I no longer laugh at Dilbert, but I do sometimes cry

My boss is a tool. I enjoy what I do, for the most part, but the imprint that this man leaves on my mental well-being has taken it's toll over the past two years. I'm not claiming to have the worst boss in the world, or looking for pity here. More than anything, I'm just amazed at what a piece of work this guy is.

Every new day, without fail, begins with a "Good MORNING, Princess!" That's me. I'm Princess. So is his four-year old daughter. He says this regardless of the weather, the day of the week, the look on my face, or the amount of thermo-nuclear global wars that have transpired since our last meeting. This makes me want to punch him in the face, which is a good suppressed urge to start each day off with.

This man is a wordsmith of the worst order. In situations where the speaker's subsequent actions might complicate matters, one might say "I'm going to throw a wrench in the gears here..." It's a useful statement, conjuring up imagery of a smoothly running, complex operation being bluntly halted by the egregious misuse of a potentially beneficial item--which is, come to think of it, his preferred management style. In any event, he does not use this phrase, but will instead use his now trademarked version: "I'm going to throw a wrench in the monkey here..." I don't know where the monkey came from, but it needs to go back. I think he had suspected we laughed about this, so one day he caught me rolling my eyes and smirking and asked, "What? Have you never heard that one before?" This was my golden opportunity, and I took it. I carefully explained the correct phrase and imagery heretofore described, and why it makes sense. I also explained why forcefully inserting a wrench into a monkey is imagery that has an altogether different usage. (though I shudder to think of the occasion that would give rise to that usage) He did not conceded that he was wrong, but explained "I guess we just grew up in different areas." To this day he still uses it in meetings with the client and upper management; they roll their eyes and smirk. There's at least two of these colloquial-isn'ts a week, but he seems proud of them--not unlike George Bush.

His philosophy must be something like "work harder NOT smarter." His phrase is "assholes and elbows" which I can make no anatomical sense of, but he uses it when it's time to put in the extra hours. The last 12 or 13 weeks have each individually been the hardest week on the project. I know this because each time he comes to me and says, "this week is a hard week, and we need to put in some extra hours, and maybe even come in on the weekend to get over the hump." Then he reassures me that, "next week we can go back to our regular schedule, and get out of here at a reasonable hour--I hate being here as much as you do." But you wouldn't know it from the schedule he keeps. He gets up every morning at 3:30, leaves his house at 4:00, drives 45 minutes (no traffic) into town, and goes to the gym. He says he goes to the gym, but I am skeptical because he is consistently a 260-pound sloth, and last year his doctor measured his cholesterol at a staggering 400. He gets to work at about 6:00, rarely takes a lunch break, and leaves the office at around 6:00 or 7:00 at night, frequently staying until 8:00 or 8:30. According to him, he's usually in bed by 9:00 or 9:30, which makes me wonder if his wife and two children even remember what he looks like.

It also makes me wonder what the hell he does all day at work. On multiple occasions I've stumbled into his office and been asked to help him with something that takes me about five minutes to explain/fix/laugh at inaudibly. I sometimes get the impression that he's been staring like a caveman at the spreadsheet for about three or four hours before I came in, and I die a little on the inside when I think of how many times this man has been promoted.

Don't even get me started on the useless shit he has me do every day. I could fill volumes with this stuff, but most of it is tedious engineering nonsense that would bore the average person to death. He's also an asshole, but I can tolerate assholes. It's the idiot-factor that just plain hurts. On top of all this, he's incredibly sensitive. I've seen him pout with the intensity of a four-year old when someone implied that his idea was less than perfect. I've seen him resort to name-calling. I've seen him file a formal report with Human Resources that someone keeps taking things off his desk without permission, rather than just asking for his damn stapler back.

The hardest part of all of this, though, is that he LOVES me. I can do no wrong in his eyes. He's never once yelled at me. He hinted for about five minutes, but has ever since been very blunt about the fact that he wants to 'mentor' me, and take me under his wing. I think these were his exact words--and I've heard them in varying forms at least monthly for the last year. I'm too nice to tell him how I really feel--that is, that I think he's consuming valuable oxygen that the rest of us could make better use of. This project ends in about six months (if the gods are merciful), at which point we might get shuffled into different projects. I don't like my odds, though, since he will have a say in what project I get sent to, and thus I am seriously considering a career change, or maybe even going back to school.

Whatever I decide, though, there is a conversation that will have to happen in about six months. It goes a little something like:

"It's not you, it's me"
"You're great and all, but..."
"I think you'll make a great girlfriend/manager for someone, but that someone is not me."

These sorts of conversations are fun for nobody. I've suffered through these before with overly-sensitive teenage and adult women, but have absolutely NO experience with overly-sensitive 40-year-old men.

I just hope he doesn't cry on me.

PS - According to further intense investigative research, even Google bears no evidence of any idiomatic usage of "wrench in the monkey" by anything other than mediocre journalists and other knuckle draggers. Let us finally and absolutely declare, then, that such usage is anomalous to the English language. The PETA-approved counterpart, "monkey in the wrench" can be attributed to Bruce Willis' character John McClane, from the first Die Hard Movie, the hero who describes himself as "A fly in the ointment...The monkey in the wrench. The pain in the ass." This was a screenplay written by two of the most prolific screenwriters in Hollywood, and based on a novel by Roderick Thorpe. My research stopped at this point when my vaporous hooched internet connection faded, with any remaining curiosity on this subject soon to follow suit.