YOU arrive at work on Monday morning with no idea of the storm that is about to engulf you. This is how you find out your boss has a lot of anger to displace:
New laminated sign, 9.02am
That wasn’t there on Friday. ‘Do not spit in sink’? Who’s spitting in the sink? Who’s been suspected of it? What would drive a person to print, laminate and put up a sign this early?
An email of refusal, 9.35am
You try to book a meeting room. Instead of pointing you to the online booking form, or better yet doing it herself, your manager has replied ‘NOT MY JOB USE THE FORM’. The first rumblings of apprehension begin. What’s happened? Did she have a bad date?
A second email of refusal, 10.02am
You need a sign-off for stationery, which is your manager’s own process instigated when she suspected Ben from sales of stealing the good Post-its the week after her dog needed a £1,200 operation. This isn’t like the other thing, she’s actually meant to do this. But won’t. Speculation grows that she’s had a shit haircut.
An extremely forbiding cc, 10.24am
And now you’re copied into a labyrinthine email thread with no apparent connection to your job, prefixed by ‘can you take this on ongoing’? Your struggle to work out what you could possibly contribute to this bureauratic inferno is outpaced by your very real fear that your manager may have been fined for stopping in a box junction.
Cancellation of your update meeting, 10.52am
Normally you’d be pleased, but this time it gives you heart palpitations. That meeting’s a Monday regular. She can only have cancelled it because she’s planning a full-scale bollocking, and she can only be planning that because the builders have fucked up her kitchen extension.
Reply all, 11.44am
Finally, unsatisfied by taking it out on her immediate team, your manager emails the whole floor reminding them about the room booking policy, drawing their attention to the sign over the sink, and inadvertently revealing it’s all because her son caused £3,000 of damage to her car this weekend. The head of department, who is going through a divorce, curtly tells her to piss off.
