I wish I was the one who had done this, but it wasn’t — it was my boss.

I was in a conference call in my boss’s office. There was my boss, and a fellow senior systems analyst/friend in that office. Our company had been purchased in recent months by another company. Our office had a big IT department, and operated on VAX computers. The company that had purchased us had this one guy who was a fanatical IBM mainframe zealot — everything except for IBM mainframes sucked, in his eyes. Also he had this rotten temperament, and really had no comprehension about how the software in our office worked, or about anything in particular other than IBM mainframes. I’m not even sure he understood the business that we were in.

Anyway, there was something really irking him that day, and I really can’t recall what it is, except that he went into the endless rant about how we were all incompetent, how our software didn’t work,, how our programmers sucked our computer systems sucked, everyone in our company sucked. Or something to that effect.

Anyway, my boss was trying to interrupt him to correct at least one of his many misunderstandings. But every time my boss tried to say something, he’d go off on another rant, interrupting him. None of us could get a word in edgewise, none of us could calm him down so that we could rebut what he was saying. After this rant had gone on for at least 5 or 10 minutes, my boss turned completely red, and instead of raising his voice and yelling (as I know some of my previous bosses would have done), he simply left the room.

So there we were, me and my friend/co-worker, listening to this seemingly endless rant. After maybe another 10 minutes, the guy says (addressing my boss by name), “So what do you have to say about that?”

My friend and I just looked at each other, and then I finally said, “Umm… he’s not here — he left the room about 10 minutes ago.” The guy just hung up in frustration. Eventually my boss came back and asked “Is he done yet?”

My favorite similar encounter with this guy — he was badmouthing me and the way I was going about dealing with something having to do with nightly processing or interest rates, or something similar and the guy was just criticizing everything that I was doing. In the middle of yet another rant by him, I heard HIS boss chime in on another line of the conference call, saying that I everything I was doing was correct, that that was the only way to do whatever it was I was doing (the details aren’t important, not that I remember any of them). Essentially, his boss told him to shut up.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with that guy very often, and he did leave eventually (not sure if it was voluntary or not, though).

On a side note, that boss, who had hired me 10 years earlier for what I consider to be my dream job — well he eventually moved on to another company, and then he recruited me to work there as well. He was a great guy, and he fostered this environment that made everyone feel more like family. Well, I’m talking about him because he died just recently of cancer. Even though I hadn’t talked to him or seen him in about 10 years or so, I have this feeling of loss. I knew his family — I was at his son’s wedding. I just wanted to mention that.