Things Bosses Have Made Me Do

I once had a boss who wanted me to print out all the photos on his bosses' camera. I open the camera card and see an assortment of vacation and party photos, and then a group of the boss' boss sitting around the house wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a tight pair of red underpants.

My eyes, my eyes.

I went back to my boss and told him this was inappropriate for me to view since his boss was not fully dressed in some of the photos. He told me to burn a CD of the photos and make an extra copy for him.

***

Everyone in my office was required to email the boss when we arrived and when we left, keep a timesheet, AND sign out on a dry erase board. He would schedule staff meetings and then he wouldn't show up for them or let us know they were canceled.

***

When a Presidential candidate came to town, he sent me out to buy two of the man's books at a Shockoe Slip bookstore, saying I had to get them and get back in 10 minutes. (Our office was not in Shockoe Slip.) I said it wasn't possible to get there, find a parking space, get the books and get back that quickly. He said to doublepark in the street. Since I thought the books were for the Big Boss, who was going to see the candidate that night, and I was currently in line for a promotion, I somehow managed to do it. It turned out the books were just for him. He wanted to get them autographed.

***
He emailed me at 8:55 on a Friday night -- even though I didn't have a Blackberry or a pager -- to tell me to come in Monday even though it was my day off and clean out the storage room. I found out later he wanted to use the storage room for his things while he was having new carpet installed in his office.

***
He took the spaceheater I had in my office for the past two years and moved it into his.

***
He asked me to get him a bowl of chili from the cafeteria because he was busy waiting for the phone to ring. I declined. He said he could change my job description so I would have to run personal errands for him. I went to HR. They said, no, he can't.

***
He brought an old draft of the annual report to a staff meeting. We told him that version had been updated already and we all had the new versions, but he wouldn't admit he had the wrong version. For the next three hours, he discussed changes to the report that we had already made. We tried to suggest we should all use the same version of the report for the meeting, but he said we had a "fixation" about versions and to stop bringing it up.

***
One winter, the staff took old candy dishes and vases from the supply closet to fill with water and put on the windowsills to add some moisture to the overheated office air. He said we were monopolizing all the vases. When a cow0rker went to lunch, he went into the coworker's office and moved one of the bowls of water to his own office. The next day, he continued to comment about how we were hogging all the water bowls until the coworker who had suffered from the dry heat the most felt so guilty, he put his vases and bowls back in the supply closet so he wouldn't have to hear about it anymore.

***

One day I called in sick and after cross-examining everyone in the office about when I called in, he told them I was probably out "shopping at Dillard's because they're having a sale." This is funny because I am the least fashionable person on earth.

***
I selected a photo to use for an employee promotion story. The employee liked it, but he said to use another one. He said the employee didn't like it. I said, "She just told me she did." He said, "it doesn't matter what you think; it matters what I think."

***
Our building was closed because of a water pipe break for two days. On the second day, he called me into work to send a notice to employees that our offices were closed for the day. When I arrive, I find there is no electricity. My computer cannot be turned on. He makes arrangements for my computer to be carried down three flights of stairs to a floor being powered by an emergency generator. By this time, it's 2:30 in the afternoon. I don't know who read the message anyway because everyone was at home.

***
One day he told me the company's money wasn't real money, it was "play money."

****

He changed my spelling of Landmark Theater to Landmark Theatre. When I sent him documentation showing it is spelled "theater" on its website and on its logo, he said, "do as I say." When I asked him if he wanted me to change it all over our own website, where it was spelled "theater," he said he would take care of that. He never did.

***
He sent me an email at 2:57 a.m. (yes, as in middle of the night) to do a typing project he had already told me to do the day before.

***
He neglects to approve a logo in time for me to present it at a meeting, even though he told the people conducting the meeting that we had an approved logo. He tells me I am not to talk to anyone about anything at the meeting, just take notes and report back to him. He says I also cannot tell anyone I was told not to talk at the meeting.

***

He gets a request for a speech 13 days before it is due and tells me to write it the day before it is due.

***

He yells at me for letting seven of his phone calls go to voicemail. It turns out they were old saved messages. When the admin assistant is away from her desk, he expects me to hear and answer his phone, even though I am three offices down the hall from him. Male co-workers are in the closer offices.

