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| Gratuitous photo of Frank |
Belgian administration ( I'm sure it's not the only one) has a lot of bosses and chiefs and presidents and heads. It is often joked that there are more bosses than workers, it sure felt that way there.
I never quite understood the structure of the hierarchy, I never tried to either. Our boss had a boss2 who had a boss3 who worked for a president...then there was a side boss...
When we signed our "poor worker" contract, we were instructed by boss3 to greet everyone in the morning, to the chagrin of most other bosses and employees. When I saw how most were annoyed by the simple fact we, feeble minded peasants, would say hello to them, I really felt it was my duty to go say hello to every single person present in the offices when I arrived EVERY SINGLE MORNING. To be fair, some people working there are very nice and didn't treat us differently from anyone else...
To our boss we were all dumb and lazy-assed thieves and liars. Still, paradoxically she left us to our own devices over 99% of the time. She enjoyed making odd threats...like "I have spies all over town, they'll know", "they can see you from their homes", or when we'd get boxes full of random stuff, "I know exactly what's in those boxes!" (so surely you'll have notive it is covered in mice/rats feces? ....but that's a story for a future post)
Oddly though she hated our guts, she still defended us against the other bosses...probably because it's her they were attacking through us. Especially the side boss. They hated each other. Well, I can understand why she'd hate our boss as that side boss was the only one who seemed to see/mind that weird shop. I really didn't appreciate she'd try to get to her through us. Everything we did bothered her. In the morning we had to wait for our boss to arrive to get the shop keys and till. But we couldn't wait in the hallway. So we waited in the lobby, but that was disorderly too. After 6 months of that, someone finally decided to let us access the shop keys without our boss being there.
Oh, and though we had to punch our presence cards in the main offices, we didn't have any keys to enter the building and basically had to wait until someone let us in. When I asked for a key I was told off, I didn't need one (still it bothered them to open the door for us).
Every day we also had to fax the baker. The fax machine was in a locked office. And sometimes there was no one in that office and we had to find the key to access the fax. And not too many people had one...the side boss had one...but "how dare we, the half-baked minions, disturb the management?"...
I don't know what was so precious in that office that they were afraid we'd steal... the fax machine...like, who still uses a fax machine in the 21st century? I had not sent one in...20 years...
I could never figure out boss2. He seemed completely oblivious to how the shop was run. I don't know if he really didn't notice, if he didn't care or if he was complicit. Boss3 was a friend of out boss...I am not sure why as they didn't seem to have anything in common...but I imagine that's why our boss was still there, being compelely incompetent for the job and being disliked by pretty much everyone.
Of course everyone pretended to like our boss as she was responsible (why, of why?) of the clocking machine. It was, I am not kidding, the only computer software she could use. That program was always opened on her desktop. She was super skilled at fidgeting in there...she had tons of overtime :'D . We, on the other hand, had a fixed work sechedule so we never had overtime...and even when we worked overtime, she'd usually just remove it from the records :/
What I really hated the most though was how they'd talk among themselves like we were not there, or how they'd go hush hush not to talk in front of us sometimes. How we were never invited when they had office parties. How we never were informed of the office events (though they were legally bound to do it).
To be continued...
Read part part 1 here
part 2 here
part 3 here
4 comments:
I think when looking for a job, you have to stick to the rules
You choose not work but you choose the boss
Weirder and weirder and not in a good way, no wonder you hated it so much!
Such weird vibes, people and rules!
Oh god, that's terrible! That boss of yours was completely insane. I hate when people are condescending to others just because they have a better salary.
hold on and I keep my fingers crossed that the situation will change soon
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