Staff Beating

Am I the only one whose boss drives them crazy? Does anyone else shudder at the sight of their boss? Anyone feel immediately sucked into the vortex of their boss’s neuroses the minute you set foot in the office?

We have a staff meeting every week. I’m serious. Every week. There is one (1) supervisor and one (1) employee and yet somehow it is necessary that we “take a break” from our busy schedule of picking nits from each other’s fur so we can “get a chance to talk.” You know that uncomfortable feeling you felt waiting for Daddy to come home and punish you for breaking Mom’s favorite dish? Yeah, that’s they way I feel every Monday morning. Aww, who am I kidding – by Sunday afternoon, I’m already imagining the following day, when I will once again find myself pinned and squirming under the piercing laserlike ferocity of my boss’s need to freak out before an audience.

She rambles. On and on, saying the same thing over and over again. She nags. She rants. She twists her hands and whimpers, then blabs and blabs and blabs some more. I am so exhausted by it that I can’t even make it funny. She calls it a staff meeting but really it's a therapy session, except in this scenario I am responsible for all of her fears and uncertainties. Oh my goodness. She dictates letters to me at length, speaking at breakneck speed, and then at the end says, "Never mind. Just write something you'd like to receive." She's pushy and says eveything in an argumentative tone, even though I mostly just nod and say, "Okay," with an occasional "Good idea!"

It's like she thinks she's leading a pep rally, as if the more "jazzed" and "enthusiastic" she gets, the more I will understand what she wants me to do. I mean, there's enthusiatic and then there's crazed blathering foaming-at-the-mouth madness.

And let's not forget the piece-de-resistance, the fact that throughout this entire verbal onslaught where she's basically urging me to do all this stupid busy work, like printing out copies of my list of patients to call when I can just read it off of the computer screen - this is another of my huge issues, the fact that she is ADDICTED to paper and resists any suggestion that printing out information readily available on her computer screen is stupid, wasteful and expensive - throughout this whole "staff meeting," she is curled up in one of the chairs the patients sit on in the waiting room with her shoes off, picking at her toenails. Yes! Her whole litany of "Things We Can Do Better!" is punctuated by the click click click of her fingers plucking furiously at her toenails until finally by the grace of God the meeting is adjourned and she scuttles behind my desk and uses MY scissors to cut off the offending nail. EW EW EW!!! I feel so violated!!!!!!

Maybe I'm just being juvenile. But seriously, can anyone give me one good reason that we need to sit down during my lunch hour - oh yeah, that's the part I forgot to tell you. I don't get to go to lunch until we're done and heaven forbid we do the meeting during "patient hours" i.e. working hours in case the phone rings and we have to stop the meeting to speak to a patient. How would we recover?? Anyway, can anyone give me one good reason that two people have to subject themselves to the agony of a Staff Meeting during non-working hours when anytime she wants to say something to me, she just hollers it out of her office anyway????? I mean, WTF??? with a capital F!