Heart of Gold

We don't get New Year's Eve off, but we DO get Friday the 2nd off. I wish we had both off, because I don't want to be here.

I did just come back refreshed from a little time off, but that relaxation has already melted away. My drive is killing me, slowly. And now it's more than my drive and the flutes and the turkeys: It's my boss, too.

At first, it was just little things:

• The way he makes a clucking noise when he's thinking
• The way he doesn't bathe every day and sometimes clips his toenails at his desk
• The way he refers to certain charts (the Prego spaghetti chart, the Everest chart) and projects (the Distributor project = "Disty") that make you feel like you're not a part of his club unless you refer to them in that way. I can tell he's trying to be cool, to make you feel like you're in the "in" crowd, but it's just falling short. It's more effort than it's worth, especially when I found out that a "Prego Spaghetti chart" is just a line graph, a "Dorothy slide" just the summary slide at the beginning. I don't want to be in his colloquial club. It's a waste of time and it just feels wrong (if anything, it should be "Distri"... he could at least abbreviate accurately).

Beyond those stupid little things, though, are now bigger things.

• My co-workers and I frequently get called "kid" and "woman." He's got a heart of gold and what not (despite only being there for less than a month, I got a x-mas bonus and a HUGE fruit basket), and he seems to be a nice guy, so I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not deliberately being condescending. But man, is that condescending or what?!
• Despite his underlying heart of gold, he's quite insensitive and has no social skills whatsoever. One of my coworkers shared with me that when her future mother-in-law was ill, her boyfriend (now husband) called her at work often to keep her updated on her situation. Future mother-in-law passes away, coworker takes a week off. When she returned, my boss expressed his condolences at the Monday morning meeting. Then it comes up how her boyfriend had to call her so much, and my boss said, "Yeah every time I heard your phone ring, I thought, 'Is she dead yet?'" Heart of gold, that guy.
  
• He's also just weird. I heard him say to a coworker today, "Wow, you smell very good. Like, really good. What is that delightful scent?" I heard him inhaling deeply and tried to think of how she could get out of this conversation as quickly as possible. She threw out a meek, "Uh, thank you. I don't know what it is." Luckily, after telling her she should find out, he walked away. Even at his attempts to be nice, he is Captain Bizarro.

So for many reasons now, I have been looking for another job. I am only finding sales and clinical research positions in the Boston area, however, and it's not looking good.