Rising to the Level of Incompetence

My Christmas wish to all of you out there is that you never have to work for a buffoon. Especially a buffoon with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

My employer uses two different software packages to track customers who visit their Web site – a program for counting the number of visitors and hits, and another one to collect their feedback to a short survey question. One of my (many) duties around this place is to collect that data every week, summarize it in a handy-dandy report, and send it to the management team. I’ve done this for about four years now.

This morning, my manager Skippy Whitebread calls me over to ask about the programs, my reporting, and how they work. He was totally baffled by my reports – he couldn’t tell one thing from another. It was like...he was looking at the data for the very first time.

Guess what? HE WAS.

The more he spoke, the more obvious it became: Despite the fact that I’d been sending him this information every Monday since early 2002, he had absolutely no clue how these programs work or what the reports even looked like. He’d never bothered to open a report, never thought to ask any questions about it. It was like he was being introduced to some great new product, and not something that landed in his e-mail inbox every Monday.

Buffoon, I tell you. Buffoon.

This isn’t the first time Skippy has done this to us. A few years ago during one of his really bad obsessive-compulsive phases he decided we need to keep track of every single task we do throughout the day, what time we started working on it, what time we finished, what time we went to break/lunch, etc. It was like billing for a lawyer’s time, only more anal than that. We had to put all this information into a spreadsheet, upload it onto his shared drive, and summarize our weekly performance for him. It took us two hours a week to put this together for him to explain what we’d been up to for the previous 38 hours.

And not once did he ever look at the results.

One week I even went as far as to enter on my spreadsheet “Hey, Skippy - I bet you don’t ever read these, do you?” And since he never called me on it, I’d say I was fairly accurate in my prediction.

We did this for about 6 months, tracking every second for him, until he finally backed off. He’s tried 5 or 6 times to have us do it again, but we protest about “wasted productivity time” and how since he’s in charge, shouldn’t he have a basic idea of what we’re up to anyway? I mean, isn’t that part of a manager’s responsibilities – to know what their employees are doing? He then drops the subjects and goes to find something else to obsess on.

Working for a manager like Skippy really has its drawbacks at times. His OCD is seriously out of hand, and the more stressed he gets, the worse it gets for all of us. He’ll focus on one thing – no matter how trivial it may be – and will drive everyone nuts about it until he switches to something else, which he’ll then pound into the ground. I wish he’d take his meds again, but he refuses. So we all suffer.

Still, Skippy isn’t the worst manager I’ve had. There’s been a lot worse than him over the years. So I’ll grit my teeth and try to ignore him when he’s bouncing off the walls or going from extreme high to extreme low back to extreme high, all in a 3 minute time frame.

Still – if he’d only asked about the reports four years ago, maybe I’d be ranting about something totally different about now.

Thank you for listening.