CenoBoss

Follows on from this.

There are days, y'know, when I think she's ok. And days when I think she's ok but just a bit mad, a bit ditzy, maybe a bit crazy even. And then other days, like today, when I'm pretty convinced she's something that took form in one of Stephen King's worst nightmares that was too dark for him to commit to paper and somehow crawled out his head and was then made flesh by Satan himself. She becomes inscrutable and emits this tangible wave of some species of horrific darkness that's hard to describe.

Anyway.

So I'm not big on 'filing', generally, partly because it's godawfully tedious and partly because I don't like our store-room. It's a horrible little messy, cold, dusty chamber down a corridor from the main office, and apart from that, it's usually in a state of utter chaos, so I tend to leave it alone as much as possible. Also, between you and me, I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I suspect that The Boss gets up to some sort of filthy arcane black magic type shit in here; strange occurrences that lead me to believe that this closet might in fact contain a few skeletons. In short, it gives me the creeps.

But today it has an air of sanctity about it, because anything beats sitting in there with that woman right now. She is fully batshit today. I could see the veins in her head from the far side of the room, and was pretty sure that she was clenching and unclenching her fists while talking to me in a manner that I do not like to see in supposedly civilized mammals.

I arrive into the dingy little store with my armload of files, and set about trying to figure out what goes where. In theory, this room should contain a year of files; that's the legal requirement. After that they just get boxed up and removed and taken who-cares-where. The files have an eight digit reference on each, the first four of which indicate month and year and the last four of which indicate job number within a given month. Easy, right?

You know better, by now, I'm sure.

I start looking through the filing cabinets. They look like this, for indeed this is they :

You'll notice she takes the ju-ju to a higher level out here, but never mind. My main problem, my main fucking problem here, is that I can't find a single folder that relates to anything about April 2009. They start at 2006 and run to early 2009.. And the cabinets are full. So where the fuck am I supposed to file these files, which comprise most of our work in the second half of 2009? Where? Bear in mind that to get it wrong is A PAINFUL DEATH, and that seemingly, there is no way to get it right.

Ah, shite. I'm going to have to go back out there and ask her. I can actually feel my testicles shrivelling up just thinking about this, but I have no choice.

Nervously, I return and look around the door. She's still sitting there, glaring like a boxer before a fight, bashing the keyboard like a lunatic.

Here's me : "Uh, ahem. I'm... trying to file these files, as requested. But I can't seem to find where 2009 should go?..."

The Boss : "IN WITH THE REST OF 2009!"

Oh my God I think her eyeballs are actually bulging. Really bulging. She's going to sprout hair from her forehead any minute now.

Here's me : "Well, I can't seem to find the second half of 2009... I can find 2006 through to then, but there is not a single folder labelled later than about April 2009, you see..."

I say this like I'm delivering news of a terminal illness or something. Or maybe like telling a really big, angry man with a gun that I've just got his daughter pregnant.

The Boss stops mashing the keyboard and looks at me with utter contempt and coldly states -

"They do not corrugate."

Here's me : "Wha?"

The Boss barks at me : "The folders do not corrugate to the files in them. You'll just have to look through to find them."

Again, today is no today to pick a fight, I can sense. So I quietly return to the store.

Now on most occasions, I'd be the one going fucking mental right now, but today, actually, this is ok. OK, so there are three filing cabinets full of mis-labelled files. OK, I am going to have to totally deconstruct and re-construct 12 drawers of files, and re-label them, and it is going to be very boring, very tedious, but most importantly - it is going to take me several hours. Alone.

So I set to work. There's a certain joy to be had in this, once it starts to come together; out of chaos, slowly, emerges order, and in this I find satisfaction, as I sit alone in here with a good dose of heavy music blasting through my earphones, writing wee white slips of card with JAN 09 and similar and putting everything in good, proper order. I imagine this sort of pleasure wears thin pretty quickly if this is what you do every day, but for now, it's a sweet mercy; it's relaxing. Not so bad, eh? She can sit in there, banging the hell out of the keys, with nowhere to direct her anger, because she's actually sent me in here, ha ha! This is all fine, this has played right into my furry wee hands and oh mother of fucking jesus she's now standing right behind me. 

I have to tell you it really did scare the shit out of me.






I remove the earphones and get to my feet.

The Boss, blocking the doorway : "Did you do his insurance?"

Here's me : "Whose insurance?"

The Boss : "Ronan Keating's."

I swear on my left fucking nut : I am not making this up.

I just stare.

The Boss says the man whose name has never been Ronan Keating's actual correct name after a very long pause.

Here's me, staring back, because this woman is neither just stupid nor crazy, she is plainly both, with a smattering of pure refined evil : "Well, no. Not from in here. There is neither phone nor computer in here. In here where I have been. As you can see. As you know. So obviously. No."

