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dragonlady7It just is.
I'm eating a cookie to ease the feeling of trauma. My throat doesn't hurt but it's moved to my chest. I don't have enough chocolate.
[Unknown site tag]The boss is a fanatic for putting updates on his employees' computers, and cleaning out their registries and such. With the result that, often as not, he breaks the computers and his employees can't do their work.
He has done this to our sales lady several times. In the past, she has found out in time to get the computer fixed.
Not today. Today she was on a demo and the programs wouldn't load, the data was missing, the versions were wrong, the database connections were mis-pointed. The people she was demoing for cut the demo short and said they'd wasted enough time looking at software that didn't work, and they had work to do. She was furious with the boss for having done this to her-- she honestly had no idea that her computer had been tampered with, and had no way of compensating for the broken things.
The boss yelled at her, and actually insulted her to the point that she broke down in tears.
A little background: The sales lady is in her late fifties, a grandmother several times over, and had a 20-year career as an R.N. She also had the guts to pack her five tiny children into her car with all her worldly possessions she could fit and drive them to her grandmother's house to escape her abusive alcoholic husband when she was a young woman. She is no sweet young thing. She is an experienced woman of the world, with brains and knowledge and qualifications.
She said nobody had yelled at her like the boss did since she'd left her husband.
I became aware of the situation when I went to the bathroom and walked past the boss' office to hear him screaming like a woman at the general manager about how nobody does things his way and how all the little details, they go their own way, they never do things his way.
The man needs medication, and badly.
The director of programming, a little Russian woman, cornered the boss and ripped him a new one when she heard about it. She told him exactly where he had to go and what he had to put where. The sales lady's computer is now locked and inaccessible to anyone but the sales lady herself, or the programming director herself. Nobody else can touch it. They can't even look at it. And the boss is not allowed to speak to the sales lady again until the programming director says so.
...
See, when I was a kid, in my house, we used to argue like that. We used to touch each other's stuff and yell at each other and scream, and our Mom would separate us until further notice. But we stopped doing that. We stopped. I think I was 10 the last time I had a hissy fit like that. I mean... I've flipped out, probably as recently as yesterday, but I haven't screamed at anyone until they cried since... Well, since I stopped having crybaby friends. I mean... OK. I'm not the most emotionally stable person on the planet. You all know that. I'm liable to tantrums, sure.
But not in a professional setting.
I've even cried here at work. I've been pissed off and obnoxious and the rest.
But it just frightens me to overhear screaming like that. And just... I mean, the poor woman! She had nothing to show this whole room full of people, busy people who were taking time to look at something, something that we want to sell for half a million dollars or something like that. To have nothing to show them... I can't even imagine.
If I had a history of dysfunction, I would probably be unable to function at this point. I'd be under the goddamn desk pretending not to be here. As it is I watched every single person in the office sneak quietly out precisely at noon, pretending they weren't here, being quiet, carefully packing themselves silently and quickly into the elevator together just to get out of here.
Me too.
I here reiterate that my company sells good products and actually is full of hardworking and professional people.
They just sort of get shouted down.
I'm eating a cookie to ease the feeling of trauma. My throat doesn't hurt but it's moved to my chest. I don't have enough chocolate.
[Unknown site tag]The boss is a fanatic for putting updates on his employees' computers, and cleaning out their registries and such. With the result that, often as not, he breaks the computers and his employees can't do their work.
He has done this to our sales lady several times. In the past, she has found out in time to get the computer fixed.
Not today. Today she was on a demo and the programs wouldn't load, the data was missing, the versions were wrong, the database connections were mis-pointed. The people she was demoing for cut the demo short and said they'd wasted enough time looking at software that didn't work, and they had work to do. She was furious with the boss for having done this to her-- she honestly had no idea that her computer had been tampered with, and had no way of compensating for the broken things.
The boss yelled at her, and actually insulted her to the point that she broke down in tears.
A little background: The sales lady is in her late fifties, a grandmother several times over, and had a 20-year career as an R.N. She also had the guts to pack her five tiny children into her car with all her worldly possessions she could fit and drive them to her grandmother's house to escape her abusive alcoholic husband when she was a young woman. She is no sweet young thing. She is an experienced woman of the world, with brains and knowledge and qualifications.
She said nobody had yelled at her like the boss did since she'd left her husband.
I became aware of the situation when I went to the bathroom and walked past the boss' office to hear him screaming like a woman at the general manager about how nobody does things his way and how all the little details, they go their own way, they never do things his way.
The man needs medication, and badly.
The director of programming, a little Russian woman, cornered the boss and ripped him a new one when she heard about it. She told him exactly where he had to go and what he had to put where. The sales lady's computer is now locked and inaccessible to anyone but the sales lady herself, or the programming director herself. Nobody else can touch it. They can't even look at it. And the boss is not allowed to speak to the sales lady again until the programming director says so.
...
See, when I was a kid, in my house, we used to argue like that. We used to touch each other's stuff and yell at each other and scream, and our Mom would separate us until further notice. But we stopped doing that. We stopped. I think I was 10 the last time I had a hissy fit like that. I mean... I've flipped out, probably as recently as yesterday, but I haven't screamed at anyone until they cried since... Well, since I stopped having crybaby friends. I mean... OK. I'm not the most emotionally stable person on the planet. You all know that. I'm liable to tantrums, sure.
But not in a professional setting.
I've even cried here at work. I've been pissed off and obnoxious and the rest.
But it just frightens me to overhear screaming like that. And just... I mean, the poor woman! She had nothing to show this whole room full of people, busy people who were taking time to look at something, something that we want to sell for half a million dollars or something like that. To have nothing to show them... I can't even imagine.
If I had a history of dysfunction, I would probably be unable to function at this point. I'd be under the goddamn desk pretending not to be here. As it is I watched every single person in the office sneak quietly out precisely at noon, pretending they weren't here, being quiet, carefully packing themselves silently and quickly into the elevator together just to get out of here.
Me too.
I here reiterate that my company sells good products and actually is full of hardworking and professional people.
They just sort of get shouted down.
