Work In The Mail Room, Run A Company

Remember the movie ‘The Secret of My Success’? It starred Michael J. Fox as recent college graduate from Kansas looking for work in New York City. Unable to land a job he settles for a job in the mail room of the company run by his ‘uncle.’ He eventually poses as a corporate executive leading to all kinds of fun and mayhem.

The thing about Fox’s character (Brantley Foster) is that he’s actually qualified for the job he’s pretending to occupy.

Here at psychotic headquarters, there are people in the mail room who are lucky to be qualified to operate machinery, yet they have major influence over how things are done around here.

The Psychotic clearly has issues with women. Being raised with just sisters and having nothing but daughters, to say nothing of the Mommy issues he must have, he has this drive to want to plug any decent looking woman around, but also takes whatever a woman tells him as gospel truth.

When they tell him something, especially when it comes to issues related to IT, the arms start waving. He’ll run to a person in IT and say, “So and so said her scanner has been making errors for 3 months now!!” When a look of incredulousness washes over the face of the person having their hair blown back by this latest eruption The Psychotic yelps, “Well that’s what they told me!!”

And that’s good enough for him.

Unfortunately, some pour soul is often sent back to deal with these people and come to find out the issue is relatively minor and really only happened once in the last 40 minutes. This info is reported back to The Psychotic who repeats (calmly this time) “Well….that’s what they told me.”

Of course, in a real company, the President wouldn’t be involving himself with such trivial issues. But he’s not happy unless he’s spreading misery.

Holidays? What Holidays?

Don’t you love it when somebody takes advantage of a situation? How about the economic times we live in?

You see, to The Psychotic, no pay increases since 2007 is not enough. Reducing everybody’s salary in the summer of 2009 by 5% is not enough. No, “these economic times” also call for eliminating paid holidays. The best part is how it was done.

You see, July 4th in 2010 was on a Sunday. As such, the holiday was scheduled for July 5th. Naturally, plenty of people scheduled off the previous Friday in order to have a long 4 day weekend. At 2:00pm on July 2nd, when people are already out of the office, The Psychotic decides to tell people that because of “these economic times” the July 4th holiday would not be a paid holiday. You either

A. Had to use vacation time
B. Go to work
C. Get docked for not working

Nice huh?

How is that followed up? Well The Psychotic wanted to be fair so about 2 weeks ago he sent out a memo giving us plenty of time to tell us he pretty much decided to jam it up our tailpipes and tell us that aside from a miracle, he’s going to eliminate the rest of the holidays for this year.

Including Thanksgiving.

Including Christmas.

He was kind enough to give everybody enough notice to “notify their families.”

What a guy.

James Lipton Interviews The Psychotic

Bravo television host James Lipton recently sat down with The Psychotic and asked him the same questions he asks everybody.

What is your favorite word?

“I” Or “Me.”

What is your least favorite word?

Vacation.

What turns you on?

Power. Women that work for me. Money.

What turns you off?

When the frigging people that work for me take days off, leave early or spill stuff on the carpet. Do you realize what it costs me to get that frigging carpet cleaned? I swear….

Sir, please. We must contin –

Don’t cut me off! Do you know who I am?

I’m sorry. Please. Can we continue?

Go ahead.

What sound or noise do you love?

I love the sound my money makes when I hug it.

What sound or noise do you hate?

When people open their damned paychecks every two weeks. More money that it costs me.

What is your favorite curse word?

I don’t have a favorite. I use them all.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

What sucks is, being a dictator these days isn’t as respectable as it used to be. Mussolini had style my friend. il Duce man. il Duce!

Ok, but I don’t think being a dictator is really a profession. Anything else?

Jeebus. You frigging asked me and I answered. Now I have to do it again? Fine. Tell that geezer Hugh Hefner he’s done.

What profession would you not like to do?

If it doesn’t pay a lot, give me access to available women and I’m not in charge, then I don’t want it.

Thank you sir. Now we’ll take questions from the students in the audience.

No. Look, I don’t have time for this, you know what I’m saying? I got people I need to kick in the butt. If these idiots out here want answers they can come and work for me and I’ll show them how things are supposed to be done. Just make sure you send enough hot women. I’m out.

Mine!

One time, The Psychotic wanted to get into a desk drawer of an employee after hours and hit the roof when he discovered the drawer was locked.

The next day he demanded to get copies of any keys people had for their desks. Why?

“Look, everything in the this go***mned office is mine! I can lock the drawers on my desk and take the keys with me. But there’s nothing in these other desks around this bulding that I don’t own!”

