Big Stupid Bosses are Bigger, Stupider Than Ever

I am extremely confident in my ignorance

The other day at the Surf Report Jeff was asking people to draw pictures of their boss and fax them to him.  First of all, way to rock the fax machine Jeff.  Oh, and your wife called, she said she’s tired of vacuuming the floor with a mastodon’s trunk and washing dishes in a prehistoric pelican’s mouth…then she joined me in making fun of the fact that you still have a fax machine.  Anyway, I wanted really badly to participate, except it turns out that I am the boss.  I bet the people here would draw some really good ones of me.

Like most bosses, I insist that I am one of the cool ones.  I stay out of people’s shit and I try to be supportive whenever possible.  I say thanks to the people that make life easier and I bust the balls of the people that make life harder for everybody else.  Occasionally, shit goes down above me and I have to make good people’s lives hell.  Mostly, the job eats it from the ass in, but I am grateful to have it.  I’ll enjoy feeding my family and paying the bills, even if I have to  endure some fucker drawing a picture of me and faxing it to Jeff Kay. 

Having said that, I recently went to a boss convention so we could all learn to be bigger assholes.  Guess what – it appears that technology is moving so fast that these guys are going from experienced and capable captains of the ship to so-helpless-that-they-have-to-call-the-grandkids-and-have-them-set-the-clock-on-the-VCR  faster than any other generation before them.  I was actually embarrassed for these guys.  At one point in the conference they brought up a woman who was a communications master…in 1972.  Twenty years ago she was teaching us the art of writing the perfect press release.  Fifteen years ago she was talking about how this “internet” was going to change our lives. Ten years ago?  E-mail etiquette.   Basically, this woman has made a career of figuring out what was happening three years ago and teaching it to people who are ten years behind.  This year she bitched for half an hour about the newspapers going out of business and then said the phrase “social networking” a bunch of times – myspace, facebook, twitter etc.  She didn’t know why we had to have these things, but she insisted we did.

The men around me were all important and influential.  They were all in charge of millions of dollars and dozens of people.  Nobody understood a word of what anyone was saying…even the people who were saying stuff.   So of course, they immediately started making fun of it and questioning its value.

According to their website, the first twitter prototype came out in August of 2006.  My first tweet was in April of 2008.  I missed being cool by a solid year…and I was the coolest guy in the room. I have no intention of debating the value of social networking in the business world.  I would, however, like to suggest the Adopt-A-Boss program as a way to combat this nationwide problem.

The Adopt-A-Boss program is where a 16 year-old girl is assigned to each of the corporate hacks that are running this country.  They will spend a month teaching these people how to send a text message, maintain an online account of some kind, wipe their ass and maybe even help them find the “beauty-full essentials that create luminous looks, OMG!”  Or we can just sit here and send each other facsimiles.  NBDEW