***
He says he doesn't have time to look at my emails to him requesting him to sign off on work I need to send out. I have to tell him verbally that I have sent him an email.

***

At 11:40 a.m., he assigns me to write a speech for his boss to deliver at a function at 12:45 p.m., that same day.

Rag Barrel Wear

One of the very few things I have in common with my late mother are my pajamas.

When we moved from North Carolina to Thailand to further my father's career in government service, a move my mother was furiously opposed to, she became so apathetic, she wouldn't pack. We had to recruit her oldest sister to pack us up. Aunt Helen was famous for her enthusiasm, but even she was perplexed when she starting boxing up my mother's clothes.

"What are these rags? Why are we packing rags?"

No, we chimed in. Those aren't rags. That's what mom sleeps in. A motley assortment of old clothes.

Just recently as I was sorting my laundry, I realized I had a motley assortment of old clothes that I slept in, too. Casual wear gone wrong. T-shirts and pull-over blouses that had stains on them, so I couldn't donate them to charity. Tops that were cut too low or had too much of a boat neckline to work with any bra I currently owned. Shorts that were a little too dowdy to wear in public. Dresses that are now too short for a woman my age. Pull on pants with elastic waists that are the very essence of not caring how you look anymore.

All of these items are still in good shape and fit somewhat, so I hate to give them away or throw them out. Who would want them anyway? Besides, they're comfortable. Another thing they have in common -- they match nothing.

Sexy nightgowns are uncomfortable. Lace and ruffles scratch. Bikini bottoms give you a wedgie all night. Spaghetti straps slip down and pin your arm. It's hard to stay warm in the winter in baby dolls and in the summer, silky stuff makes you sweat. Matching PJs, I can never find the top that matches the bottom. The bottom usually outlasts the tops anyway. I don't like sleeping in anything with buttons or collars, so eventually button tops get tossed and I end up with a lot of orphaned bottoms.

But wait, I have old t-shirts to go with them. Gradually my rag barrel of nightclothes developed, and I became my mother in bed, alluring in mismatched plaids and faded colors. If my Aunt Helen had to pack me up -- although she won't since she's died, too -- she would say, "What are these rags?!"

Those aren't rags, that's my pajamas.

Large

This explains so much, and is what I've always suspected. Glad to see science confirms it.

From Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant book, Blink:

Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and the stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.

...An inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary...a tall person enjoys literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage...

Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It's because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rationed than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon.

Different Grieving

The night our cat was dying, my husband had band practice and he didn't cancel it. During the cat’s frightening first seizure, I could hear the music and laughter downstairs.

He can compartmentalize his emotions. I suspect most men can. The fact that they can turn it on or off doesn’t subtract from the sincerity of the emotion. That’s something women don’t understand about men. We tend to marinate for long periods in our emotions. I can be unhappy, depressed, bitter, angry, or revengeful for a long time. I can wear it like a floppy hat obscuring my face. I can manifest positive emotions as well, but their shelf life is much shorter.

All through the month that the cat was slowly melting away of whatever killed her (cancer, pancreatitis, FIP, does it matter?) he could sit with her and look profoundly sad, and then he could go downstairs and watch television…or sleep at night. He could talk about other things. Do other things. I could only huddle around the cat, frantically trying to figure out a way out of this for both of us. At the end, I couldn’t even go to work. I stayed huddled with the cat for the last three days, day and night. I didn’t sleep. Sometimes she would look at me like, “Please go away so I can die. You know I can’t do it with you staring at me.”

Last night, after sitting silently over bowls of soup at Panera, I finally asked him the question that had been irritating me like a bug bite since the incident happened. “After you saw her have the seizure, why didn’t you say let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

When band practice had ended and his friends had gone home, he came back upstairs where I was sitting with the cat on the sofa. The seizure had been over for about an hour, but she was trying to push her head under the sofa cushion and was gently paddling her feet. I told him what had happened, and he immediately folded into sadness and sat next to her, petting her. After awhile, he said, “I think she’s trying to climb off the sofa.”

