Dear Longtime Readers,
You may recall at the beginning of this blog (or through the whole previous one before it), a personage titled simply as, “Boss.”
…Over time, he had acquired quite the cult following from you all…in that the readership and repostings of almost anything to do with him were especially popular. Mostly because (I’m told), he cracked you up. Which I never could understand really, as outside of morbid hysteria, I never found anything he did, the least bit funny.
…Cheap, yes.
…Half-assed, you bet.
…Idiotic, most of the time.
…But “funny,” no.
Boss is the kind of person in your life who only OTHER people find funny, and only because they don’t have to deal with him like you do. Also, there’s that every-once-in-a-while level of mind-blowing wrongness and stupidity that you almost can’t HELP being obsessed with. Like reading about serial killers, and the entire concept of Reality TV.
…If Boss were a channel, I have no doubt he’d do high digit ratings. Well, for a good run there anyway…up to just after his wife had left him for a woman, which jump-started his track-suit-Axe-aftershave wearing, Pimp-daddy phase. After that, he stopped coming to work, or pretending to care, at all…and we rarely ever see him, now.
…Rarely, as in not even once per month.
…Which means the story lines start to fall back a bit, with nothing to fuel them, and Boss all but disappears from the collective conscious of the you’s, though still in less amusing digital form of irritation, ever present to the us’s.
So it has been.
…For nearly a year.
Between Him, WHS Pimp and myself, there is no pretense of who does the work in our branch (the us’s) and who doesn’t even bother to get out of bed and shave most days (the him.)
…Then, just like most hucksters and grifters, “time” began to catch up to Boss. We had seen it coming…oh, for a long while. Truth be told, we assumed it would have happened much sooner than this.
…But, “this” is where it did. And “time” has now caught up. And with a drop in from Corporate today, wherein he was MIA, thereby throwing both WHS Pimp and I completely to the wolves, we had (finally) no choice but to act in kind.
Today, we threw him…in no uncertain terms…under the train.
…A train moving at full speed ahead.
An “Express.”
What we bought (after a three hour meeting, alone in my office, with WHS crew and Builder Bunnies locked out and left to whisper about it, in the yard,) was roughly one week and thirty days.
The Boss’ Boss will be here until Friday now (unplanned.) Inventory will be unfrozen. And piece by piece, stick by stick, nut by bolt, every stick of material and stock will be recorded, allocated, wrapped, kitted, restocked, relieved, trashed, sold off, and/or scrapped. In that time, the entire inner offices will be paper audited, whilst we continue road shows, expected to also work and crew-out, load, conduct reports, process contracts and make and receive calls as if the whole process going on around us, is totally normal.
…At the end of which, if we’ve been very good, and have managed to keep our own noses clean, he will go away until 30 days from Friday, with us still in possession of jobs and office keys. Then, in due time, an entire mass team from Corporate will arrive for a final audit, from number of ball point pens in the supply closet to roofing nails in the pre-assembled kits.
…And if we survive ALL of that…we MIGHT (just might) ultimately manage to salvage the branch, and keep our jobs.
…Boss, on the other hand, I don’t believe will be so lucky.
There is a 5:30 pm meeting, that “Corporate” will be holding tonight. Only one other person is to be present, besides the chief. It isn’t us…(as we did our jobs today, faced the giant, showed our work, and moved on.)
No one REALLY knows what will happen at that time. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion, you’ll be needing to tune into another Reality show for cheap laughs, in future.
Change is a-comin,’ kids.
Just hope it’s for the better.
~D
