Diary of a Wolfeman

As I have said before, the Bossman can be a bit of a raving idiot sometimes. Lately, he has taken to formally writing people reprimands when they fail to follow the ass-headed procedures we have around the shop. (Okay, maybe they aren’t so ass-headed as they are difficult to follow when the craziness that is our business gets up in your face.)

Today he finally got around to me. I took time from the multi-computer rollout I was doing today to drive over to our HR office for a friendly little get-together where they shoved almost two pages of bull-puckey in front of me with a signature line on the back. It detailed two seperate instances of “infractions” that Bossman thought warranted a formal reprimand.

The first and largest dealt with a Sunday job that went into the shitter. Our Techie-in-Training is pretty good at wiring, so he was heading the op, and I was being brought in to polish off the wiring, configure a router and wireless hotspot – only the wiring was only 1/4 done, and the gear hadn’t even been ordered yet, let alone delivered.

So, I helped T-i-T get the wiring to the point where it was a one-man op again and left the site after conferring with the client and explaining why I was leaving. As luck would have it, things went pretty downhill after I left – the customer got pissed, T-i-T froze like a deer in headlights, and Bossman got bitched out the next day, and he creditted the guy 3 hours labor to make amends – all without asking me about it at all. The first I heard of this is when HR Lady tossed the reprimand at me.

The second point was to nag me for not calling in to authorize a couple hours of overtime to fix a completely hosed network at a huge client’s site when I had the client’s CFO breathing down my neck to get it fixed. Then there was the part where I didn’t tell anyone that we needed to get a tech up again the next day. This is all part of another job that Bossman and I stayed at until 1:00am not a week before – a $25,000 gig, and getting it right may let us actually keep them, where screwing up even the slightest will lose us this client. Well, I was busy fixing the problem, not worrying about the time. Yes, I should have at least called after I left to verify – I’ll give him that. But when I was done, it was working – there wasn’t a need I could see for sending someone back out. (It is just a nasty coincidence that another problem cropped up after I left.)

I read the whole thing, then started explaining what actually happened with the first one. By the time I got done, I had not only cleared myself, I got to say to his face in front of HR Lady AND the new General Manager how he had offended me and wasted all of our time by not coming and talking to me about this BEFORE he set formal paperwork in motion. That two-page document will be a two-sentence document if he ever actually bothers to have me sign it.

This meeting actually turned out pretty good for me – now all three of them know for certain that I can walk into a bad situation and not only come out looking pretty darn good, I can make the other guy feel sheepish in the process, without ever raising my voice.

Don’t fuck with the Wolfe.