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.