The Boss, her explosive anger all the more nerve-jangling because I'm now trapped in a tiny room with her blocking the doorway : "GET IT DONE YOU CAN'T JUST LEAVE THINGS LYING DO HIS INSURANCE NOW AND STOP PLAYING ABOUT IN HERE!"




To be, sadly, continued, again.

The Boss is Coming - Look Busy

I knew something was wrong quite early on today. I have a nose for these things, at this stage I think I'd have met with tragedy by now if I didn't.


There was, shall we say, an Atmosphere.


It's hard to say just why, subtle little things, but one of the main giveaways is the way The Boss types when She has a Problem. She pounds away at the keyboard will all of the aggression and total lack of any kind of grace of a very bad drunken teenage death-metal drummer. Who has maybe just been dumped by his girlfriend or something. Anyway, I detected this vibe, and not feeling really up to this today, was trying to just keep my head down and lay low. 


But no, despite not wanting trouble, trouble plainly wanted me.

The Boss : "Did you send those bills to Caroline today?"

Here's me : "What, more today?"

The Boss : "SHE ASKED YOU TO SEND THEM THIS MORNING!"

Here's me : "Uh, no, she asked me yesterday morning, and I did send them at that stage. Uh, you were copied in..."

The Boss : "SHE ASKED TODAY!"

Here's me : "I didn't get asked for any more today, honestly."

The Boss : "NO."

Boss Says No, then. I do intend to tell her right before I leave here that it's not as useful a multi-purpose word as "awayandfuckyourselfyoubatshitcrazyoldbastard". 


I wait.

The Boss, barely scaling down from the summit of Mt. Angry : "The ones she asked for yesterday!"

Here's me : "You said... nevermind."

About a year ago, I'd probably have argued this. Then I'd probably have asked her what the hell her problem was and asked her kindly that whatever the fuck it was not to take it out on me. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Such is the WAY OF PAIN.

Here's me : "I sent them yesterday?"

The Boss is obviously wrestling with some sort of blood clot in the brain. I try to look too intensely busy to be spoken to. It is very nearly the truth. It does not, however, work.

The Boss : "AND HAVE YOU PUT AWAY THOSE FILES YET!"

Here's me, looking at the files which she is indicating, which are sitting on the desk between us, totally unable to help myself : "Those files? Yeah."

The Boss : "DON'T BE SMARK WITH IT!"

Plainly the woman is actually about to have a meltdown, and also the prospect of spending a while in the store-room out back right now seems, for once, rather attractive, so I seize up the files and my iPod and head on out to the store-room, fully intending to try to make this last the rest of the day if I can.






To be continued.

Unaccountable

All was silent in the Halls of the Damned, when suddenly :

The Boss : "FUCK!"

Here's me : "What?"

The Boss : "BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD! God forgive me!"

Here's me : "God doesn't care. What's the problem?"

The Boss, screeching in her sudden panic : "I haven't sent off the accounts!"

Here's me : "Oh."

The Boss : "They were supposed to be with the accountants for yesterday latest!"

Here's me : "Oh."

The Boss : "Can you send them for me?"

Here's me : "Yes. What do you want me to send?"

The Boss : "November 09!"

Here's me : "Just November?"

The Boss, as if I'm stupid : "No, November through to October!"

Here's me, staring at her, eyebrow raised.

The Boss : "WHAT'S THE PROBLEM!?!?"

Here's me, veerrrry sloooowly : "You just said 'November through to October'. November 09 to October... what. Try again."

The Boss : "No, November before! A fullancial year! And I have to go early! I have a dentist's appointment!"

Here's me, ignoring that little pormanteau : "OK. Do you have their address handy, I'll post it to them tonight?"

By 'post it' I refer to posting one of the A4 hardbacked ledgers which I have previously mentioned constitutes our accounts system (along with the pencil and my still-missing shiny new fucking rubber)

The Boss : "You'll have to scan it!"

Sigh.

Here's me : "You want me to scan this whole book?"

The Boss : "YOU HAVE TO!"

Here's me : "If I scan this whole thing it'll be an e-mail the size of Manchester."

The Boss : "JUST DO IT!"

Here's me : "Gah. Give it here."

So I take it, and step up to the plate, and start tinkering with the much-hacked photocopier/scanner device. The book when opened is two sides of A4, naturally I want to set this on the scanner and just scan an A3 sized document each time, yeah? So I'm just checking this is all lining up correctly and so on, running a couple of test copies to check I'm scanning the appropriate area and such...


The Boss is outraged.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING PLAYING WITH THAT THING!"

Here's me, sadly shaking my head : "Never mind."

The Boss : "START SCANNING THEM!"

Here's me, still calm but only just : "Calm. Down. I am spending a couple of minutes setting this up in order to save about half an hour. Just leave me to it."