I’m In Charge Here!

There’s this great blog called Matchstic that deals with business, branding, etc. They have a hilarious post up today. Hilarious when thinking it could be applied to The Psychotic.

You see, ‘Ben’ is somebody The Psychotic admires before he undergoes his transformation. The Psychotic holds it up as a badge of honor that he’s considered to be a jerk. Let’s look at how TP (The Psychotic) would respond to their suggestions on change:

1. Listen to your customers & employees. What do they think of you?

“Listen to who? I run this company. Not my employees and not my customers. I don’t care what they think of me!”

2. Define what you want them to say about you and why they should choose you over any other.

Here’s what I want them to say: “How high?” when I say “Jump!” That’s all they need to say!

3. Design the way you interact with them that tells the story of how you want to be perceived.

Look, this is my company. What I say goes. You want a story? Here’s a story. “The Boss comes in. Tells people what to do. They do it. Or they get fired.” End of story.

4. Apply that to every single interaction.

Damn right. I’m not satisfied unless I see flames shooting out of everybody’s ass when they’re here.

5. Commit to setting the right perceptions knowing that perceptions shape behaviors which drive a companies results.

I tell the customers what they want to hear to get them off my back and then I leave it to the hired help to clean up my mess. That’s how I roll. I don’t give a rat’s rear end how I’m perceived after I land a new customer. When they’re a potential customer, we promise them the world. Never said ‘No’ to a potential customer because that’s just not good business.

Various Nuttiness

- We have a kitchen off to the side of our main conference room. He has a separate key for that kitchen. He doesn’t want anybody in there while he is out because he thinks people might take soda or water out of the small fridge that is in there.

– Speaking of which, he goes out and personally buys the soda, water and other items that go into that fridge so he can keep tabs on it.

– He’ll leave to go to a meeting somewhere and while a normal person, knowing they weren’t going to be done until 4:30 or so would just take their things with them and go straight home, not him. He’ll come back between 4:30-4:45 just to make sure nobody has left early.

– Similar to above when he’s not in the office, he’s sure to call in at 4:30-4:45 just to see if he can find out if somebody has left early.

– If he sees two people talking somewhere, he will always….always..make an excuse to walk over there either to listen or to interrupt the conversation. He is almost physically unable to walk past two people talking and not stop.

- Before we have customers come in, he walks around the office making sure nothing looks at all messy. He’s certain customers will tear up their contracts and run screaming out of the office if they see a ceiling tile out of place.

- He once said, “Don’t tell a customer we can’t do something. That’s not good business.” Apparently, lying to them is.

30 Years!

How do you validate yourself? How do you make others see your point of view?

A true leader will listen to all points of view. A true leader will not be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” A true leader has a vision and explains that vision to people to make them understand why that’s the direction he/she wants to go.

The psychotic on the other hand merely uses their position of authority to say, “My way or the highway.” They’re not interested in building a coalition. They’re not interested in leadership. They’re interested in power.

The psychotic believes that using the phrase, “I’ve been doing this for 30 years!” is the be-all, end-all of quotes to use when confronted with somebody they perceive is questioning their authority. He’ll use it even though he knows down deep, the idea the person he is speaking to brought up is superior to his own. That can’t happen. So instead of admitting somebody else thought of something better, he drops, “Look, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been doing this for 30 years.”

Funny thing is, I’ve been working here for over 10 years so he should be saying 40 years at this point, but I suspect if I remind him of that it would only remind him of how old he is and would get me in bigger trouble.

Interestingly, The Psychotic brought aboard a person at one point that was going to help with some project management. This man was semi-retired and had worked for a Fortune 50 company, running their South America operations. This man, was everything The Psychotic was not. He was the definitive leader. He didn’t understand the small intricacies of the operations he ran but he didn’t need to. He was smart enough to hire good people who knew all about that while he focused on the big picture. Suffice to say, this man wasn’t around as long as he thought he would be initially because he soon came to understand that his supposed friend (they were neighbors) was in fact, a psychotic.

One time, during a meeting somebody said something about a process and The Psychotic joked to The Good Leader, “What do we know, right Good Leader? We’ve only been doing this for 30 years. Ha ha. Ha ha.” The Good Leader was caught off guard and then said, “Oh…yeah. Right. Heh.” But you could see it on his face. He was thinking, “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

Don’t throw out your experience as a means of proving you’re right. You could have been doing it wrong for 30 years.