. To which I replied, “you directly said ‘it’s not our job to enforce policy.’ There is no other way to interpret that.”

To which he replied, “Well, I’m taking enforce literally to mean ‘compel compliance.’ We have no authority to do that.”

Again…there is no other meaning of enforce. And not there is a very important and not at all subtle distinction between “not our job” (ie: not our responsibility) and “don’t have the authority” to do something.

Here is where I mentally beat my head against the wall.

The end result is: I still have a job. Some part of him has to know he’s on warning. And what I need to do now is concentrate all my efforts into not letting him push my buttons ever again.

Oh, yes, and start looking for another job.

Speaking truth to power has consequences that the people who advocate it as a life strategy don’t seem to understand.

If you are like me and you internalize stress and you make the mistake as I recently did of answering your boss’ question about not seeming to be “OK” with the truthful answer of “Well, actually, no, I’m not OK. I’m not especially happy with either my job or the organization at the moment. In fact, I’m so unhappy that Monday night I was puking and shitting blood at the same time and 95% of that was due to stress.” you may have spoken truth to power but you’ve also given power leverage over you.

You have told them just how much they can push you, just how much they can get you to wrap yourself around your own axle. Of course, any idiot who tries to manipulate you by using this information ignores the basic principle: an animal with nothing to lose is the most dangerous thing on the planet.

Given that my boss’ response to my answer was to tell me that I needed to not internalize so much stress is it any wonder I’ve initiated the exit strategy planning?

Project management isn’t rocket science. Hell, rocket science isn’t rocket science really but I digress.

Managing any project successfully takes a unique combination of skill at prioritizing, interpersonal politics, record keeping, and the ability to understand that there are five basic elements to any project whether it’s mowing the lawn or invading a country. Those five basic elements are:

The goal: What are you trying to achieve? Figure that out first and you’re about 40% of the way there. Is the goal just to get the grass cut so you don’t get a ticket from the city or is it to have a yard manicured to the point where photographers from Better Homes & Gardens are having orgasms over your lawn? What the goal is helps determine the complexity and flexibility of…

The tasks involved (aka: the workload): What actually has to be done to achieve the goal? Hacking away with any old lawn mower is something your average, still hung over 15 year-old can do. Making a show garden worthy of Hampton Court Palace takes a different level of skill which brings us to…

The personnel (aka: human resources): Who is actually going to be doing these tasks? Do you have enough people in your house to get the jobs done? Do they have the right skills? Do they have the right equipment? If you don’t have what you need in terms of actual people or you have the people but they don’t have the right skills or equipment you may have to consider…

The money (aka: the budget): How much do you have to spend? Can you afford a new lawn mower? New clippers? Plants? The fancy mulch? Getting extra people to do the tasks or getting those people skills or equipment takes money. And all of these things have to be considered in light of…

The timeline (aka: the deadline): When do you want to have the goal achieved? More to the point, how long do you have to achieve the goal? What you’re trying to achieve (the goal) has to be evaluated against the time in which you have to achieve it.

The timeline is a special element unlike the others. See, time is a finite resource. You can not stop the clock no matter how much you wish you could. You can not stretch your 24 hour day into 30 hours no matter how many cans of Jolt Cola you drink. And up until a certain tipping point in each project you don’t have to worry about the clock: if the tasks increase you can add more personnel if you have them by shifting existing responsibilities or by spending money to either permanently or temporarily add personnel. But once you reach that tipping point in the timeline unless you either decrease the tasks involved or exponentially increase the number of people doing those tasks it is impossible to meet the deadline.

Where prioritizing comes in is in determining what is most important. In cases where keeping the budget low is the priority the key is often to find out if the deadline is flexible; lack of money to add human resources to do the tasks necessitates a decrease in workload or a lengthening of timeline. In cases where the timeline is inflexible and you don’t have any money to add more personnel the only option is to decrease the workload. Where decreasing the workload would compromise achieving the goal at all and the timeline is not flexible your only choice is to spend money to add more hands to the project.

Pretty simple, right? Balance the amount and complexity of work against the number of people you have to do the work and the financial resources you have to see if you can achieve the goal by the time you want to be finished after you’ve figured out what the priority element is that will be constant or inflexible: money, time, or workload.

So why is it that senior managers always fail to understand that you can not increase workload without adding personnel and still maintain your timeline?

When I figure that one out it will probably be time for me to go to the little project manager’s room in the sky. Until then, though, I need to find a way to explain to all of my various bosses that they’ve only got one monkey and they only pay that monkey enough banannas to cover 8 hours a day. Being a trash collector is looking better and better every day.

When I was in high school I was friends with a girl named Katie (OK, not strictly true: I was friends with several girls named Katie. That’s just the way the naming demographics broke in my class.) This particular Katie was taller than me, not by much, which was rare considering that at 14 I was already 5′ 7″, blonde, and glamorous in that slightly adventurous, whiff-of-danger sort of way that for some reason I find appealing.

I’m not quite sure how we ended up lab partners in whatever class it was we had together that fall – Intro to Computers I think (yes, I am that old) – but during that year we became “friends” and whether it was boasting or confiding Katie told me a lot about her social life which included the fact that she’d lost her virginity to her 17 year-old boyfriend over the summer. Given that she was 14 just like me and didn’t think this event was a big deal she seemed so wild, so grown up.

And in my middle class baby-dykeness I was completely and utterly smitten, not that I would have admitted I had a crush on this girl who was ostensibly my friend. No, I just felt all warm and fuzzy inside and acted like a complete dope when she was around. So that January after being invited over for a Superbowl party with boys in whom I hadn’t the slightest iota of interest I called her house to chat with her mom about what would be a good birthday gift for her. And for a week afterward whenever I said hi to her in the halls she completely ignored me. It was like I didn’t exist. After about a week of this I finally asked her what exactly she was angry at me for. She informed me in a voice that would have dripped icicles if tones of voice were capable of such things that I’d been rude to her mother when I’d called.