The Boss is momentarily placated. So I'm standing there at the scanner/photocopier thing, putting a hardback book on it and scanning each page, lifting it, turning the page, repeating this process, and generally wondering just where the fuck my fucking life started to go so badly wrong and thinking it was probably that time me and a friend drink a bottle of his mother's Bacardi one night when we were fourteen.

a reconstruction of the crime scene, for the reader's perusal

So, I race on through this process, and stop briefly to remove the few test copies I did from underneath, which I then drop into The Boss's bin, which regular readers shall know is just beside the copier. 


Mistake.


The Boss was previously merely "outraged", now it is fair to say she is fucking apoplectic.

"YOU CAN'T JUST PUT THOSE IN THE BIN THOSE ARE OUR ACCOUNTS!", she actually fucking yells at me, then reaches into the bin, pulls out the papers I have just deposited there, makes a great show of ripping them up and then actually fucking throws them down the side of the fucking bin.

not a reconstruction. actual scene. FML.

I'm pretty sure my mouth is hanging open and my fists are clenching in a manner that would make most people quietly walk away, there very well may be steam coming out of my ears actually.

The Boss's life and my employment here are both saved by the phone ringing. I return to my desk and froth quietly, and The Boss starts shouting inanities down the phone. The call ends a moment later when she slams the phone down.

"THE STUPID BASTARDS!"

I don't even look round.

"THEY'VE MOVED ME TO AN EARLIER APPOINTMENT BUT THEY PHONED DUBLIN TO TELL ME!"

Can't help myself now - "They phoned who in Dublin?"

The Boss screams our company name at me.

Here's me, once again a perfectly tranquil mask of calm hiding the murder that lies at the heart of me : "That is us."

The Boss : "THEY PHONED THE DUBLIN BRANCH!"

with which she seizes up her bags and runs to the door, leaving me now a bizarre mixture of confused, angry and amused. Not least because we don't have a Dublin branch.








EPILOGUE :

About ten minutes after leaving The Boss phoned me and, very bright, breezy and cheerful, said "I thought I'd just to give you something to do while I was away!" and proceeded to give me instructions on something she needs done which would make a funny entry in and of itself but I'm too utterly fucking pissed off to go there right now.


If you're looking for me, I'll be in the office here, kicking the shit out of everything in sight and screaming myself hoarse.

Do Not Ask For Credit

Often when The Boss is having a day off, she likes to spend some time the day before making a list of things for me to do while she's away. I don't really understand why the fuck she doesn't just do them, rather than sending me lengthy cryptic e-mails, but hey.

This morning that pile was refreshingly absent. One thing only - some documents to be sent out, special delivery, the customer needs them by tomorrow. Excellent, sez I, and carries on with my day, as happy as a dog with two danglers in my Boss-Free-Zone.

It was all going pretty well till round about lunchtime when a different customer phones me in a mad panic. He is having a major problem. Uh.. how to explain this. If you don't know what a "Bill of Lading" or a "Letter of Credit" are - actually don't worry about it, it's boring as fuck and knowing won't enrich your life any. The two need to match up, where they both exist, and if they don't people start to get very edge about often very large sums of money. And this customer, his don't match up, and he's just realised, and he has to lodge these documents with the bank before close of business tomorrow.

It's a tiny mistake. There's a six digit number missing from one of the documents. These documents are always checked and re-checked because mistakes in them are so costly, but on this occasion a mistake was made - and thank fuck, not by me.

So anyway I need to find the original document, to find this six figure number, and I have no idea where the hell the Boss might have put it, so rather than look through the huge, teetering piles of documents, files, folders and what have you that are both all over her desk and the floor for a good few metres all around it, I phoned her to ask her. I'm not exaggerating, it looks a troop of chimpanzees had an orgy in a stationery shop over there.

Here's me : "Where are the documents for that Bahrain shipment?

The Boss : "In the file."

Here's me : "Yes. Which file, and where is that file?"

The Boss : "On my desk."

Here's me, looking over at her desk forlornly : "It's fair to say that your desk looks like a fucking bomb site."

The Boss : "Don't worry. Just phone Martin. He'll give you the reference."

Here's me : "Who's Martin?"

The Boss : "Tom."

Here's me : "Oh, fuck."

The Boss : "Just phone him! His number's in the file!"

Well that's a big fucking help, thank you.

About an hour later, in between trying to find off the customer who by now sounds like he's having some kind of embolism, I found the file. Inside is a good half inch of paper. It has been stapled together maybe fifty times, and not just in one corner, just randomly all round the fucking edges, so when you try to actually turn a page it turns into this madly fucking clever origami concertina.

a fucking paperclip would be better

Just what the fuck is all this stuff, I wonder. My files are about ten pages or so. How the hell has she got half a ream of paper worth of information on one job? I look through and the answer becomes clear. Imagine you get an e-mail from a customer, a booking. You print it, and open a file. You reply, then print your reply - which of course prints the customer's original e-mail in the file - and then put all of that in the file, too. You do this over the days and weeks that a booking runs for, until the file itself contains page 1-18 of an email exchange, followed by pages 2-18 of the same exchange, and so on.

