eastern thinking

I have a new boss at work and at least at the present time I can safely say he's the worst boss I've ever had. I've had bosses who were assholes but never a boss who is an asshole and a micro manager. Without going into details, he has also said a number of humiliating things to me in meetings in front of my colleagues (I suspect, among other issues, he doesn't respect technical women, or maybe women at all). I would also mention that other colleagues are having, or have had, the same experience that I'm having.

So I will freely admit I've devised a number of ways to subtly torture him. He's asian and has a hard time pronouncing some words, so I ask questions which he has to answer using the hard to pronounce words, and then I ask him to repeat himself, saying that I can't understand him. Someone even suggested I change my name to "lobster claws".

I also send purposely complex emails to him because he has a tendency to cc everyone on the planet and make derogatory comments about what ever topic I've emailed him on in an attempt to make me look like an idiot. Unfortunately for him, his reading skills aren't great, so what ever he responds with is usually unrelated to what I've emailed him about (it can take up to an hour for me to craft these emails, putting in key trigger words that I know he wants to rant about but that turn out to be unrelated to the email topic). He's stopped ccing everyone or attacking me via email because people were responding to him "what are you talking about" or "I'm not sure why I was cced on this because it's not related to my work". Haha.

But then Friday night I was watching a PBS documentary about Buddha (my friend Jess was like "you are the only person I know who watches free public tv via a dvd you paid for from netflix"). I'd never really understood buddhism before but the documentary did a good job explaining it. The whole point, from what I could gather, is that you can't eliminate human suffering but you can decide how to respond to suffering (that's where meditation comes in). And I started to think about my boss and how maybe I need to have a better response instead of torturing him the way he tortures me. I'm going to try it starting Monday and see how it works out.

In the meantime, I was shoveling snow yesterday and my neighbor came out to talk to me and I told her about the Buddha documentary and she said "you should go to the buddha center because I think you'd make a great buddhist". So, maybe I will go and check it out. Should result in an adventure or two I think.