Unsent Dick(head)

Yo, Dick.  Dickhead.  Dickwad.  Dicksucker.  Fucking dickhole. 

What a convenient name you have, Dick.  It seems more appropriate now than ever and I’m sure there are lots of people out there who appreciate the plethora of variations available with your simple monosyllabic name.  Namely, anyone who’s had the tragic misfortune of having worked for you at any point during your power hungry struggle to the middle.

A master of overselling and under-delivering.  That’s what you did when I met you.  You seemed all calm and cool and collected during your interview of me.  Ideas flying.  You reminded me of Alan Alda.  You still do, but no longer of the warm and fuzzy MASH style Alda.  No.  Now you’re the conniving son-of-a-bitch psycho Alda like the character he played in “Aviator”. 

And I liked you.  Indeed, you were one of the key reasons I took that job.  I’m already in good with the CEO, I thought.  Though I hated reporting to Joe.  Okay, maybe “hate” is too strong a word, but he skeeved me out.  Though very well-presented and tidy, he looked like the kind of guy who, if he missed just one day of bathing, he’d reek of some foul alien odor and maggots would be nesting in his crevices.  And if he gave me one more impromptu five-minute shoulder massage, he was going to come back with two bloody stumps. 

Joe left only a few weeks after I showed up, four months after he showed up.  Four months!  I knew something was more than a bit off there, but I figured it was Joe.  But it’s not.  It’s you.  I didn’t realize it until I began reporting to you.

Yes, you.  In utter and complete admiration of everything I did.  I was your new hero.  I didn’t know at the time that you had been through four – count them 1-2-3-4 – people in my position in just eighteen months.  Four!  When I asked at the interview why you were hiring, you all played it off as if you’d never had anyone in the role.  Fucking liars, the lot. You hire and fire people in less time than it takes to bend over to take one for the team.  And here I am now, another casualty.

Remember after my big kickoff meeting?  When you told me, “You get it… and we don’t?”  A group of us were sitting at that café.  Sipping stiff drinks.  And I told you (two drinks later) there is no reason for everyone in the company to think you’re an ass (which they do, by the way), because you aren’t.  Remember that?  We all had a good laugh about that. 

I didn’t know at the time how you operated.  How one minute you’re all gung-ho about someone and his work, and one little imagined misstep sends you into some unmentionable realm where your head starts spinning around and you vomit green paste.  That’s why they think you’re a schmuck.  I do “get it”.  Now.

Christ, you talked a lot about “getting it”.  He gets it, she doesn’t.  Blah blah blah.  The thing is, “it” changes from day to day with you and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that someone who gets “it” doesn’t redefine “it” every time he reads or hears something that conflicts with “it”. 

Some dude from some Fortune 25 walks in and suggests blah is a waste of time two days after you told me to become the blah expert.  If you want to take it on, take it on, you said.  You even drew a diagram on my grease board.  But there you are, two days later, nodding your head at Big Important Fortune 25 Man and thinking to yourself, “Yeah… that person doesn’t ‘get it.’” Then you rush off to human resources to see how quickly you can get her off the property.

And two weeks before that, you told me, while sipping wine in a bar five minutes after telling my 20-year-old employee that you’re promoting her and moving her to Sydney to be solely responsible for opening your new office there, that you hate the work I’ve been doing and you’re not sure it’s going to work out with me. And my now-ex-employee is sitting right there! 

But that’s how you operate. With that strange power balance combined with embarrassing communication skills.  Announcing the sale of the company by email.  Not reading my business plan and telling me this while in a meeting with senior leadership six weeks after I began executing on it.  Dismissive, “No, I never got around to reading that.”  As if here we are with all of the important people in the company and I’m going to let you all know how worthless I think you are while we’re all sitting here nice and comfy. I told you exactly what I was going to do but you ignored it then and circled back a month later to insult me in front of colleagues and say I’m not doing what you wanted.

Instead of telling them what you want from them, you kick them to the curb for not somehow telepathically sucking information from your brain and regurgitating what you’ve been imagining. 

No wonder 80% of the leadership staff is six months old.

If I cared about your business, it would be interesting to see what happens to you after the sale of the company is complete.  Those people don’t know what they’re in for any more than I did.

But I don’t care.  So I guess I’ll never know.

(2002)