Play video games with the 14 year old. Enjoy your money on a long vacation. If you are making good money, and the boss thinks of you as family, when things go slightly wrong you should freak out why? Just be matter of fact* with your boss and try to stay above it.
*“Sure thing, I’ll go start researching how I might approach that issue right now. Maybe in a few days I’ll have a good plan of attack…” He might get the hint.
Or, maybe passive-aggressive behavior and sarcasm is not the best route to take. Your call.
OMFG, Jar, we are clones. Our BOSSES are clones. That whole temp to Office Manager/IT/everythinunderthefreakingsunperson (“Don’t worry, she’ll find a way to do it.”) for a 6 years…starting to sweat small company hit just 14 years old…heart pounding a little too close for comfort. Now I’m having a panic attack.
Well…not that I’m encouraging copyright infringement by any stretch of the imagination, but…
If you feel like being a smart ass one day, you could replace all company logos with American Airlines’ logo.
And then tell your boss that you are striving to be more like them.
Seriously, though, hope everything works out for you. And hopefully, you won’t go completely crazy and introduce your boss’s anus to Taco Bell “Fire” sauce.
Your boss sounds like a nutcase, but at least he got someone who actually knows what he’s doing in there. And I agree with others here, they need to get rid of the 14 year old. He knows jack shit about the OS you are using, so what good is he, exactly?
I don’t know what to tell you about OS X, other than it is supposed to be really good for cross-platform stuff and networking. Much better than OS 9 and below.
Bad news working with family (even if they’re not blood family)… the boundaries between the “work” you and the “family” you get way too blurred…
You need to shock this guy into realising just how badly he’s fucking up - can you take a week off sick? lets see how the business survives then?
I’ve done it and it made a difference - not huge but it started off a process of changing attitudes… sometimes you really need to just scare em into doing something… its a bad situation and work is NOT supposed to stress you out like this. But then again, I think work is just a means to an end…
I feel better today, especially since I convinced him to hire a professional to upgrade our systems. We’re not going to lose the 14 completely because of his father’s connections in real estate. I know that for sure.
People who know me and read my lj about all of my misadventures know that I feel really terrible when I get mad at him because…he’s a great guy. He’s just a scatterbrain. He thinks, wrongly, that I’m a computer GENIUS. He KNOWS that he is NOT a computer genius. He has crashed my computer so many times that he’s been banned from touching it. I tell him, like a child, not to go near it. He buys me chocolate when he corrupts filemaker files. He brings me lattes when I’m having a bad day…he’s helping my husband I buy a condo.
So, really, leaving isn’t an option, until my catering business takes off a little more.
He just frustrates me to no end on occasion (like a five year old would) and I wanted to come in here and rant about it. My husband says to think of him as ‘simple’ and just talk slowly and repetitively until he understands.
I think I’ll try that. Thank god it’s friday.
Lots of good advice here jarbabyj. I particularly like Racer1’s post, which I echo.
I am the CIO of a medium size software company and besides Developers, I have IS support people. The most effective way for them to tell me that they’re overworked and/or understaffed is every time I put something else on their plate they say “OK. No problem. We’d love to do that. But what exactly do you want us to not do as a consequence of us doing what you just asked for.”
