Thursday, April 20, 2006

T Minus 27

So sorry, folks. Had to reinstall the word verification for a while. There's a certain spammer out there in the woodpile. No, not you Zonthar.
Well, it looks as if the tension at work is not going to lessen anytime soon. At yesterday's staff meeting the boss repeated something I had said to him about two or three weeks ago in a closed-door meeting and then promptly named me as the source. What I had told him when asked what I thought about the wrokplace was that I felt that the entire atmosphere around the office was very angry and hostile (not to me personally, but in general). When he asked what I thought might be the cause of it I told him that I thought he had a lot to do with it, because of his tendency to fly off the handle and chew people out before getting the facts straight. So, he dutifully trotted it out yesterday (of course, leaving out the part where I mentioned his involvement) and outed me. It was almost funny, because he rattled this off, but conveniently couldn't remember how I had phrased it and actually paused without looking at me and waited for me to fill it in. After 10 seconds of silence I spoke up and refreshed his memory. At that point, though, I made sure everyone in the room heard that I feel it goes from the top to the bottom. Starts with the boss. This morning I was already hearing the little barbs from my co-workers ("so, ratting us out to the boss"). Personally, I think the boss did it partly to see if he could drive a wedge between me and the rest of the staff. Didn't seem to work, though. I think they all knew exactly what was up when the boss spoke out of turn like that. He's never done something like that to anyone at a staff meeting for as long as I've been here. His top project manager actually came in early today (I was at work at 5:30 this morning) to ask me about it and suggest that I confer with corporate folks when I transfer back about the boss's leadership problems. Turns out he has already been publicly reprimanded once for creating a hostile work environment. My lab tech has actually filed a harassment complaint against him in the past for inappropriate comments.
But I'm keeping my head down, doing my thing, counting down the days left, doing my relaxation thing, fending off stress as best I can. How's by you?