Tee Hee. :)
Boss just accidentally reprimanded a client by email.
*strangled snort*
Yes, it's evil of me to take joy in Boss' mishap. Yes, it shows what a petty, impotent, small-minded and small-hearted person I am to find so much glee in another's humiliation.
But I console myself by thinking, I'm not really laughing at Boss; I'm chortling with Fate, slapping the back of Poetic Justice, and drinking a toast to Hubris & Hamartia. Because it was SO apropos.
Over a year ago, Boss had our SysAdmin set up the network so Boss could personally access all of our email. This means that not only can Boss electronically look over our shoulders all the time, Boss can also electronically breathe down our necks by firing off micromanaging emails about our emails.
Now of course companies monitor email; this isn't a gripe about that. I don't even mind micromanaging. But...
...but it's a question of Boss' kneejerk mental reflexes. Boss thinks fast... far, far too fast for safety. Boss' mind races at such a reckless breakneck pace that hasty conclusions often supply the grounds for hot-blooded and intransigent injunctions.
It's as if Boss is imbued with so much life force, so much kinetic energy, that it would be a scientific impossibility for Boss to even momentarily hesitate. To expect Boss to prudently take a minute and actually read every word of the email and mull things over before making a decision would be like expecting a waterfall to willfully resolve itself into a tranquil pond in mid-air.
Mind you, I suppose one could argue frames of reference; from the waterfall's point of view, it's being absolutely still while everything goes whipping by or comes crashing up to meet it.
At any rate, Boss is the only human being I have met whose personality could in all fairness be poetically likened to a primal force of nature.
If humans are a watery incarnation of the Stream of Time & Gravity, then Boss is a seething cataract plunging headlong at terminal velocity into future towards that State of Final Inertia, while the rest of us drift aimlessly down like snowflakes.
By that reckoning, I suppose Reincarnation could be thought of as a sort of Evaporation Cycle of the Soul...
But as usual I get carried away by my own verbosity as I wax rhapsodic about Boss. All that purple prose was meant to set up the background for this:
A client had emailed some questions, the email was forwarded to me, I answered the questions and CC'd it to a few other people to whom the information was relevant.
When I got the consequent email from Boss, it took me about fifteen minutes to figure out what it really meant. Boss had done a "Reply All" and, addressing the comments to the client, delivered a brief and significant yet rather puzzling knuckle-rapping.
Boss has given hell to clients before, so I presumed it was intentional; but in the context, the text didn't make any logical sense. I think it took me as long as it did to understand it because I'm resigned to Boss not making sense.
I finally twigged that the client had the same first name as one of the employees here; and it was the knuckles of that employee Boss had clearly meant to rap.
With a blind presumption that is vexatingly typical, Boss had paid no heed to the fact that the client's email suffix is not even remotely close to our company email suffix; and neither, too, are the surnames at all alike.
Fortunately, the employee was vindicated at closing time. Boss, while rushing out the front door, asked in passing about said employee's involvement in the matter; and I, with as much nonchalance as I could muster, pointed out emails and surnames.
An abashed look nearly passed across Boss' face, but lost all nerve and fled. Boss promptly found fault with the client over something else, and left with dignity intact.
And that's the story of the mis-sent email.
Yes, I could have written this entire post in plainer language, and with less extraneous matter. At its practical essence, it is just about an email mis-sent. But that wouldn't do justice to Boss, nor to how Boss makes me feel.
I appreciate that Boss is no more or less fallible than average; it's just that Boss' status and power magnify these ordinary flaws into tragic flaws. By Boss' very nature, a normally insignificant event becomes epic.
And, frankly, I'm going overboard with words because this is my first blogsite and it's the first opportunity I've had to really, really play (and cavort & frolic!) with writing.
(Who was it who wrote, of a lovelorn youth: "He threw himself upon thorns of purple prose and bled"?)
For the sake of brevity, though, I ought to experiment with limiting myself to haiku for the next few posts...
To: Err is Human
Send! Boss lectures @client
not @employee.