Dear bosses: Grow up or get lost

Let’s say someone at your office is annoying, unprofessional, and an overall pest. Now let’s say that someone is your boss — in fact, your two bosses. How do you curb their shenanigans and let the staff get real work done? In this case, by taking extra measures.

I worked for a small corporate office out west for a time, building and maintaining the LAN, machines, website, servers, and so on. It was a small shop and poorly run, so I also handled tons of tasks outside of IT.

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But the biggest problem at the company? The owners. They were flakes who had poor management skills, to put it mildly. To give you an example of their inefficient business practices, they would come to me each week with a grand new business plan that would take four to six months to implement and demand I start working on it immediately. A week later they ordered me to stop work and focus my attention on the next grand new plan instead.

My response to all of this, eventually, was to file each grand new plan for one week to see if it survived. If so, I would start working on it. None ever made it that far.

Just. Go. Away.

But they had another, even more annoying habit. They rarely showed up at the office, but when they did, they were disruptive to the entire organization. They’d roll in on random days, shouting and carrying on like teenagers, interrupting business and making a nuisance of themselves. Thankfully, they rarely stayed long. We dreaded their visits and preferred to be left alone to do our work.

Then they got the bright idea to outfit their office, so they could hang out and “help.” Each wanted a computer, of course.

They got to work outfitting their office space (complete with wet bar), and I started putting together their machines. Even before both projects were complete, they began coming in every day, making a mess with their micromanaging and distractions and driving employees to frustration.

A sound plan

I decided to turn their high school antics against them. When I built their machines I made sure they had speakers. I also set the Windows startup sound on each of their machines differently. Then I waited.

My desk was near their office door, which allowed me to hear what was going on in the office as they settled in for the day. I’d ignore the bootup sounds from the first boss’s computer, but when the second machine with a different audio file came online, I set my plan in motion. Across the corporate LAN, I used an old utility called syndrop on the first machine to crash his computer. Then that boss would reboot his machine and I would syndrop the second, and so forth.

Whenever one of them turned his machine on, the other’s computer would crash. Before long, they were yelling at each other, “Stop crashing my computer!” and fighting in their office, rather than going out on the floor and disturbing the employees.

It didn’t take much time on my part, and it kept them distracted and in their office, so we could get some actual work done. Surprisingly, they never asked me to figure out what was going on with their computers. They just assumed the other person was doing something to make their machines crash. Then they’d retreat to the wet bar and would often leave early, giving us peace.

This went on for about a month, then the situation worsened. These guys maintained multiple bank accounts for the business in question and started “forgetting” to transfer money into the payroll account on paydays.

At that point, I kept them distracted while people faxed resumes to potential employers and nailed down starting dates with other companies. My new job was the first to start out of the group. The owners actually seemed surprised when I marched in one day and gave notice. One of them even said, “You can’t leave! I won’t let you!”

But we did.

Last I heard, the business had been sold to someone who knew what he was doing and is now thriving, without distractions or disruptions or bounced paychecks — and a new, probably happier, staff.

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This story, “Dear bosses: Grow up or get lost,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.