Impersonal space

El Jefe knows no personal space bounds. The most common situation is when someone will be in my office talking with me. He will stand a foot behind them, grinning, listening in and waiting until he can interrupt. I have gotten good at not looking directly at him, which would give him an excuse. With one exception (she senses tremors in the force), the poor person I’m talking to doesn’t have eyes behind their back, and gets creeped out when he’s in their space.

On Thursday, I was talking with Mark, one of the senior engineers, about different approaches to a bug that he was fixing. El Jefe, who understands none of this (but doesn’t know he doesn’t know), stood behind him for nearly ten minutes. Mark has the tendency to dive into extremely low-level arcana like algorithmic complexity, leading to a much longer conversation than was necessary. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the details, I just don’t have a particular need to know them. When Mark left, El Jefe was eager to show me his latest ThermoMeter updates… despite our last conversation.

Yes, Virginia, he is a VP with nothing better to do.

If no one is in my office, El Jefe will barge in and walk right behind my desk, into my safety zone. The first time this happened, I was looking at a mock-up of application dialogs. He started to offer his “creative input,” and I nearly had to gnaw my leg off. His attempted interest in and contribution to my work has conditioned me to reflexively hide all of my applications (Windows-D) or lock the screen (Windows-L). Until a few days ago, I hadn’t realized I was doing this when anyone comes in.