New Bosses

Everyone who's held a job has had to endure a new boss at one time or another. If you've been alive as long as I have, you see them come and go...sometimes it's good, sometimes not so good.

I work in one of three divisions of a local government agency. When our boss retired, a new guy was promoted to fill the vacant position. But he's not our boss. No, when they decided to promote the new guy, they also decided it would be good to move all three division heads around. So instead of having one guy who doesn't know what he's doing, you now have three guys who don't know what they're doing. Sounds a little like your typical government cluster fuck, doesn't it?

JD is our new boss. Clearly, he feels uncomfortable not knowing what he's doing. Fortunately for him, and, much more importantly, us, he's got a good sense of humor. On the downside, he's a clean freak. This poses a slight problem for our group because we're basically a bunch of pigs. JD's also a Punctuality Nazi...this only poses a problem for The Princess and I. Punctuality is pretty much a foreign word to us. The Princess is young...she can learn to be punctual. Me, I'm an old dog...and I'm not really interested in learning new tricks. It's not that I can't, it's just that I don't wanna.

Our division is in a building separate from the main office where the other divisions are housed. In our departmental universe, our division is Uranus. Pronounced the good old fashioned way...your anus. We like to think of ourselves as The Land of Misfit Toys...the red headed step children, if you will, of our department.

Hell, our department wouldn't even spring for a shred bin for our office for ten, count 'em, ten years. The powers that be wanted us to haul banker boxes filled with secret squirrel material to one of the divisions that had shred bins. They were important enough to get shred bins...we weren't.

In defiance, which sounds way better than "because we were lazy", we stacked boxes of stuff that needed to be shredded everywhere. It's wasn't quite bad enough to make the Hoarders show because we still had passable trails. It's just that none of us felt inclined to wreck our backs hauling boxes. Now that JD is there, doing his Mr. Clean impersonation, he's hell bent on making sure all the old shit gets tossed. He likes to have everything neat and orderly looking...which has absolutely no bearing on how fast or correctly work gets done. Just my opinion...

I'm sure everyone will adjust...eventually. But it seems to me that it would be much easier for JD to adjust to our way of doing things than the other way around. Doesn't it make more sense for one person to change to accommodate ten people than for ten people to have to change to accommodate one? It never seems to work that way, though, does it?

Every time a new sheriff comes to town they're like dogs hiking their legs, wanting to make their mark. They want to fix things that aren't broken. They want to make things "better". Everything can be running smoothly and then Barney Fife comes in and fucks things up.

Why can't they just leave things alone until they know what they're doing? Then, after they have some small idea in their pea brain of what's going on, fix what needs to be fixed. When they come in and start changing things before that, all they're doing is raising their leg and saying "piss on you" to the employees who, for the last ten years, have been making things work.

These are the same people who, before they became bosses, used to complain about exactly this type of self-important behavior. How is it that once they become "boss" they automatically forget how asinine they used to think this kind of shit was?

There's always going to be room for improvement. It's a government agency for fuck's sake...government agencies aren't usually known for their efficient operations, now are they?

My guess is six months from now, nothing will have changed...with the possible exception of our office being cleaner...it's the stoopidist thing.

I Have Questions...

I was driving down the road a couple of weeks ago on my way to the feed store to pick up senior horse feed. We were coming back from yet another unnecessary Costco excursion, The Scari One and I, and we were yakking about the whole gender identity thing. You know, boys who feel they're girls, girls who feel they're boys, the bathroom/shower situation at schools. Some of this stuff seems way more complicated than it needs to be.

If you're not personally involved in any kind of gender identity crisis, I can't imagine you'd ever really know how it feels. Even having a loved one with some type of gender dysphoria would only make you more sympathetic to their feelings, but I don't think you'd really "understand" how it felt.

I can totally see middle and high school aged kids using the whole "identifying" thing to their advantage, though. You know it's just a matter of time before there's going to be some kind of news report that high school boys were pretending to be suffering from gender dysphoria just so they could get into the bathrooms and locker rooms of the girls or vice versa. 

Is there any solution that's going to make everyone happy? I don't think so. But, I have questions about how the whole gender dysphoria thing actually works...

Say, for instance, you're a man who identifies as a woman but still have male genitalia with no desire to have a sex change. Is that the same as cross-dressing?  What's the difference between that and a transvestite? Are men who dress like women all transgender or do some just like feminine clothes? I've shunned dresses all my life in favor of blue jeans. Have I been a transvestite all my life and just didn't know it? Do people even use the word "transvestite" anymore? Do we really need another word for it? Admittedly, my only knowledge of transvestism comes from watching Eddie Izzard who, in my opinion, happens to be a really funny guy. 

If a man identifies as a woman but doesn't have a sex change and wants to have sex with men isn't he just a gay transvestite? Are there men who want to be women who end up still wanting women sexually? Do they identify as lesbians before having the gender reassignment? Is Caitlyn Jenner just cross dressing? Is she going to eventually physically become a woman? 

I'd been pondering this stuff before we got to the feed store so I decided I was going to ask the feed store guy about Caitlyn. He's a clean-cut young cowboy type so I was curious about what he'd have to say. When I walked in he wasn't there but his helper was. The helper is the complete opposite of the "cowboy" visually. He's a young guy, all tatted up, kinda convict looking, but just a super nice guy and a really hard worker. The old "never judge a book..." comes to mind. 

This poor kid, here's some old lady coming in to buy feed for her horses who, out of the blue, asks him what he thinks of the whole Caitlyn Jenner thing. Tattoo Boy kind of hemmed and hawed, not wanting to say anything offensive. I didn't have the heart to try to make him tell me what he thought. We did share a laugh when I said it was too bad Caitlyn didn't become a woman years ago when she could have been a hot chick instead of an old lady. That's actually pretty sad when you think about it...

It's also sad that Tattoo Boy had to be afraid to say what he thought. Everybody these days is afraid to say what they think. WTF? Why should anyone have to be afraid to say whatever they want? There was a news article about college kids who were traumatized because someone wrote a hated politician's name on a sidewalk...in chalk!!! Really???? How much of a big fuckin' sissy do you have to be that seeing a NAME IN CHALK traumatizes you? And what's up with free speech zones on college campuses? Aren't we supposed to have free speech everywhere in the good ol' US of A?

Tell me what happens now, for instance, if a white male decides he's going to identify as a black or Latino woman? Can he be eligible for affirmative action? If you can't identify people by gender or ethnicity how can you have programs like affirmative action? Can this guy now get say, small business loans, scholarships, or grants specific to black or Latino women? Can he decide he wants to identify as a refugee from a foreign country in order to obtain refugee benefits? I mean, if all you have to do is "identify", how do you prevent shit like this?

You know all this stuff is going to happen eventually because there's always someone who's going to try to take advantage of the system.

The whole bathroom thing is kinda bogus. It would seem to me that if you have kids and you're afraid of your kids using the bathroom alone, as a parent you should go with them. Being some kind of different gender identifier doesn't make you a pedophile.

And why is it every time you hear outrage on a news report about the whole bathroom thing it's always someone fearing for the "safety" of their daughter? How come nobody worries about their sons?

Personally, I want privacy if, God forbid, I'm forced to poop in public. I'd prefer bathrooms that are individual...like little closetlets with locking doors and soundproof walls...and great ventilation systems. If all bathrooms were like the one I want there wouldn't be any bathroom gender problem now would there?

I don't really care who uses what bathroom. If you gotta go, you gotta go...although now that I think about it, the bathroom I want would be a perfect place to murder someone...it's the stoopidist thing.