Three Long Months

I recall the day when Bob first walked through the door to our office, three months ago. It was a sunny afternoon. The first week of May. Birds were chirping, servers were humming, and things were generally swell. That is, until a clinically obese cloud of arrogance, misfortune, and incompetence descended on our unassuming professional existence.

Truth is, we had been without a manager for some time. Three months, to be exact. Jim was our former lead, and after 10 years (a lifetime, in IT) of productive and inspiring leadership, he left us for greener corporate pastures. It was difficult at first, but we stuck together as a team, and managed to keep the proverbial ship afloat. So of course, when we heard from The Dean that we were getting a new manager, we were thrilled. Here was going to be somebody to help us with the grunt of desktop support, with the daily and nightly challenges of systems administration. A UNIX guru and a Windows expert. A programmer with a keen eye for hidden bugs. We were psyched, because a new manager meant that we had to do less, that our lives would get easier, and that coffee breaks would once again be copious and indefinite in duration.

So that was our mental state when we were first confronted with Bob. He was not exactly an Adonis, but it wasn’t his physique that we were interested in. People skills, we whispered in anticipation. Technical expertise, we mumbled happily as we waited to shake his hand. Exactly five minutes passed before Bob began to shatter our hopes for a productive and pleasant life at the office. The first person that he struck out with was me.

“So, you are the girl at the office,” he uttered with a smirk. “We had a girl at the office at my last job. She made the best coffee! Better than Starbucks!”

“I am in charge of the Windows environment,” I replied, deciding to give him another chance. Sexual harassment could be charming, if done properly.

“I know a guy at Microsoft. VP,” he said definitively, and looked away. Our first conversation was over, and I immediately began to resent the fact that it wouldn’t be our last.

His next strike was pitched by Marek, our brilliant systems administrator by way of the Soviet block. Marek introduced himself, and concisely described his role within the group. A simple “nice to meet you” would have sufficed, but Bob, obviously feeling unfulfilled by his exchange with me, embarked on a long, and completely unprovoked history of the Ukraine and his extensive recreational travels there.

“And you know what they say about the women in Odessa, Mark, eh?” he whistled and winked.

“What?” Marek was obviously taken back. This was the first time we’ve seen him looking so confused. But Bob just kept winking and whistling.

“And Kiev, what a place, eh Mark?”

“I wouldn’t know. I am from Prague. I’ve never been to the Ukraine.” I guess he decided to allow Bob to call him Mark. A bit of a trump card to play later, I suppose.

“Well you should go, you don’t know what you are missing.” And with that, he moved on to the development team.

Already wary, Ben, Dave, and Chris introduced themselves. They spoke extensively about the PHP environment, and the development infrastructure that all our sites are built on. It was a convincing speech, evangelizing the merits of open source, PHP, and mySQL.

“Hmm. You know, I think this place will run much better on Java and Oracle. mySQL is just not enterprisey enough. We have to think big now that I am here,” he said, while our collective jaws dropped to the floor. “Anna, can you set up a meeting where I can discuss this with the boys?”

Swing and a miss.

And so it continued, day after day, week after week, for three long months. We were caught off-guard by Bob’s idiocy. Personally, I was fighting an internal battle between a desire to give him a second (third, fourth, fifteenth) chance and a much stronger urge to throw hot coffee in his face. Weekly staff meetings became exercises in restraint as Bob expounded on the advantages of every technology that we were not using, while denouncing the “small thinking” of our current infrastructure. Here was a man who wanted to change everything. For the worst. And in the worst way possible.

For three months Bob was the picture of punctuality. First one in, last one out. Tardiness was one of his many pet peeves (along with free software, service level agreements, and universal suffrage).

But one Monday morning, it all changed.

From: Bob Bossman
To: sitg-staff@bpu.edu

Hello Everyone,
I won’t be coming in to work today. My father, who is 79 years old, has long been suffering from schizophrenia. He is a good man, plagued by this terrible disease. My mother is a strong woman, but can no longer take care of him. We decided to institutionalize him. And I will be taking today off to check him into the mental hospital and get him settled in. I won’t have my blackberry or access to my computer, so don’t try to email me.

Sincerely,
Bob Bossman, Executive Director

Bob’s first unscheduled absence was justified by a tragic, heart-felt excuse about his father’s illness. I was touched, and began to feel guilty about all the animosity that I’ve felt for the man. Surely, he was under a great deal of personal stress, which, if anything, is a reasonable excuse for professional incompetence. I was feeling really rotten about my own behavior, until Nick pointed out that the excuse was bogus.

“Bob’s parents are dead,” he said plainly. “Remember, he told us about it two weeks ago.”

Of course! Ben was complaining about how much he hates spending the weekend at his in-laws, and Bob said “at least you have a family to spend the weekend with. Both of my parents are dead. Cancer.” And then he went on about how expensive funerals are, and how he would just want to be cremated. It was a really delightful conversation to have on a sunny Monday morning.

This was the first time that Bob made up an excuse to get out of work. We wondered what he could be doing with his free time, but we were still new to the world of managerial absenteeism, and decided that he probably just needed a day off to catch up on errands, and that the extensive and blatant lie was just another quirk of his already unusual and unappealing personality. As time went on, Bob’s absenteeism continued on a regular basis, and our speculations about his activities away from the office became more elaborate.

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