I feel extra sad. Not only am I googling "how to deal with control freaks", but half the advice is for abusive relationships. What makes it extra sad is that, if this were a relationship, I'd be out the door. Maybe if my theoretical controlling boyfriend was paying me I'd stick around, too.

Timelies all!

Juliebird, sorry that your boss is being ridiculous.

I also want to note, in the case of the control freak, that I am of team mentality. I was in the Army, I drank the "there is no I in TEAM" kool-aid. And when I was hired into this job, the job interview included the paraphrased statement of "we are a small staff, and wear many hats" and helping everyone do their jobs was always the modus operandi, even if we in the hort dept. became resigned to that not referring to us.

Now I'm dealing with a very we/us them mentality, which, in a staff of nine people, only five of whom are full-time, is frustrating. Our Executive Director mops the coffee splashes off the walls and sweeps. We help each other. And nobody helps weed the garden, and I'm copacetic with that. Because we are also the only department that has hundreds of volunteers doing our shit for free.

I feel like a double agent, or whatever the arrangement is, trying to be a team player and be a loyal subordinate within our department.

So sequestration is taking its first bite at work: all travel authorizations cancelled, our annual spring symposium cancelled, annual calibration workshop cancelled, and training money is probably going to be frozen. Could be worse, but the two big events are in-house run, and kinda a big deal to the community. Ah well.

I had this image of marijuana being grown in the basement of a school and that's how the school was being funded.

I did too.

Further, I expected you to be interviewed on "This American Life" about your drug enterprise.

Sheer genius. I bow to your brilliance.

So sequestration is taking its first bite at work

Ugh, sorry to hear that. Sequestration is going to blow.

Wow. I was just reading a website's relationship advice that made Cosmopolitan look like Dworkin, and then I hit (no pun intended) #6 on their list of how to make your man feel like a man. Revolutionary, man. And I thought giving him "free reign" would be all it took.

#6 on their list of how to make your man feel like a man.

Wow. Okay. I'm just going to drop a reference to The World According to Garp and back away slowly.

I was going to mention American Gods.

I'd love to believe that site is satire, but...yeah.

So, watching un-named thing on TV, and there is this exchange while trying to discern someone's motive:

"If you're a terrorist, that might be reason enough."
"He's not from the Middle East. Fair skin, fair hair--the kind of terrorist we should fear the most--one of us."

Now, I think that's a carelessly biased thing to say in the first place, but who replies to a non-fair-skinned non-fair-haired speaker by defining "us" Nordically and excluding the person you're responding to? Oh, right. Humans.

::sigh:: Back to road head.

#6 on their list of how to make your man feel like a man.

This kind of thing started a bad chain of events in Stephen King's Thinner