Happy Path

Existential Tuesdays with the Boss

I liked Charles. A lot. He was a good leader and a great thinker. Richard once referred to him as "a little rough around the edges", but I'd have to disagree. I appreciate someone who is straight-forward and speaks their mind. If people were ever offended by Charles, I think it was because they didn't like being called out. And he was actually a great student of the management processes. Generally, his words and approach were carefully considered to achieve maximum results. That's not to say that he was manipulative or insincere, I just mean that he understood human interaction in a way that allowed him to direct an interaction when necessary. And if he didn't have a horse in the race, he was happy to sit back and listen.

I regularly stopped by Charles's office to get papers signed or to talk about the budget or some other work-related matter. Usually if I spent more than five minutes in his space, we'd stray from the topic at hand. Partly, this was due to Charles's impatience and his divided brain. Ideas and responsibilities zipped around his head like a jar full of flies. But it could also be attributed to his undying curiosity. I had more discussions about workplace ethics, human existence, theology, and far-out theories with him than I've ever had with any other boss or even many of my friends. Not to say we lounged on bean bags and talked Aristotle. We did, however, touch on some pretty provocative subjects.

On one such day, I'd gone into Charles's office to enquire in person why he kept sending me random contract numbers to search. He had the posture of a beaten man when I walked in. "Hey. Why do you keep sending me contract IDs?"

"Oh. Hi." He turned on the shared monitor. "I'm looking at this homework from Richard." Up popped the kind of spreadsheet that made my throat dry and my hands sweaty.

"Oh, God. Tell me I don't have to get involved with this."

"Sit down." I sat down, expecting the worst.

"Look at this email." A new screen opened up with a short message at the top, followed by a forwarded email. Can you help? "Richard has a meeting with the new VP on Friday and he wants me to look at this spreadsheet." I scanned the headings and data to decipher what I could in the little time Charles's cursor sat in any one place. I could pick out some familiar project ID numbers and there were a few names I recognized. "I hate this stuff. It's so frustrating." Charles scrolled up and down the spreadsheet and clicked from email to email.

"What are you trying to do?"

"I think Richard wants me to assess which of these projects belong to us and then give him the highlights of what we're doing."

"Well, that's not so bad," I said with relief, sitting back in my chair. "That one is Windows 7," I said, pointing at the screen. "And that one is RDC."

"Oh, good," he said, obviously relieved to have roped me in. "Who's the Delivery Manager on that one?" He pointed to another project.

"Hm. I think Wanda? But I'm not sure." Before I'd finished my sentence, he'd pulled up Smartstream, the Bible of Project Controls and an annotated guide to all projects at The Bank.

"Can I find it in here? What do I do?" Instead of waiting for me to answer, he returned to the spreadsheet to refer to the number once again and then zipped back to Smartstream. "Where do I put this?" He started clicking from heading to heading. Watching his frenetic movements on the screen was making me dizzy.

"Under project, look at project cost summary and detail." Charles scanned the page with his cursor and finally landed in the right area. "Now scroll down that list until you find the number."

"What was the number again?" He bounced back to the spreadsheet.

"One-six-one-one-eight-four-three." When it came to the projects our team was working on, I knew the numbers intimately. For the millionth time since I'd started working at The Bank, I shook my head at what had become my daily work life. I was a numbers machine! "The table is really touchy, so you can scroll right past the number-"