Things have been tough at work lately. My boss has been working long hours and I can see it is affecting his health. He’s been coughing and blowing his nose a lot. He’s seemed so stressed and snappy and at times it has felt like he goes out of his way to look for imperfections in my work.
What’s worse is that because we have so much to achieve in a short amount of time, he wont let me take any annual leave until November.
I don’t know why but recently, we seem to have had a lot of little misunderstandings. Part of the problem is that he doesn’t explain things properly. One day he asked me to update our web site, so I did. As soon as he found out I had done this, he went ballistic because he had wanted to wait for a certain time to publish the new information – about 10 minutes after I had done so – and he had wanted all the attached documents to be named in a certain way and the links to open up in new windows. How could he expect me to know all that just by asking me to update the web site?
Then during a meeting we had on Thursday with the Commissioners, the Chief Justice asked me to put the late submissions we’d received, up on our web site, so I did. It was a simple process, I just needed to add the names of the people putting in the submissions and then add hyperlinks to the documents…. well that’s what I thought. It turns out my melancholic boss wanted to do the task himself (I think?), and for it to be done in a way that was different to how I had done it. With all the tension that’s developed between us over the last month or so, it was just one snap too many.
I went back to my office and all these tears just started pouring out of my eyes, silent tears. I was quickly wiping them away because I didn’t want him to know I was so upset. He just frustrates me so much sometimes because he’s so pedantic about everything and it all has to be done his way. I work so hard in this job, much harder than in any other job I have done before, and I do my tasks as well as I can and then I get these snippy comments thrown at me when I least expect them.
A little while later, thankfully after I had stopped the tears flowing, he comes into my office and says “I guess I didn’t really explain what I wanted” and then walks out. It didn’t make me feel any better.
I then headed downstairs for a cup of coffee in search for someone positive to cheer me up. Two of the guys brightened up my morning by telling me about their Contiki tours coming up. Lucky fellas. I was just so grateful for their cheerfulness. Then I dragged myself back upstairs to my office.
About an hour later, my boss knocks on my office door and says “can we talk?”. I was like “what about?” and he goes “I just want to talk about this morning and clear the air”. So I go and sit in his office and he starts to ramble on about how he knows he hasn’t been clearly expressing himself lately and that he has a tendency to focus on the negatives and not acknowledge my work (I told him that was true). He said he was dealing with these flaws in his personality (I was thinking “man, he actually read that book on personality types that I gave him!”). He said that he wanted to improve the communication between us and for me to tell him when I think he’s being unreasonable (I told him that was really hard to do when he was so snappy with me, and asked him if he minded me throwing something at him instead – that made us both smile a bit).
Anyway, I guess it changed things a bit. The whole time I had tears in my eyes. I realize it must have been hard for him to say all that, even though he didn’t actually say sorry. The word “sorry” is not in his vocabulary. Instead he just blamed it all on his personality type, which I thought was funny, though I certainly didn’t feel like laughing at the time. Things were still pretty tense all arvo right up til when I left work. Thank God that day ended.
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