So I picked her up and put her on the floor, arranging her body like the Egyptian Sphinx. She briefly held her head up, then started wobbling, and then horribly, the second seizure started. “Don’t touch her,” my husband said alarmed, but we both moved to the floor and hovered over her, our palms open as if we were trying to catch the seizure as it bounced over her body and toss it away. After it ended, she was again limp and exhausted, and didn’t seem to notice us anymore, or care. I thought for sure my husband would say, “Grab your purse and keys, we have to go to the vet now. It’s time.”

Instead, he said he was going to bed. And he did. And he slept.

I picked up the cat and went downstairs to the futon where we had been restlessly sleeping for the last five nights, but every morning when the sun came up, the cat would lift her head up for another day. The seizures were not a good sign, but so many other nights when she had gotten so still that I thought she was gone, I had been wrong. Maybe I’d be wrong again. So we bundled up together on the futon and waited.

There would be eight more seizures that night before the dawn. You could set your watch by their regularity. Sometimes I thought I should jump in the car and drive to the emergency vet by myself and be done with it. I knew he would be upset when he found out, but if he couldn’t make the decision, someone had to. But then I couldn’t either. The seizure would end and she’d be peaceful again, asleep and breathing quietly. I would think, okay, that’s the last one. I didn't want her to die in the car en route to the vet because she hated riding in the car.

But it wouldn’t be the last one. By 3 a.m., the craziness set in. Maybe it’s not a tumor, but a cyst and it's breaking open. Once it drains, she’ll be all better! She’ll wake up her old self! This is just the poison leaving her body! All is well!

That mental trickery lasted a couple of seizures. Then I went into negotiations. God, end this. End this or cure this. I want a dead cat or a well cat right now. Work a miracle. You can do it! You are God! Do it. What good is being God if you don’t do stuff like this? Now, now, do it, now!

That didn’t work either, although the seizures from 4 a.m. on were less violent. Her head didn’t shake. Her mouth didn’t open. Only her legs would paddle furiously, like she was running. Then less furiously, slowing down to a trot, like she was arriving somewhere.

The sun came up. I could hear my husband upstairs waking up. Another day had started. The cat was still breathing, although asleep. Her body was strangely warm in places, cool in others. I kept checking her. If I rubbed an ear, it would twitch. If I rubbed a paw, it would flinch. My husband came downstairs.

“How is she?” he said, ready to be sad. I dully, bitterly reported the eight seizures, the night of no sleep. He just said, “oh, man.” He petted her for a while, and then he was able to switch it off again, go upstairs and start the coffee. I hoped all the normal morning noises would provoke a response in the cat. It’s morning! Breakfast time! Lift your head again like you do every morning when you hear his voice! Like you did yesterday!

Nothing.

I wrapped her in the blanket and moved her upstairs to my bed. Now that she had survived another night, it was my turn to get some sleep. My husband could watch over her. Her body felt limper than usual, but it was still warm and she was still breathing. I put her head on the pillow and pulled the blanket up to her chin. I went in the kitchen to get a donut and went back to my bed. That’s when I noticed the look.

I had two cats die on me years ago, one at age 18 and one at 17, both at home, and I knew right away when I saw them it was a dead cat, not a sleeping cat. Their mouth opens just a little. This look was different than the one she had when I went for the donut. I tried rubbing the ears, the paws, nothing moved now. She was still warm in parts, cool in others. I couldn’t see breathing anymore. The vet had said to watch the eyes at the end. I shined a flashlight in her dilated pupils and they didn’t contract. They didn’t move. My insides starting folding in on me like a collapsing house of cards.

I went to the front door and opened it. My husband had just finished watering the bushes and was talking to the neighbors. I let him be happy until the neighbors drove away. He turned around and saw me in the doorway. I couldn’t find the words, but I guess my flailing hands and collapsing face said them for me. He ran into the house.

I did my crazy act. “Maybe it’s a coma. You think it’s a coma?” And he was realistic. “She’s gone. She’s gone.” And we cried, again hovering our hands over her like we could catch her spirit leaving and stuff it back in. For the rest of the day, we solemnly went through the ritual. Finding a box. Deciding where to bury her. Getting the shovels and picks together. Picking up favorite items to put in the box with her. Looking at photos of her and printing them to put inside the box, photos of us with her so she wouldn’t forget us.

