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Tales of the BossLady: Ancient Work-Related Journals from Beyond the Dawn of Time, which is to say back when Michael Jackson was roaming freely, the iPhone was still just a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eye, and Lindsay Lohan — well, actually, she was pretty screwed up, even back then.

(As a follow-up of sorts to the Passing The Torch story, I’d like to point out that since I took over the creation of our flyers (and started creating them in Microsoft Publisher rather than Word), we have gotten numerous compliments from associates and clients on their improved quality. BossLady, to her credit, conceded: “I guess you didn’t ruin it!” I love my job.)

BossMan and BossLady have two employees: me and my seldom-seen co-worker. My co-worker stuffs envelopes with our flyers and drops them off at the mailroom (that’s the thumbnail version of her job description, at any rate).

BossMan, BossLady, my co-worker, and I make up a “team” of four. Collectively, we’re known around the office as “The [BossMan] and [BossLady] Team.”

Today, a picture in the newspaper of another local real estate team inspired a priceless comment. See, this other team consists of seven people, but they’re doing miserable business when compared to ours. This other team, with a staff of seven, only has four current property listings — total value, about a million bucks. Whereas we, with a paltry four team members, have over forty listings totaling over $4 million in value.

BossLady gloated to the room at large that we’re doing four times better than a team twice as big, and opined that it’s because “we have technology.”

Yep, we sure do. Too bad all the technology is in your living room, covered with coffee-cup rings, instead of in a nice comfortable office with actual furniture.

Also on the theme of patting oneself on the back, BossMan received two complimentary emails today (and before you start thinking ill of me, let me point out that using BossMan’s email is explicitly part of my job, so I wasn’t “snooping”). One was from a lady who receives our junk mail:

“Just wanted to thank you for the flyer you send. It is very interesting and well prepared. I love the color photos.”

Later in the day, we received a response from a woman who has done business with us in the past, and with whom we were trying to cultivate more business. She declined to list her property with us, but closed her email with the following:

“You’re really great to keep in touch — and I love your website.”

As I’ve mentioned before, the flyers and the site are both my purview these days. Once upon a time, BossMan and/or BossLady would have made a point of telling me when people compliment my work, but alas, that is no longer the way. I get the impression, from certain sort-of-kidding-but-not-really remarks that BossLady has made, that she thinks if they praise me too much I’ll “get a big head.” I also get the impression, from other I’m-not-bitter-no-really-I’m-not-except-I-totally-am remarks from BossLady, that BossLady is a little bitter that I’m getting more praise for these things than she ever did when she was in charge of them.

The Tales of the BossLady are entries from an old journal I once kept, documenting the day-to-day goofery of working for an aggravating Realtor and her Realtor boyfriend. These anecdotes were all written several years ago; I’m a little older, a little wiser, and a little less full of myself these days, or so I dare to think.

Recently I managed to convince BossMan to let me start emailing .pdf files to people, rather than continue the sad practice of faxing a contract to one person, then having them fax it back to us so we can fax it to the other party and let them fax it back to us so we can fax it to the main office, and so on and so forth. After one or two faxes, these things become illegible and we were getting more and more complaints, so finally I started using Acrobat Distiller to create .pdf copies of various things, uploading them to our Web site, and emailing a link to the party who needs the document. We don’t email attachments because most ordinary people are either rightfully suspicious of attachments, or they can’t figure out how to open them. The concept of clicking a link is fairly simple and straightforward, and most people can figure it out.

There are, of course, a few exceptions, most notably from AOL users who aren’t able to click links in their emails because of the way AOL parses them. Most AOL users know, however, that it works this way and are able to grasp the concept of “copy and paste the link into your address bar.”

Unfortunately, there are a few simple souls, like an AOL user I spoke to yesterday, who can’t even get that far. Why these people have email in the first place, I have no idea, but I had to get on the phone and walk the customer through the lengthy and complicated process of retrieving the .pdf from the link I’d emailed him.

