My Boss is an Idiot

My Boss is an idiot. I want you to know that before this blog comes alive with my explaining how he’s an idiot and why this affects me so much. I don’t know why I’ve decided to write a blog except that other people do it and they seem pretty successful. I just hope that by writing a record of my experiences with the man, I can find the therapy I can’t otherwise afford on the minimum wage. And, of course, if there's anybody out there who reads this and finds it in any way illuminating, I’ll live happy in the knowledge that something positive has come from a life that has gone so very wrong since that fateful day at the job agency nearly six months ago.

Let me begin by introducing myself. My name is Thomas Lawrence, though my surname is certainly false. T.E. Lawrence is a hero of mine and I think there’s a welcome irony about naming myself after a man of heroism. I’m also a fan of D.H. Lawrence who spent his life in search of spiritual and physical freedom. Two men frame what I’d like to be. I, on the other hand, work 9 to 5 in Manchester, cowering in the shadow of the CityBank building. Not that the blame for my predicament has anything to do with the great city of Manchester. Every morning I arrive at Piccadilly Station at seven thirty and I’m struck by the scale of the place as though it’s my very first time there. It’s not just the buildings that excite me, but the rush of noise and opportunity. I catch a tram into the centre of the city and spend my day surrounded by the finest culture to be found outside London: old and new architecture, theatres, cinemas (both mainstream and independent), and more art galleries than a thinking man could ever dream of visiting. From where I sit in the office, it takes me two minutes to walk to a painting by Gainsborough or Constable.

Not that I get any time to do that. I’m usually stuck inside with My Boss. And, as I think I’ve mentioned, he’s an idiot.

For the sake of my job, I won’t name My Boss, although he has got a name. He has a family too, and a wife who undoubtedly loves him. There are even children who look up to him and friends with whom he plays golf on a Friday morning while the rest of us work to pay for a few rounds at the nineteenth hole. None of this explains why he’s an idiot and why he makes my life so miserable. In fact, it would be hard to make you understand the scale of his idiocy in a concise yet comprehensive way. It’s why this is a blog. It might take me weeks to fully explore this unique creature I’m calling ‘My Boss’. It will take me a while to convince you of his utter imbecility.

However, this is my first post on this blog and my first time talking to strangers on the web, so let me give you a précis of My Boss’s qualities, so you can keep an eye out for them in the coming weeks.

1. Like all true idiots, he has no idea what he’s doing. Watching a chimpanzee pick ants from a hollow log with the dampened end of twig is to see thinking of a far higher order than you will find in My Boss’s office on your average workday. He has many schemes to become the ‘biggest name in the advertising business’ but this usually involves our using technology for something that the technology was never designed to do. ‘We’ll print colour baseball hats on our printer’ he will say, ignoring the practicality of getting a hat to run through the mechanism of an old black and white laser. When you try to suggest that we might have to buy a new colour inkjet and use heat transfers, he gets angry and calls you ‘reactionary’. He accuses you of being ‘in the stone age with the rest of the monkeys’. You then spend your morning trying to feed a baseball hat into the envelope slot of a laser printer.

2. As you can see, he has a temper. It’s the sort of temper that makes you suspect that, earlier in the day, some errant rodent had decided to nest in his underpants and, having woken up hungry, has taken a large bite out of the biggest nut in the tree. Red faced, spitting disgust, hammering the desk: My Boss shouts everybody down. Then he will covertly scratch his nuts.

3. One quickly realises that ignorance and a bad temper are two of his better qualities once you understand that he’s also a racist who spends most of his day telling everybody he meets that they must be politically correct. ‘We need more blacks in our new ad campaign’ is the sort of thing you’ll hear him say. ‘There aren’t enough people of, how shall we say, “a darker hue”, preferably with some sort of disability.’ That’s another of his favourite comments. It’s all spoken without a touch of that postmodern irony that might make it excusable. A short time in the man’s company is enough to turn anybody who might have previously lobbied against political correctness into a new Polly Toynbee. My Boss is the reason why The Guardian has a growing readership.

4. It’s a shame that My Boss lacks any irony because he also thinks that he’s funny. Actually, he thinks himself the funniest guy since Bernard Manning ‘kicked the f***ing bucket’. The man can’t go a minute without cracking a terrible joke, usually at the expense of ‘ze Germans’ (he pronounces it as you can probably imagine he pronounces it). He also speaks in this strange perversion of proper English, in which odd words take on added emphasis, and everything comes with the added zing of a ‘mucho gracias’, a ‘ta-ta’ or a ‘cheerio’.

5. He is sexist in ways I think it’s not good to go into for the moment. I’ll let that come as a nice surprise for you in the coming weeks.

6. His management skills begin and end with the threat of the sack. Everything comes down to the statement: ‘I pay you to do that, so you’ll do it’. It makes it hard to be efficient when you are aware of doing a job wrong because you’ve been told to do it that way. I once spent a morning pre-gluing stamps so they would be easier to apply later in the day, knowing that, by three o’clock, the glue would have dried. I finished the day with a desk covered with enough postage to send it to Columbia by air mail.

7. His dress sense belongs in the 1970s. He dresses like Terry Scott and nobody has ever explained that golfing jumpers and tartan trousers send out the wrong messages to potential clients who want you to improve their image.

If these seven points doesn’t seem enough to convince that My Boss is an idiot, it’s only because I’m incapable of writing briefly about a man of such mountainous incompetence, anger, hatred, jokes, and clichés.

My Boss is an idiot and I have made it my task to say to the world what I can’t say to his face. Unfortunately, he also pays my wages and I so desperately need this job...