He was able to turn the ritual off long enough to go to McDonald’s and get us food, food I couldn’t taste although I tried to eat it. Then we went to the woods on his mother's property for the burial, a story in itself for another day, and it was over. I haven’t seen him cry since and he’s been fine, like it was something that happened a long time ago to someone else. That is, until I asked him the question at Panera’s.

“After you saw her have a seizure, why didn’t you say, let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

The muscles in his face started moving like there was an earthquake under his skin. His facial features sucked themselves inward as if I had literally punched him. It all happened in a fleeting half a second and I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking right at him. The emotion exploded and was contained that quickly. He put his head down so I couldn’t see anymore and mumbled something that sounded like, “I couldn’t…”

I quickly changed the subject because that had been answer enough. That’s how men deal with strong emotion. They compartmentalize it; they turn it off. It's the instinct of war where you can't mourn a fallen comrade for even a second because the battle continues all around you and you have to continue. They’re able to, in the face of a painful decision, just not make it and go to bed. And sleep. He had left that hard decision to me, knowing with my high threshold for pain and drama, even if I couldn’t make it either, I could endure the consequences of our not making it. I’d take care of it. I’d absorb it all and suck the pain right out of the air for him.

I’ve read about couples that lose young children. It is very difficult to keep the marriage together after that. The divorce rate is high, as if the only way to escape the memory is to escape the relationship that created the child that died. I had a friend whose marriage collapsed after their son died. I look at the marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards and know they were damaged irrevocably when their son died, and nothing they’ve done since has fixed it for them, not having more children or running for President, or even having an affair.

I have to accept that we mourn differently. He can put his pain away in a box and be happy again. If I keep poking at the box and force it open, he’ll hurt and cry for me, but as soon as he can, he’ll shut that box and move on. He’s gone away for the weekend now with friends to play music and swim in the sun. No one will talk about the cat there. If he had stayed here with me, we would talk about the cat, because I’m wearing the pain like a big floppy hat that gets in the way of everything else I might need to do. Even if I said nothing, he can tell by looking at me that I’m thinking about it.

If I keep wearing this misery hat, eventually he’s going to forget that it’s about the cat and think I’m just a miserable person in general. Someone else will come along who is happy and laughing for the moment, and she will seem like a much better person to be with, and he will be right. She’ll be able to taste and enjoy food, laugh at bad jokes, want to go out with his friends, and embrace him without thinking that the last time they hugged, it was over the cat. Never in her life will it ever cross her mind to blame him for making her sit alone through the night through eight seizures because that will not be in their history.

Maybe it’s women in general; maybe it’s just me. Maybe realizing how we’re different and accepting it is half the battle. He’s going to be all right. I need to take off this hat and put it in a box.

This Makes Me Happy

Would You Get Divorced Over This?

If my life were a reality show, you’d see the same type of squabbling as Jon & Kate Plus 8. (Our reality show would have to be on Animal Planet, though, because it’s Me & Him Plus 8 [Cats] right now.) Our fights are just as epic and just as irrelevant, only right now neither one of us can afford to drive off in a new sports car to a bachelor pad with a caravan of young women we met in bars (or in my case, a stud bodyguard). Not until that reality show money starts coming in, anyway.

Just like Kate, I’m a sniper critic. Under my breath, barely audible, I maintain a running commentary of how I’m not getting the cooperation and labor needed to keep our household clean, repaired, financed and functioning. Mumble, mumble, mumble. If cameras were on me, I know I would mumble louder, hoping the entire camera crew would turn on him and guilt-trip him into keeping our household clean, repaired, financed and functioning.

Like Jon, he is largely unresponsive to sniping. He saves his retaliation for three main arenas – the kitchen, the car, and who let the cats out? And he’s no mumbler either. The shouting can get epic, awesome and FTW, as they say on Twitter. An outsider would find some of these verbal beatdowns comical because the causes are so off-the-wall. Okay, sure, sometimes I did let the cats out on purpose, but most of the time, it’s not like I did something just to aggravate him. If any of his meltdowns or my sniping were packaged as a weekly TV show, you would definitely think we were headed for divorce.

But alas, we are too poor. We have to stay together.

What do we fight the most about? Not in any particular order:

- Who let the cats out

- The fact that I use the garbage disposal to grind up and dispose of leftover food (Isn’t that what it’s for?? Isn’t it? I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer from him on why garbage disposals were invented and what they are supposed to be used for.)