Fuck.

Me.

So finally in the midst of all this I found the bloody thing, placated the customer and got the necessary corrections sorted out and everything is mostly ok. It took all bloody afternoon but it's mostly ok.

On the way home I was thinking to myself, y'know, there's a certain tact you should use when you're dealing with situations like this, I've found, because nobody likes to have serious fuck-ups thrust in their face, so it's better to be fairly helpful about the whole thing wherever possible. Anyway. It was sorted, at least, and hopefully The Boss would in some way appreciate this tomorrow rather than trying to nail me on some charge real or imagined purely so the focus is not on her.

Round about this stage was when I realised that I'd forgot to post her other fucking documents.

I'm considering just doing a runner.


p.s cheers Stewart ;)

He Shoots, He Scores, It Is Probably An Own Goal

The upshot of this last communication, it turns out, is that we have a shipment arriving into Dublin today and the charges on it, some several thousand dollars, have to be paid before we can release it to the customer, who of course needs it urgently. The Boss is panicking because at this time of year a bank transfer could take until next week, and so the shipment would be delayed, the customer upset, and so on.

Now that I have figured out, after much ado, what in the flying fuck is going on, I have just rectified this entire panic attack by calling someone I know in the shipping line's local branch and asking very nicely "Hey, could you sort this out with your Dublin people for us please, so we have a credit account and can just pay for this in January?" to which the reply was "No bother mate, I'll sort that out for you, Happy New Year".

So some sort of GODAWFUL END OF THE WORLD BOSS PANIC is resolved by a simple friendly phone call, the downside of this being that when she comes in tomorrow, I already know in advance that she's going to be furious about me having done this in the quick, efficient and friendly way. She will, I already know, take great exception to this. Arse-biscuits. Honestly, I've had her on the bloody phone all day and "nails down the blackboard" doesn't even begin to cover it, it's the conversational equivalent of having my scrotum trapped inside a dot-matrix printer.

The Appropriate Response

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane"

Philip K. Dick

I'm sitting here with my brain running out of my ears. Honestly. I'm pretty sure that's a liquefied part of my temporal lobe I can feel coming out of my right ear, just now. If it really is, and seriously, I fucking think it is too, it'll diminish my perceived enjoyment of music, I'm almost certain.

So anyway, I'm trying to operate this fucking wankstick whoredog of a system which I may previously have described as, uh, intuitive and well laid out or some other optimistic bullshit, and it probably just seems so difficult and time-consuming because I'm new to it and so on, yes, this must be the case but fuck me this would all be so much easier if The Boss would please, pretty please, just shut the fuck up, just for a few minutes, please PLEASE PLEASE JUST FUCKING SHUT THE FUCKING FUCK UP. FUCK.

I've withstood 'La Cucharach-A!, La Cucharach-A!, doop dee dooby dooby doo', for most of the day, I've witnessed another escalation in her fucking crazy waste-paper-basket-Ju-Ju, I've suffered the inane questions and random statements without (much) complaint, I've told her what fucking date it is at least three fucking times, I've refrained from smashing the fucking office up when a short while ago she calmly asked 'are you busy?' but I swear, I swear I FECKING SWEAR TAE FECKING FECK, one more fucking attempt at a fucking helpful fucking suggestion and I am fetching the fucking fire axe.

The Boss, hovering behind me : "Click that."

Here's me : "Look. I'm working through it, ok?"

The Boss : "What are you trying to do?"

Here's me : "Add an empty container."

The Boss : "Click there."

Here's me : "Where?"

The Boss : "There" - jabs finger - "where it says 'add empty'".

Here's me : "That says 'add entry'. That is to add a whole new consignment."

The Boss : "That's close enough, isn't it?"

Well fuck me, you've only just gone and revolutionized fucking computing with one fell fucking swoop.

Here's me : "Look. I need to concentrate. Give my head peace."

The Boss : "You should have been listening to Thurston."

Here's me, I think I actually just bit part of my own tongue off : "Fuuuuuuckkkkkkkkk....."

The Boss : "Call him and ask him."

Here's me : "Pleeeeease. Just. Please. Leave me alone. For five minutes. Please. I'll work it out."

The Boss : "Well, you'd better."

Here's me, suddenly actually listening to the woman, you understand this is not delivered as a question, it is a warning shot, a chance to recant : "what"

The Boss : "You'd better be sure you understand everything about this."

Here's me : "whatdidyousay"

The Boss : "Well I hope you do, because as soon as I have a booking to put on you'll have to show me how!"

The endtimes are surely upon us.

(actually probably just upon me, no need for alarm)

(fuck)