The Subordinate

Meet The Boss

Francois wakes up early, around five in the morning - either he is trying to emulate the self-help book of "5 AM Club" lingering around his book shelf or it really got him in the habit when he became an athlete. Though he doesn't show up to work until two in the afternoon. He goes to the gym, and then attend to his life and does guest lecturing or manages a business school. One can say, he literally has no direction in life and career and his purpose is just to make money without any vision, mission and objective.

Money... is the ultimate goal.

It puzzles me why he couldn't gone into banking given his love for money. Every work outings, a couple middle aged women check him out - immediately projects himself as Mr Money and that they're attracted to him as money making machine. However, if the onlooker is well off, then it has to be his penis - even when clearly the onlooker was looking at either the clock or the doorway searching for someone else.

I scratched my head thinking about this, after my brief stint in Standard Chartered - it still puzzles me why someone like him... a money guru still cannot get past the security guard of Goldman Sachs.

I opened the office door, a small shabby, outside of London office.

You see, if my boss is anywhere close to successful as he projects himself to be, I'm sure my office wouldn't be between London and the abyss (Berkshire). It would be in one of those post-codes that begins with SW1, E1, or EC1.

Surely after all the chlorine from the pool of years of swimming, diving and getting knocked over, and head bobbing in to the water - for the ten metre impact.

I knew it. Nightmares like this happen for real. A graduate from a research intensive university in Scotland, classic and intellectual, would be working for a university muscle who literally doesn't know that "elipses" must not be used in formal business writing.

Part of my job is omitting those elipses to make look like a professional. And making sure that he never uses the world toilet in the client - if anything that word is a major pet peeve to my ear. This is it, I thought... we have fallen from great. When the job description of golden star is not exactly anything that that actually do, then we may have reached the maturity and demise of the services industry.

The boss, however went to university, albeit a shabby one. An institution, someone like me wouldn't even have heard of, until someone like me would delve in to the real world. Oh Sussex, is a county - I just never knew that county hosts a university.

The moment his receptionist - a classic office accessory that projects superiority, entered the office it was the cue that the boss is about to turn up.

Guards up, hide the current read of an Isabel Allende novel, which keeps me busy toiling in the office other than calling the caterers to satisfy the client for the networking event. Pretend your busy.

"Alright?" A standard mediocre greeting in the Anglosphere world, since the 2008 recession.

"Joe, have you ever thought of getting an MBA?" Dawn, the secretary from Cheshire had asked, the first in her family to get in to university. For her, working for the faded glory athletic boss is a step to greatness. As for me, it is a mockery of my degree.

"I sure have the credentials for LBS," until I remembered my incompetent boss guest lectures there - and so the pragmatism for those kinds of institutions had begun.