Eccentric Bosses and Colleagues

Get together with old acquaintances from a job and sooner or later the conversation will turn to eccentric colleagues or bosses. Some spark pleasant memories while others induce cringing but all are memorable. My own have included:

• A supervisor who used to hide from his employees. Weeks passed and few people reported having seen him. It was discovered that he'd created an office in another building and was working there. Management soon decided that he could locate his office even further away.



• A chief of staff who routinely declared that he was a "people person." If you worked with him long enough you realized he was a carnivorous people person.



• A department head who kept a huge jar of Rolaids on his desk. Over the months you could watch as it slowly diminished and then he'd fill it again.



• A director who was so full of ideas that he could reach brainlock trying to express them. Highly creative, he irritated a top executive and was soon exiled.



• A department head whose work, although meticulously and fully researched, was usually completed too late to have any relevance whatsoever.



• A profane and wild-looking executive who was used as a clean-up artist. Very capable but he had a short shelf-life in his assignments but a little dose of him went a long way.



• An oily, competent and thoroughly untrustworthy operator. Uriah Heep in a good suit. He went far. One of his secrets was revealed when people from outside the organization would gush about how they wished they could work with him because he is such a great guy.



• A thoroughly decent and competent executive. He also went far. His reputation was built on ethics and reliability.



• A manager who never discriminated because he treated everyone like dirt. One day, however, after a blunt conversation urging him to change his ways, he made a complete turnaround and became a human being.



• The professional who made a practice of praising people to the skies one month and then damning them to hell the next.



• The executive who always read her mail while staff reported to her.



• The executive who kept nothing personal, such as photos or awards, in his office and whose reason for doing so was he wanted to be able to walk away from the job at any time.