- Why he piles junk in the garage without leaving a passageway to get through the garage and get to the junk

- Why he keeps trying to turn any room he spends time in into the garage

- Why I don’t run the garbage disposal for a precise amount of time (which only he knows) before I run the dishwasher

- Why I don’t wash the dishes BEFORE I put them in the dishwasher (Isn’t that what the dishwasher is for??)

- Why he leaves damp washcloths around the sink in balls instead of spreading them out so they actually dry

- Why he won’t flush the toilet before taking a shower (it does not steal all his hot water, this is just crazy. I flush toilets in the house while he’s in the shower and he doesn’t even know it.)

- Why he spends so much time in the passing lane

- Why I drive at all when I am clearly a woman

- Why doesn’t he write it down when he withdraws cash from the ATM

- Why do I sell everything we no longer use (because we no longer use it???)

Wouldn’t this make a good television show? I think so. Then we could get enough money to live in separate places.

Michael Jackson

He should have stopped with the way he looked in the Billie Jean and Beat It videos. By the time you get to Black and White, something isn't going right, and the Leave Me Alone video where he's flying around in the little roller coaster rocket, he's taken his first step into the true Neverland where you Never Can return to anything even remotely normal or even good looking.

There is so much danger in having too much money when you are young and have no concept of how to manage it. I watched this documentary about him where he was shopping in a Las Vegas gift shop, a lot of fake Egyptian "relics." He would just walk up and down the aisles saying, "I'll take that, and that, and that one..." It was insanely expensive, useless, fake crap.

A news program tonight suggested that as Michael matured into adulthood, the face of "the man in the mirror" became more and more like his father's, and so the surgery began not just to de-ethnic the nose, but to make him so different from the father, he could never again be the son. And then you always think, the next thing will make me happy. The next thing. If I change this. If I change that. I will be happy. I will feel like I have back what I lost, what I never had.

But you don't. It must be a very strange and difficult way to live.

I liked "Rock With Me" and "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." Sweet songs, and he was cute, even with his original nose and little Afro. He wore a tux, not gigantic baggy pants and a wifebeater undershirt. The Thriller video was a huge event. I remember hanging out in a Sears TV section because MTV was on and the station was about to play the video. It's a long, long video, and people gathered around to see it, fascinated. It was the perfect match between a catchy, epic tune and wonderfully choreographed dance numbers.

The dancing was amazing. Dancing went out of vogue in the 1950s after Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire faded from the movies. Michael Jackson brought it back for awhile like no one else could or has since. He would have had a much happier life on Broadway as a dancer and being openly gay. (As a singer, he is not that much, a Mickey Mouse voice that, like Britney Spears, benefits from special effects and studio enhancements. He is no Adam Lambert.)

I love the mysterious romance of the Billie Jean video. It is as classic and timeless as Gene Kelly's title performance in "Singin' in the Rain." The Beat It video is silly. Jackson cannot pull off being a tough guy, even in a red leather jacket, but the song is great. I attribute that to Eddie Van Halen, though. The introduction of the moonwalk at the 25th Anniversay Motown show is electrifying in ways I cannot describe. I remember watching it live when it happened and you just don't believe what you're seeing. His body could truly move in magical ways. It was the talk of the world the next morning, a defining moment in entertainment history.

But when he died, he was 50, almost 51. There is no magic in being a manchild and 50. There comes a time when you have to begin looking old or else you'e just going to look ridiculous. Like it or not, you start to look like your father and your legs and arms don't bend the way they used to. You cannot fight time. And you can no longer do a 50-city world tour and expect to enthrall the fans the same way you did 30 years ago. Even Sinatra became, in the end, a painful singer to listen to. If you are millions of dollars in debt (that no yard sale of all that Las Vegas gift shop crap is going to solve) and have no choice but to commit to such a tour -- and kill yourself trying to get in shape for it -- well, that was a series of bad decisions made by a manchild who had no one he could trust for sound advice.

And it's not like this is the first time this has happened to a famous person. Elvis and Judy Garland come to mind, just to name two. Elvis died at 42, bloated and puffy. Garland was only 47 and looked 20 years older.