The fact that bosses have a mind of their own, they’re temperamental and often pesky, is well known. What is not known is that we too have the tendency to emulate them in their bossiness, however unwittingly, when our own turn comes.
The mantle of ‘boss’ does not befit and therefore does not become, every human being. Some are born bosses and slide seamlessly into their elevated roles, whenever they chance upon them. Others can never even pretend to feel comfortable in a superior role, and often wish that they were back amongst the echelons of the junior-most riff-raff!
There is of course a third category — those who are incompetent, as well as boorish, non-performers, but they scarcely realise it. They seem to think that they are God’s gift to humankind. Currently, someone is pretending to be the boss of the world, but is really only a tragi-comic bully. He and his ilk, inebriated with power as they are, haven’t the
foggiest idea about just how insufferable they can become.
The thing about such bosses is that they feel entitled to brandish their opinions around, without much filtration. The elevated chair of command upon which they are comfortably ensconced, unless they’re working from home, somehow instils in them a heady feeling of being impregnable. They therefore feel as if they can mouth any adjective, or even expletive, in the general direction of those whom they consider to be lowly, cringing, subordinates, or subjects, as the case may be.
Not all bosses are of this sort, thankfully. There are some who happily epitomise goodness, laughter and fun, even if inadvertently. There was one boss who would call for a meeting in the dead of winter and his largish head would be adorned by an even larger monkey cap. We would scarcely manage to contain our giggles which continually
threatened to burst forth from our lips, at the sight of his oversized cap, repeatedly covering his eyes and nose in a very funny way. As a result, he had to adjust the naughty headgear many times.
All this, whilst he was trying to explain a delicate new strategy to combat the competition and its supposedly nefarious ways. We secretly wondered whether the opposite camp had presented him with that huge monkey cap, seemingly as a goodwill gesture, but actually designed to grossly slow him down!
Another boss was in the habit of travelling excessively, and at times he would take me along. Many a new destination was thus accessed for the first time by the lowly me, since the boss wanted an assistant during such tours! A third boss was in the habit of ordering a weekly lunch for the whole team from a café. This was a welcome treat in those bygone days, when we were generally not as spoilt as we are now, what with Zomato, Swiggy, et al, currently at our beck and call.
The thing about the boss-subordinate relationship that the junior must quickly infer is that the flow of power is one sided. Just as water flows downstream in the mountains, orders make themselves felt only in the direction of the lower rungs of the hierarchy. They emerge suddenly, or otherwise, from ‘above’, you see, and they are almost always to be complied with, pronto! Rare is the boss who understands that the mechanics of the system usually prevent the powerless ones from working at lightning speed. And the boss usually tends to rub it in by saying that he would have accomplished the said task in a jiffy in his junior days.
At home, there’s not much doubt about the identity of the boss, but then I’m not one who writes about wife-husband jokes! Outside the system the position of boss is a ‘free for all’ matter. Some might say that this is a ‘might is right’ era. But that was to be true of medieval times, was it not?
I am also informed that there is actually a World Bosses Day, which falls on October 16, annually. Not sure why they need it though. They seem to be riding high all the time!
