One thing I was hoping not to have to mention following my international adventure was what often happens post-trip. You see, dear fans, every couple of months, big bossman likes to engage in a sort of character building exercise...these exercises have coincided with our last 2 overseas trips, and sure enough, third time ain't a charm.
What happens is that he'll spend a week or two trying to re-assert his dominance over the tribe by making me his bitch. He'll literally beat me within an inch of my resignation before he goes back to kinda sorta respecting me. At the same time this is going on, one of the other boss-types, seemingly afraid I'll get up and walk out (thereby requiring him to do a LOT more work), does his best to keep the old ego above water during this, reminding me how dumb most of BBM's points are and giving me data points on how well the firm is doing, how great my team is and trying to quantify the size of my individual contributions...it's kind of a nice good-cop/bad-cop dynamic.
Every once in a while, big bossman will come at me with something valid, but 99% of the time it's stupid shit. I'll have a different opinion on how to do something (and, naturally, be wrong), I'll do something that we discussed, but he'll have forgotten the conversation and I'll have to re-explain the logic that had been agreed to a couple of hours earlier.
Today, I had one that may have been a new extreme, and thankfully, there's a tech angle to it...During our overseas adventure, we met with a long-time client who's changing his business. This new endeavor of his could involve helping some of the clients from another department. We've been working to make the connections for him and yesterday, he asked for a little more information. I checked it with my counterparts on the "other side" and called my foreign friend to let him know we were working on it. Today, big bossman asked what we were doing about the request and I told him the people on the other side were looking into it, and that I had called foreign client guy to let him know we were working on it. His response...
"Why wasn't I copied?"
Now, Dr. Nerd has been told (usually by HR people at competing companies) that he's grossly underpaid for what he brings to the table. Because of this Sally Struthers infomercial-level poverty, I'm not always able to stay up to speed on the hottest trends in geek couture, but if this magical, wonderful phone that allows you to CC your boss on calls really exists, I must find it...
Bossman is 0 for his last 2 on these little power trips of his...he's going to be 0 for 3 soon. I may not be able to dish it out any better than Glass Joe (from the old school Mike Tyson's Punch Out), but I'll be damned if I can't take a hit and stay off the canvas.
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