My boss Dick Lumbergh is five years older than me, makes twice my salary and should probably not be allowed to use an electric toaster, much less be in charge of a technology department for a mid-sized company.

Yes, it looks like a dunce cap for a reason.

You see, Dick likes to change his Instant Messenger icon. Not once a month. Not once a week. No, Dick changes his IM icon every…single…day.

At first I think I’m going crazy. Every time I chat with him it seems as though I’m asked if I want to download his new icon. But that doesn’t make any sense. My boss is in charge of millions of dollars in computer equipment, a staff of programmers and support people and attaches more electronic gizmos to his belt than Batman.

This morning curiosity gets the better of me. The moment he turns on his PC I send him a quick IM…

“Dick, did you get that email I sent you yesterday confirming that you received that phone message I forwarded to you?”

“Yes, I think so,” he types.

“Thanks!”

And the trap is set. Instead of closing my IM window, I leave it open and sit back to watch the show. Sure enough, a moment later I’m asked if I want to download his icon and I, of course, answer “yes.”

It’s a white guitar this morning. I sip some coffee and twirl around in my chair. One spin later my PC is again asking me if I want to download his icon again.

I click “yes” again and wait. If he has the free time to change his icon repeatedly, then I can certainly find the time to download it.

Now it’s a red electric guitar.

I go to work on paperclip animal to add to the little aluminum zoo on my desk, but I barely have time to make a shiny metal snake before I’m asked about the next icon.

He picks a baseball with a New York Mets logo. I toss an eraser over my cube wall and hear an “Ow…”

I have another sip of coffee and we’re back to musical instruments.

This time it’s a blue sparkly electric guitar. I am obviously watching a genius at work. I fiddle with the color on my monitor.

He chooses a Dilbert head. I start bending the paperclip snake into something with legs.

We’re on the same wavelength. He chooses an icon of a frog. I clean out my mouse.

Finally he seems to settle on a white guitar icon which I’m sure I’ve seen before. I check the clock and notice that I’ve been watching him bounce through icons for nearly ten minutes. I pull up the calculator and figure he just got paid a little over $4.00 to to do that and I just got paid a little under $2.00 to watch it.

The conclusion of my experiment: my boss not only has the time to fiddle with his Instant Messenger icon for ten minutes every day, but he also is so technically inept that he has to apply each icon and look at his own little window before deciding if he likes it or not.

Secondary conclusion: my boss is really into musical instruments, especially electric guitars, and hopeless baseball teams.

That’s good, I suppose. Someone who works as hard as he does needs a hobby.

And it’s probably safer than playing with the toaster.

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Now that I’m a manager I’m seeing more “things” going on in my company that I never knew about before. I see the pains they take to do things the right way by layering on bureaucratic procedure after bureaucratic procedure in an attempt to do things the right way. I see how they work to make sure everyone is treated fairly to the point where skill and talent no longer matter because they’re so afraid of being unfair that they refuse to recognize that some workers are actually *gasp* better than others. I see some of the complex issues in decision making that go on in the boardrooms and back halls and I’m starting to get a great appreciation for some of the subtleties of office politics I hadn’t been aware of before.

I am also much more aware of some of the “not quite kosher” things my company does now. I’ve found some legitimate “problems” with some of our processes and expressed that concern to my own managers. I’ve gotten a lot of head nodding and “Yes, we’ll have to look into that…” but seen little real action.

Don’t get me wrong: I think most companies probably take some liberties with the thousands of legal rules and laws established for running every aspect of a large company. I don’t think my company, or most companies, set out to break the letter of the law intentionally. Rather, the laws in question are often open to interpretation, purposely vague, or simply too complex and onerous for any one person or department in a company to fully understand or follow.

I take comfort in the fact that the “issues” I’ve discovered are relatively small. No one is getting hurt, no one is dying and very little real “harm” is being done to anyone due to these small indiscretions that my company is engaging in.

