No More Thermo Meter

I’m used to having two or three hours before El Jefe arrives and productivity grinds to a halt. When he does wander in, I can feel my tension ramp up. It’s like Spider-sense or jock itch or trying to buy a Nintendo Wii during the holidays: unpleasant.

His office overlooks the nexus of engineering, marketing, QA and the break room. Typically as soon as I’d come in the door across the hall, I’d scoot right to stay out of his line of sight until I could turn down the hallway to my office. All this was to minimize my interaction with him. I dreaded whenever he’d come into my office asking “Got a minute?” then not waiting for a response. I always equated those minutes with minutes I’d never, ever get back. Or, if I was in the middle of a conversation with someone, he would stand right behind them, trying to get my attention so he could interrupt. He was that fucking creepy.

This morning started off pretty much the same. I’d been working on a customer proposal. Around 10, I got thirsty and walked down the hall to the break room. His light was on. Tension set in. Then I remembered he’s past tense. I shut his light off.

Princess also reported the same physiological reaction when she saw his light on.

Going into his office, voluntarily, was weird, but reminded me of a tradition at a former employer: the ritualistic looting and plundering of equipment from the departed’s office. I asked Josh if I could expropriate some hardware from El Jefe’s office, expecting to have to justify stuff. Josh was beaming. “Knock yourself out.” Really, all I was after was a flat screen monitor that would match the uneven pair I had on my desk. And a UPS, because it’s winter storm time.  I found a matching monitor.  Ooh, small bookshelf!

Cliff held a meeting with El Jefe’s division, giving his high level rationale. It was nothing that hadn’t already gone out in email: we want to adopt lean/agile/scrum; El Jefe isn’t a people manager; we don’t have a position for him. He offered three other Veeps as contacts for people worried or with issues or needing to purchase stuff that El Jefe meddled with. (It was interesting chatting with various parties afterwards. The most telling comment was Cliff observing body language during project review meetings. Mine was a clear giveaway of my contempt for him, but when Cliff noticed 6 for 6, he took that as a sign. Employee surveys reinforced this.)

The one person most visibly shocked, and who had been “adopted” by El Jefe and put onto “special projects” that no one else tracks, asked if there were any other personnel changes upcoming. There is only one official answer for that, young’un: “Not at this time.”

I would have loved for someone to ask “what took you so long?”

Just watching the body language:

• Princess was displaying her best poker face.
• One manager was having a hard time containing him giddiness. I imagine his lip is hurting a lot from biting down on it so hard.
• The BM was blank-faced, as usual. I can never tell if the guy is merely asleep or contacting his home planet on the low bandwidth channel.
• Herr Crankypants, who is always an emotional roller coaster — up when he visits his girlfriend, down when she’s gone — was subdued. El Jefe’s leaving takes off some pressure, but he is a burnout case (I have told him as such).
• Grace took the high road that this was a good opportunity.
• Captain Sarcastic was thinking “We have a product shipping at the end of the month, can we all get back to work now?”
• The general sentiment was that of tempered relief, let’s just move on.

Later in the afternoon, we had an onsite redux of our offsite strategy meeting. Not being alpha dogged into stupid tangents was great. The discussion, in the end, was thoughtful, useful and moderately conclusive, despite my flubbing a few times when pent-up el jefeism leaked out.

I may have to produce a silly version of his ThermoMeter to see if anyone notices.