Tuesday, February 28, 2012

EASY COME EASY GO

I have a boss who is invisible, except for the constant chatter.
He is like a hole in the air that creeps up behind you and suddenly there he is, boring you with some kind of policy he is considering implementing, or telling a story from his boyhood, only its a horribly boring story that makes your eyeballs itch and for the duration of the story the earth actually stops spinning and you can't wait for him to finish and leave.
"Grandpa had a penny collection he buried under a barb wire fence" he will say "But then he forgot where he buried it. Imagine all those pennies, 1930 thru 1965! Gone forever!"
I don't know what to do with a story like that.

No, thats not right. I know exactly what to do with a story like that.
"Grandpa was a Confederate soldier turned Union spy and managed to infiltrate the Gold Reserves at Phantom Hill. The Generals wife, Evita,  fell for him, and one night he got the keys and took the gold and the Generals wife Evita too, and he escaped down to Brazil like so many of them did, but the Carpetbaggers and Copperheads got wind of him being down there, so he left Lily (she had let herself kinda go, and wound up moving to Argentina with all the gold)  for a nice Catholic girl named Rosa, and they moved back up El Paso way. He changed his name, and she opened up a Cantina that had a jukebox that played mostly Marty Robbins stuff, and they popped out a couple of kids and he got into the bicycle repair business and took up moonshining during Prohibition."
I have no idea how to wrap that story up, but there it is.


But I know what my boss is doing. He's back here trying to get me to tell him one of my stories, which I do, because he actually has less to do than I do and I pity him for that.
Sometimes I wonder if I should turn him on to "Unremitting Failure".
Maybe that would help, because I shuudder every day when he silently appears at my desk for the 15th time and says his standing Joke--"Well, thats a deep subject"--I swear the next time he says that I'll slap him.
We had some business to go over last week and over a 3-Day period I managed to ask him if he had "a degree in Micromanagement", then pointed out to him that he was "over-reacting" and on the third day told him straight up that he talked way too much about what we ought to do. I believe my exact words were "you bludgeon me with it".
I think he called HDQ and they told him the same thing.
But thats not what saved me.
The only thing that saves me around here is that I tell a pretty good tall tale. I don't know what they would do without me.
Bore each other to death, probably.

This is a really dangerous and foolish post to do I suppose, but the fact is I like my boss and he likes me and we are very different kinds of people that manage to wotrk together pretty well. Tomorrow I will tell you about the lug nuts he and I spent two days working on.

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