I really like my job and I really think my employer provides a good product. I promote them in my personal life whenever I can. But seeing these little blemishes on my company has slightly change my perspective. I now realize that an organization can continue to work for the greater good while sometimes making small errors along the way. All in all, these infractions are minor.

But, man, they annoy the heck out of me.

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We’re having our biweekly scavenger hunt this morning.

The only thing in our list, as it is every other week, is “something which will hold hot coffee without scalding our hands or leaking all over our desks and dripping into our very sensitive nether regions.”

The Styrofoam Holy Grail of our office

You see, we’re out of Styrofoam coffee cups. Sure, they’re the environmental equivalent of RAID to cockroaches, but you don’t worry about the environment so much when you’re 20 minutes late to cubicle hell on a Monday morning after a weekend of fun. To put it simply: we need those cups to hold our magical elixir of youth and vitality to get us through the day… Yes, I mean coffee.

But without cups we can’t drink coffee. This makes us very, very sad.

This is not the first time we’ve faced this tragedy.

Lisa, our office secretary, forgot to order cups and we obviously forgot to remind her to do her job. Lisa, bless her soul, is a functioning idiot. I’m sure there’s some amazingly tragic and heartwarming story involving multiple car accidents or a blimp explosion or being fired out of cannon or something which explains her total lack of thought, but I don’t really care at the moment.

I know she has a daughter that she’s on the phone with 7.5 hours a day. I know she has a husband she’s on the phone with the other .5 hours. I know she regularly uses Microsoft Excel as her word processor of choice. And I know my bare hands can’t hold fresh coffee long enough to properly stir in the cream and sugar. Don’t even ask what I was planning on stirring the coffee with.

And, dammit, my coworker is screaming in delight. He just found an old soup bowl in the back of the cabinet and is now enjoying a bowl of fresh, steaming hot coffee.

This is not to say that Lisa’s problems only revolve around coffee cups. I’ve been watching her closely and I’ve come to the conclusion that any task involving numbers, colors, letters, words or basic motor skills seems to throw her for a loop. You have to really try to be as dense as she is.

About a month ago I asked Lisa to order a desk lamp for me. About a week later two very large Office Depot boxes with my name on them showed up at my cube. I opened them up to find 40 cases of hot pink Post-It Notes. I had to call Lisa to straighten the mess out.

“Lisa, I now can now label everything we have in the company, including the employees, with little hot pink squares of paper,” I explain.

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“I don’t-”

“Then why’d you order them?”

So I marched down to Lisa’s desk and asked her to pull the requisition form. This proved to be a special type of challenge because Lisa’s filing system is apparently based on some set of criteria which only people in padded rooms can decipher.

Finally she found the form and presented it to me. She had somehow taken the first two digits of the desklamp sku number and put it in the “Quantity” field, resulting in a heck of lot of items that were two digits less than a desklamp. At least it wasn’t 40 desks.

Cripes! Another coworker just dumped out his pencil holder and is using that for coffee. He’s now enjoying a hot cup up joe that’s only slightly marred by that “bottom of the cup pen-ink and pencil-shaving” flavor. Lucky bastard.

These ordering problems with Lisa are not isolated incidents. Just lask week I asked her to order a few office supplies from Office Depot. On Friday I ended up with a blank box that had no label containing a book entitled The Wisdom of Menopause. The really spooky thing is that Office Depot doesn’t even carry that book.

When I asked Lisa about it she simply explained that she had obviously given me the wrong package. Obviously. Though I had to wonder what the person who ordered this book was wondering when she opened her box and found a heavy-duty Swingline stapler, a box of dry-erase markers, a case of paper towels and a bottle of Wite-Out.

So the search for coffee cups continues. Sure, the employee cafeteria has something we could use, but they charge us a dime for each empty cup, so it’s really a matter of pride to not have to resort to that.

The way I figure it we might as well just order a dozen ceramic coffee cups and not have to worry about constantly restocking our supplies. I’ll fill out the paperwork for the mugs and give it to Lisa today, which leaves only one question…

What on earth are we going to do with the 120,000 Brother SX-4000 Electronic Typewriters we’ll receive instead?

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