Managing your superior

My mentally-broken superior was hiding, or was taking the day off, or something. All I know is that she wasn’t responding to messages. And I know she sees her messages no matter what. (It turns out that she was taking a “sick day” without telling anyone, so that she could take her offspring to their first day of school in the new school year. When I want a day off, I can just generate a random physical ailment, without the hassle of offspring.)

Meanwhile, clients were badgering her (and me) to make commitments on service dates. I had no information… I’ve just come off a long project, and since the servers and data have all been moved around (and in some cases, lost completely), I don’t know where the central “project board” is kept anymore. I think it’s been lost along with a lot of other data that my superior claims was lost due to a lightning strike. Whatever. I don’t run the physical plant, she does. But that is why I keep a copy of everything I come across. You never know when you’ll need it again, or when suddenly your copy will become the only copy.

So, after a long day of no response from my superior, I simply began responding to the clients and telling them what I think our availability is, and asking them what their preferences were.

That quickly got a response from my superior, who then sent a global message to me and to the clients, saying that we had even more requests for service than I knew about, and saying that we’d get back to them.

When your superior refuses to do anything, start doing their job for them, in a public way that people will notice. It may shame your superior into doing her job so that you can’t take the credit for doing it. It may also earn you a reprimand, but in my case, reprimands don’t really matter, since I am her lead agent.

We’ll see what happens next.