Inevitable Lena

My friends and I had a really good time playing downtown in Iowa City last night.  I had never listened to Euforquestra before, and they came samba-ing in after we finished with an encore, creating some nice momentum for their show.  They are young and friendly and full of juice.

I'm just happy to have juice.

My brother-in-law's former girlfriend, Lena, came up to greet me before the show.  Those of you familiar with my recent rant on serial monogamy will remember Lena.  She seems doubly determined since JD moved out to make herself a regular fixture in our lives.  Lena has been calling family members expressing her concern about JD's drinking.  She seems to want some sort of intervention.  They have sold off their farm equipment and Lena is reportedly selling the property they were occupying, and JD has moved in with his father out by the reservoir.  Lena and never called much, but now she's everybody's new best friend!  What gives?

I'm enjoying my position on the periphery on this one.  JD's going to have a hard time drinking at speed if he lives with his dad.  He seems to have had the same relationship with alcohol for about the past ten years.  Maybe something will come to a head.  Not up to me.  Living with my in laws, who are actually pretty good people, has taught me to offer advice sparingly, and when it is requested.  A good skill, if learned late in life.

Some folks are hard to get rid of.  I supervised a therapist when I started being a boss at my agency who was just a turd.  A control freak, he would become threatened and then would sound very patronizing when things didn't work out.  He was a bully to peers and would explode on them intermittently when he thought they weren't doing their jobs well.  He desperately wanted a leadership position in the agency and was roundly detested by a good portion of his peers, and seen as a transparent suck up by all but a few administrators.

I gave this guy a good deal of very blunt advice about leadership, how much of it is informal and that none of it is really associated with bullying or explosive outbursts resulting in demeaning interactions.  He was able to increase the interval between episodes, but he was not able to extinguish them.  He also continued to try to finagle some sort of leadership opportunity, but seemed to think it was going to all be about who he knew and how he manipulated.  (This can be true, but it also usually involves at least a certain degree of helpfulness and one or two social skills, used judiciously, with peers.)  At any rate, I got rid of the guy when I developed a new program, much to my relief, but then he was assigned back to me when I was involuntarily reorganized and restructured.

Being involuntarily reorganized and restructured is something I could think about riffing on for some time.  Perhaps a song. . . .

After a while, this turd man demanded more money or he would leave for another agency.  He went over my head to do this and had an interview scheduled with the COO about it.   She checked in and asked if I wanted to keep him and I indicated my indifference.  She paid him the money and he was more insufferable than ever, feeling validated or something.  Finally, he left for that other agency, when another internal supervisory position became available and he was given only token consideration for it.  I was free!  Freeeeeeeeee!

Again, I was overly optimistic.  This is a flaw of mine, really.  Recently, while tidying up 13 years of messiness and incomplete tasks, I discovered that turd man had not filled in all the demographic data on his clients when he left.  He had instead assigned all these cases to me.  To be fair I remember him saying something about this and I agreed, asking myself, I suppose, "how bad could it be?"

Bad.  I will spend my evenings the rest of the week cleaning up turd boy's data along with my own.  I am haunted by turd boy consistently for the entire duration of my career as a manager.  He is my corporate albatross.

Lena and turd boy haunt us, the follow in our wake, reminding us of our poor decisions, our hubris, our ambition and our own transparency.  They are at once clueless and knowing.

I suspect they are also in league with the Schwann's man.