Boss has been online for the bulk of the morning in the Lobby, shopping on The Lady Market.
…This is where he sits with his laptop, scrolling his dating site of choice, and from time to time calling me or the WHS Pimp over to grade the women on a “should I, or shouldn’t I” basis.
I don’t play the game, usually yelling from my desk, “I’m too busy doing your job right now! P.S. I need some coffee!”
…And so he’ll go away and find some, plop it on my desk with whatever other offerings to buy my silence, that he can come up with (today: mini cinnamon rolls), then go back to his “work.”
In that time he’s also managed to dodge having to put out a contractor fire, because of a sorta fake conference call. “Sorta,” in that he DOES have a conference call, but he screwed the dates up and it actually happens tomorrow…but he was logged in on a dead air call (put on mute) for twenty minutes, while he Lady shopped, before he decided to confirm the date on his calendar. I (of course) knew none of this for quite some time, and continued plowing through contracts and pay reports and answering phones for several hours, before taking a break to go pee for three seconds.
(I pass by him in the lobby, seeing him playing with his new iPad.)
Me: Wait. Aren’t you on a conference call still? It was set for like four hours.
Boss: Oh, yeah. That’s tomorrow, I guess.
Me: Wait. So how long were you on-air before you figured that out?
Boss: Like twenty minutes. I dunno.
Me: But you’ve been off since then?
Boss: Yuh. I wonder what our app allowance is gonna be?
Me: …So you could have been answering calls, at least…
Boss: –They have this new band-mix one I could totally use for my gigs.
Me: Isn’t that thing bugged?
Boss: Yeah. But I can disable it.
Me: The bugging was the whole point. If you go off grid, they’ll just yell at you to get it fixed.
Boss: They gotta catch me first.
Me: I need you to get phones.
Boss: But not (enter name of Contractor here.) I’m hiding from him.
Me: How long?
Boss: Told him is was a training day.
Me: We’ve never had a day of training in this place, in the History of ever. For anything.
Boss: Yeah, but he doesn’t know that.
(I look at his new mess in the lobby, of scattered crap everywhere, and him sitting huddled over an iPad trying to decode it, as his laptop, open just to the right of him, is set on a collection of women’s headshots.)
Me: …You wanna bet.
***
…Meanwhile, some of you may be asking yourselves, “Why the lobby?”
…Some of you may be asking yourselves any NUMBER of questions, actually…believe me, I am well acquainted with them all. I can’t answer every one you come up with…cuz in five years time working with this man, I still don’t understand him fully. But this is one question that I can answer.
…He has set up shop in the lobby for two reasons:
1) Two weeks ago, his swivel chair broke and he fell to the floor…so moved into the lobby where the chairs are better, but too big to fit at his desk, while we waited for the new one I ordered him to arrive.
2) Last week, his new chair arrived, but his desk was so messy that he decided he’d just keep camping out in the lobby every day. Mostly because, every day after he leaves, I clean the lobby out, by putting all his shit back on his desk, which he occasionally shifts around in piles on his desk and floor, that he never does anything with, thus the piles grow, and he’d rather just not deal with it.
…I am not kidding.
This is what his office looks like today:
This is what my desk looks like today:
…These were taken at the beginning of my self-proclaimed “break”…which happened, directly after I got out of the bathroom, and he called me over to show me this new YouTube video.
…My “break” was all of ten minutes, and I was well into typing today’s post, before he declared that “since the conference is tomorrow,” and he has, “this new iPad thing he needs to figure out, with new software and everything,” that he was just going to, “take off to one of the vendor sites to test it all out,” and maybe, “not come back again, until tomorrow.”
…”If that was okay?”
I told him to knock himself out, and went on with my typing.
…And so it goes.
Morning reports completed, I sit here and tap on the keys in between phone rings, and rearrange the schedule as customer’s continually realize that next week is Thanksgiving, and they need to change their booking dates, cuz they’ll be at Aunt Pearl’s all week n’ things.
…And I’ll listen to their entire family life history, as they explain it all to me in mind-numbing detail…as if I give a shit…and I will “uh huh,” and “okay,” and “no problem,” and “Yep,” my way through the rest of the day.
…An annoyance, but better than one of the other worse kind of days. So, I’ll take it.
~D