Bi-Polar Boss Disorder

Short of My Fair Lady, the longest I dated anyone was a Latina girl in college for a year and a half. After six months, I should have dropped her like a bad habit and run for the hills screaming, but held onto the pain primarily out of low self-confidence. The whole "I don't know if I'll ever find anyone else..." mantra that the young go through, only to later realize that with 3 billion-plus women in the world, my odds of meeting anyone were damn good. During said relationship, she was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, the short explanation is basically this: Tie a wildcat and a hyena together by the tails, tranq both of them, then throw them in a sack together and stand back. When the drugs wear off, all hell is going to break lose and you're only safe by running as far away as possible.

I've now come to think of my boss as bi-polar. Either that, or a living, breathing, hand puppet with the CEO's hand so far up her ass if she leans her head back, we'll see his fingers as an Adam's Apple.

I work in a production company that produces what amounts to glorified infomercials and corporate videos. My boss is the head of the production department and her boss is, naturally, the CEO. He's known for flying off at the slightest thing, and she's become known as parrotting anything and everything he says. Case in point was our weekly meeting this morning.

Just last week, our boss was talking about the need to reign in the creativity in favor of turning-and-burning product. Shortly thereafter, the CEO talks about needing to improve the quality. Cut to today and she's talking to us about being more creative and doing what we can to boost quality and creativity while still maintaining our turn-and-burn attitude and go-team-go spirit.

The silence in the room was, to be blunt, deafening.

The punchline comes mere moments later when she informs the room of how she will henceforth examine "approval" copies of our work. She plans to examine "approval" copies and then see where we can be more "creative" and then give it back to us, all while point at the boss and saying, "See, I did something!" Meanwhile, we busy bees plot ways of getting her fired because we know she's kicking back things just for the sake of kicking things back so the boss thinks she's doing something. I laugh consistently when she takes on assignment after assignment only to delegate it to her "wunderkinds," our two production assistants/travel coordinators/whatever-else-they're-called. They know everytime she accepts something that it's only going to fall on their shoulders, and have accepted this with a grim sense of inevitability.

After a point, I'd have figured they would snap and take out the whole office, or at least the management wall. I'd also say that if I don't post for a few days to take that as a bad sign, but considering the (in)frequency of my posts, that might not be such a hot idea.