...Same As the Old Boss

Now I have no boss at all.

The place where I work has always been pretty loose. We are now part of a huge corporation, having been bought out a few years ago, but we get our part of the job done, so we have mostly been allowed to do it our own way. The main difference is we now have to report every breath we take on poorly-designed Microsoft Excel spreadsheet forms that we get from headquarters. It took them two years to figure out how to protect the cells with formulas in them. For all that time the spreadsheets came with warnings: "DO NOT TYPE IN THE CELLS WITH FORMULAS!!"

This laissez faire mindset has extended to the relationship between the worker bees and the local management. Basically, management is ignored, unless they threaten to fire you, and then you kiss enough ass to keep your job, and soon you can go back to ignoring them. In general, this suits the managers OK, since they don't know anything about hiring, firing, training or motivating anyway, and being ignored relieves them of having to either learn something about managing or act like they know something about it, and gives them more time to check the horse racing results on the internet.

The good thing about a really big corporation (I think this is true, although this is my first experience with this sort of thing), is that nobody you meet in the halls knows exactly who you are, or, more importantly, who you know. You might be friends with the Regional Vice President. So if you maintain the right attitude and a certain swagger in walk and talk, most of the suits will leave you alone, because what if you're important? At the same time, of course, I don't get to browbeat anyone I meet in the halls, for much the same reason. So there's good news and bad news, I guess.

Much of the way things work is like an army. No one knows what you're doing, and you don't know what they're doing, and none of you have been told exactly why you're doing it, and it has to be done that way because, goddamnit, that's the way it has to be done. In an army, though, everyone wears uniforms and insignia, so you know who gets to boss whom, thus taking away the natural camouflage we in corporate life enjoy. We have the same confusion as they do in the army, but we also don't know who's in charge.

So now the Big Guy at our location has been moved Somewhere Else, and he has not been replaced. Essentially, there is no one at the helm. We don't know when or if a new Big Guy will be appointed. We know that The Corporation has a penchant for hiring young, eager college grads for jobs that they might be ready for in ten years. We assume it's because they cost less than people who actually know what they are doing. But we don't even have a whiff of a taste of a water-cooler rumor as to what the fuck is going to happen.

So now, as might be expected when there is no leadership whatsoever, everybody is ignoring everybody else, no one knows if the new Big Guy is already among us, or even if it's one of us, and the miracle is that the place still functions pretty much as it always has. But I actually have no one to report to. I have to think up work, assign it to myself, with a deadline, complain about the workload (to myself), miss the deadline, give myself some shit and promise it'll never happen again.

Sa-weeet.