Anyway. My boss got upset with me the first month I worked here because he told me he could start a particular monthly Zoom meeting from home (I asked him multiple times, as he is not good with technology and he admitted that at the interview and said I would have to do a lot of tech stuff for him) and I thought, “I could sign in for him and start the interview, if he can’t find the button,” so I asked him for his password and got very frustrated with me over the phone because he doesn’t have a Zoom password, why would he have a Zoom password? You just click on Zoom and it goes and the meeting starts!
As it turned out the person who’d been handling this task every month previously was starting the meeting for him, with his Zoom account, and he was just clicking the link to the meeting, not signed into an account, assuming that that magically started everything. He no longer trusts me with anything to do with Zoom. Which is fine, honestly.
He also frequently emails me scanned PDFs of things and tells me to print them and scan them, or to change the wording on them (“but don’t retype everything!” Okay… so where’s the version in a word processor? “I sent you the file!” Sir, that is a bad scan with your handwriting all over it, I cannot incorporate your changes easily with just this.) He has no idea how email threading works, and frequently acts like I’m lying about having sent him something when someone else has responded to the thread (or, worse, used the same generic thread title) and my email isn’t the first in the thread anymore. If there’s any minor computer issue (like, something froze and I had to ctrl+alt+del and therefore it’s taking a little longer to do the task) he gets upset that I have wasted time by handling it on my own and continuing with the task instead of stopping everything and waiting until [male coworker] has time to come and to fix my computer. (The male coworker in question is usually busy and often WFH and while he’s an expert in our accounting software I don’t think he knows much about, like, printer issues.)
And then there’s the table in Word that an important list is organized in. (Not a spreadsheet. A table in Word. I did not make the table in Word; frankly I think my predecessor is afraid of spreadsheets.) I was forbidden to remove or reorder the table in Word. I was forbidden to add columns. Except, oh, why isn’t there this information, why haven’t you been putting that on there? Oh, I’ve been putting it on there in this column? Well, add it in this other, unrelated column, too, boss will come up with an elaborate symbology. And then forget what the symbols mean and accuse me of overcomplicating things. Why isn’t this information on there? Add these two columns! Wait! Why has the pagination changed, why are the rows thicker now???? Don’t remove items we’re done with, then he can’t find everything, it’s not in the same place! When boss’ boss asks how many items are still open, just manually count them all, it shouldn’t take that long, the list is only 25 pages. Oh, and never reorder the list so everything is always on the same page from version to version, but if something new comes in that’s associated with a client who’s already on the list, put the new thing below that! (But never reorder the list. Every page must remain exactly the same. But add this information.)
My boss felt it was a “waste of time” to spend any time doing anything organizational for this project (a direct quote: “You don’t need to put them in order, just do them!” About a list of 100+ items that all needed to go through a complex multistep process, and some of which were higher priorities than the others.) so I didn’t dare take the time to do an actual spreadsheet, but a coworker was recently assigned to this project by someone higher up than my boss, and she DID create the spreadsheet of my dreams while my boss was busy micromanaging me, and I love it and it’s just about halved the time it takes for me to do some of my work. Boss is deeply suspicious of this change and probably thinks I’m a witch, but he has just left for a vacation so hopefully we can get some stuff done today before he comes back.
(Coworker, if you’re reading this, I meant it when I said I loved the spreadsheet. I would probably not die for this spreadsheet, but I would get a papercut for it, and that’s not nothing.)