Having been raised to be polite to my elders this struck me doubly hard as I stood there frantically reviewing the phone conversation in my head. I didn’t think I’d been rude, overly friendly perhaps, but not rude. I recall having to work not to barf as I asked her to convey my apologies to her mother for me, and that I’d hope she’d accept mine to her as well. She sort of nodded as I recall, slammed her locker, and went off. And for the next two weeks she still didn’t speak to me. And two weeks after that. And another two weeks.

Sometime around week three of the silent treatment I decided that I really didn’t need her as a friend, that someone who would treat me like that wasn’t worth my time. By the time she determined I’d been punished enough I was done with her. Yes, I was polite to her as she tried to renew our friendship but it was clear that we weren’t really friends any more. Even then I had a certain intellectual distance from the experience as she tried to get close to me again after freezing me out and she realized that it wasn’t going to work.

I suppose I eventually forgave her for the way she treated me; we were polite to each other all through the rest of high school even though she tracked academically differently than I did (I was the smart kid) and we didn’t really run in the same circles.

But did I really forgive her or was it just that I found a way to reconcile my image of her with her behavior? And how far does someone have to go to not merit forgiveness?

This question comes up for me now for a number of reasons but the most pointed one is the fact that the professional community in which I work is incredibly small in the place in which I live and I’ve recently been contacted by someone, we’ll call him Mr. Designer (because even though his parents were silly enough to grace him with the two of the necessary initials they were smart enough not to give him the middle name Oscar), who was less than honest in his dealings with me as an employee.

I can forgive the fact that Mr. Designer was a bad people manager. I’m not such a hot people manager myself; people always have needs and they’re never forthcoming about them even if asked directly so you have to suss them out and not getting their needs met often gets in the way of getting the work done. Managing staff can be a real pain in the ass.

It was also the dot com era which meant we worked crazy hours on projects that often never saw launch. My initial project work for this company was actually a subcontract to work on a high profile, multimillion dollar site that has been held up as an example of all that was wrong with how business malfunctioned during that era…$8M dollars for a web site that never debuted. The long hours, the frustration of never seeing your work come to fruition, the strange working conditions (seven of us crammed into a basement in a house in Northern Virginia) were all part of the times.

In order to get a contract, Mr. Designer would often agree to schedules that were ridiculously short, ones that if we had a full slate of work were impossible to meet and if we didn’t have a full slate of work he’d simply throw two or three people on the project to get it done. He created a near constant sense of panic, a low grade adrenaline drip that kept us all as edgy as wiener dogs knocking back double shots of espresso.

But after sometimes weeks of sitting around because there wasn’t really enough work, and after getting shit blown at me for showing up after 9am on days when it snowed in a city where even the mention of the dreaded s-word in the previous night’s weather forecast is enough to clear grocery store shelves of bread, toilet paper, milk, and kitty litter, I found another job. It wasn’t until later that I realized the truth nature of his duplicity.

Every year the Social Security Administration sends me an estimated benefits form. It hopefully declares that X amount will be my monthly benefits assuming a) my income continues to trend upward based on some formula that was probably developed in the 1940s, and b) the baby boomers don’t clean out the social security trust fund. And every year I check to make sure that they’ve recorded the previous year’s income correctly.

It’s not well known but FICA, which comes out of your check every time you get paid, isn’t due to the government every two weeks or bi-monthly. No, FICA payments go to the Fed quarterly. And the oldest tax dodge in the book for a business with irregular cash flow is to take the FICA out of the employees’ checks, use that money to cover bills or shortfalls, and then make the payment up later out of accounts receivable. It’s illegal and it’s done every single day. And it only works if you actually make up the payments.

My social security earnings statement for the fiscal year after I left Mr. Designer’s employment reflected only the monies I’d been paid by my previous employer yet I paid taxes on and had W-2 statements reflecting significantly higher income. All this means that Mr. Designer took my money, used it for business purposes, and then never sent it to the government.

So did he think I wouldn’t check or perhaps wouldn’t notice that my income had been under reported to the Social Security Administration but tens of thousands of dollars?

Back when I was working for The Treehuggers, who weren’t so good with money themselves, Mr. Designer discovered we had a common acquaintance who gave out my work number without asking me. I ignored his calls and didn’t feel but the slightest twinge. But now with the advent of social networking, Mr. Designer is back wanting to link to me and “get back in touch.”

Even though SSA took my W2s as proof of income and corrected my account, essentially Mr. Designer tried to defraud me of my earned wages one of the sins, my mother repeatedly informs me, that cries out for vengeance. The question becomes: what does someone have to do, how big does a transgression have to be, in order for someone to remain unforgiven?

Do you draw the line at damage done? Do you draw it at initial impact? Or maybe it isn’t about the actual effects of the action or transgression at all. Maybe it’s about the circumstances under which the deed was done (which is worse: to have someone do something that hurts you when that person knows because you’ve told them it will hurt your feelings or to have someone act out of self-interest with no regard for how it affects you?)

Looked at from another perspective, maybe it isn’t about forgiveness at all. Resentment and anger bind you to someone almost more strongly than love ever possibly could. Maybe it’s really about boundaries. I don’t really resent Mr. Designer for what he did but I certainly don’t want him back in my life. So maybe I’m still applying the lesson I learned when I was 14. That still doesn’t answer the question I sat down here to ponder: do I let him LinkIn or not?