Oy.
Tell your boss to tap the new-student pool and hire some schooled but zero-experience folks fresh out of the local MCSE mill. They are desperate for something to add to their resume and will often work for close to nothing. It’s a win-win situation.
You can expect a high turnaround but it’s better than a 14 year old who can’t upgrade software…
What does he say when you tell him no? Or is he so far in his technical dreamworld that he doesn’t notice?
Four choices:
Keep telling him no.
Tell him you need the proper training, which he will pay for.
Keep telling him no, but keep making sure it gets done. This is guaranteed to make your life stressful and unpleasant.
Leave. You’ve been doing all that for six years? You must have a fantastic resume.
jar,
I would call around to some of the outsourcing companies that deal with small clients and ask them to contact your boss and have them do a presentation as to why professional IT people (trained and certified) is the best bet for his company. They can monitor your systems and if something goes down, they are on call 24/7. You can lock in a rate that’s doable for a small company via a contract and keep your small network up and running about 95% of the time. When they need to do a software upgrade, it can be done professionally.
I think that’s the best course of action so you don’t lose your marbles.
Good luck.
Coward: well, an MCSE may know next to nothing about Macs, but… still a better shot than a 14-year old who isn’t ‘comfortable’ installing software’
That’s the EASIEST FUCKING THING TO DO IN TERMS OF MAINTAINING A COMPUTER. If he’s not comfortable with THAT then he’s USELESS (he’s a kid, I understand and it shouldn’t come down on him, it should come down on your nardhead of a boss for hiring him).
Fuck. Tell him if he doesn’t stop bothering you with this stuff that you’re gonna want a HUGE raise. He sounds like a pennypincher. Maybe that will make him stop.
(Don’t make me come up there…)
OK OK.
He’s not a pennypincher. I make a very nice wage and I get five weeks of vacation a year. That’s why it tears me apart to complain about this stuff, but at some point, I just snap.
He’s relented this afternoon to hiring a ‘real’ tech guy to upgrade the office to OSX, upgrade the retrospect back up, redo the network connections so we can all access the server from home and upgrade our internet stuff.
He still wants the fourteen year old to ‘maintain’ things. Which is code for “his dad has big connections in our business so we want to brown nose just a bit”
I feel somewhat better, although I’m still unable to come up with the 'universal cross platform document format"
Notepad.
The .txt format is nice and easy. You can save, print, and edit. You don’t get confused by all of the available fonts. Nor do you get confused by all of the available font sizes. No way to change the colour and then not be able to read it.
And best of all, it’s free. 
If only. He wants all documents in color, with the logo “kind of like american airlines does it”
That’s an exact quote. As a three person company, we must strive to be more like American Airlines.
:rolleyes:
Notepad is a Windows app…Jess works with a Mac.
MS Word creates files that can be read by both the mac and windows version (or save as rtf files)
And of course there is Acrobat.
Well, hells. Not a problem. XML or PDF, if you can get him to finalize documents.
.pdf he doesn’t like because you can’t alter the documents afterwards, we do a lot of work FOR other people who like to do their own edits, and some of our fonts and our .tif logo look ‘fuzzy’ in .pdf.
Believe me. You can’t win. I’ve tried it all. He’s a nutcase.
So uh, switch to Windows or Unix and I’ll be the IT person. Although as an IT whore, I don’t come cheaply.
Seriously tho, it sucks that you’re going through this. It’s nuts to hire a 14 year old kid to be the company’s only IT person, especially since this kid sounds unqualified.
So… How about the save-as-html function? Or build the letterhead into the header of a document template?
Or do it the way American Airlines does it, and buy custom letterheads on your paper.
Um, with the fourteen year old-doesn’t that violate child labor laws?
jar, QUIT. You know who you sound like? Me, in my last couple months at Kmart. It was killing me. QUIT QUIT QUIT!!!
I think this is what they used to call a co-dependent relationship.
He’s generous, you’re grateful, he makes unreasonable demands, you feel guilty for complaining, he keeps making unreasonable demands, you’re going nuts, he gives you 5 weeks vacation to keep you on a string, he’s not a penny pincher but he hires someone’s child because he’s half the price (can’t you see the contradiction here?), you get stressed – go to the beginning and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
You’re being used and manipulated. This will not end unless YOU either set clear limits on what you are willing to do (assertiveness training), or leave. I admire what you’ve managed so far, but you are burning out. This will NOT get better all by itself.
Deep breath, jar.
Then, ditto everyone here.
If you don’t know how to do it, say so. If you want, intentionally screw something up, then say, “Sorry, I told you I didn’t know what I was doing. Perhaps you better call the pros in.”
I know it’s hard, but if you think of yourself as a doormat he’s going to continue walking all over you.
You could take the “Bartleby the Scrivener” approach.
Whatever you’re asked to do, just say, “I would prefer not to.”
It’s free. Final beta is out for OS X, and I trust its beta more than most final products.
It’s default format is xml (zipped up using standard zip algorithms). We’ve started using it at our office–one of the great features is using a script to to global search and replace on all our documents (unzip, search, replace, rezip).
I think the best suggestion so far is Thudlow’s
You sound to have a very similar situation to my best friend back in UK. She was caught in the situation of being the only compitant person in the office. She also got caught by the boss guilt tripping her into doing far more than she was paid for.
For her it just became more and more difficult to leave, but she did manage it, and is much happier now in new employment.
So for you, I susspect you should leave. That is unless you feel strong enough to take over the job and remove your incapable boss. The second possibility is Machiavellian but may be possible for you.
Cheers, Bippy
Openoffice is also very good. But I’m not sure Jarbaby’s ready for it.
Jar, that 14 year old is a hazard, because he will not think before he does things. It is extremely likely that in the near future he will cause a large amount of data loss. Do yourself a favor, and make a backup of everything important.
But most importantly, remember, we’re here for you. If you have an impossible task, post, and we’ll find a solution. That’s what we do.