BossLady took this as yet another opportunity to harangue me about something that wasn’t really a persistent problem (really, maybe one out of every twenty emails we send results in a call from a confused user). She insisted that the links I was creating were “too complicated for stupid people.” She doesn’t want to waste time on explaining email links to people when we could, in her opinion, solve the problem by simplifying the filenames.

I name the files along these lines:
http://oursite.com/customername/LA_customername.pdf (“LA” stands for listing agreement, if you care) or
http://oursite.com/customername/offer_date.pdf
This allows me to keep track of what particular documents I’ve sent to which customers.

But BossLady explained her theory to me, at great length: When people have trouble opening these links, she said, they attempt to type them into the address bar themselves, but get confused by capital letters and underscores. She suggested — nay, insisted — that I start formatting the filenames thusly:
http://oursite.com/customername.pdf

BossLady is firmly convinced that this, and this alone, would eliminate the crushing tsunami of time-wasting phone calls from idiotic customers. She literally spent twenty minutes on this thesis.

Never mind the fact that no matter how simple the filename, this particular guy would not have been able to retrieve the document without my help because he was that clueless. Never mind the fact that filenames like the ones she insists on don’t tell you anything about what type of document you’re sending, which would make record-keeping a royal pain in the ass in the long run. A royal pain in my ass, to be specific, since I’m the one who does the work. And never mind the fact that calls of “I can’t open the link” are actually a very rare occurrence, and not something that happens more than once a month or so, if that.

This was just another case of BossLady attempting to sound like she knows what she’s doing and how to solve problems. I’ve noticed an increasingly desperate need on her part to assert BossLadyAuthority. She seems to feel that the best way to do this is to tell me how I’m doing something wrong at least once or twice a day.

I’m telling this story as a lead-in to a truly priceless comment that BossLady made after she was through lecturing me on how I was making things difficult for the non-Internet-savvy with my “complicated” filenames:

“Some of these people are pretty hopeless when it comes to technology.”

I replied, “…Yeah.”

I have since discovered a much better workaround for emailing AOL users: Use an HTML anchored link in the body of the email. (Not being an AOL user myself, I had to do a little research on the issue before the solution came to me. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t even come close to knowing everything.) I plan to start utilizing this method, rather than mangling my file naming system. I don’t plan on mentioning this to BossLady because it would take me forty-five minutes to explain the concept of “anchors” to her.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the less I actually say to BossLady, the less aggravation I’ll have to endure trying to ram a new concept into her skull. It’s similar to the “Just do it; it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” theory.

Tales of the BossLady are anecdotes I wrote several years ago when I was working for a, shall we say, rather eccentric woman in the real estate business. Though I have long since moved on, I present these little stories as I originally wrote them, in the present tense, as if I were still slaving under her kooky and mercurial whip.

BossLady rather abruptly started talking about Feng Shui one day. We’re still sitting around in our makeshift “office,” post-hurricane, watching boxes and file folders and other detritus build up around us, and one day she just…asks me if I know anything about Feng Shui.

I replied, truthfully, “Well, I know about it, but I don’t really know anything about it.” One of my relatives had expressed an interest in Feng Shui years ago, and I had gone with her to a Feng Shui store (yes, they exist). I know that it’s the art of object placement, and that certain colors of certain items in certain sections of certain rooms do different things to the energy, or something, when they’re facing a certain way. Or something.

Actually, I immediately started thinking of that episode of “Sealab 2021,” “Murphy Murph and the Feng Shui Bunch.” BossLady and Captain Murphy share some alarming similarities.

Anyway, BossLady said that she had heard a lot of great things about Feng Shui, so she ordered a course on it. She made a few noises about how she thought it might help the business. I said, “Mmmmmm,” for lack of anything better or more polite to say.

The following week, a box came to the house marked “FENG SHUI.” She was very excited when I told her the box had come (it was a really small box, about the size of a small town’s phone book, so I’m guessing the “course” consists of a small book and a CD-ROM or two), and I expected to have to listen to her yap about the Magic of the East and how it has So Much To Teach Us, but I never heard another word about it afterwards.

If she has since Feng Shuied the “office” in any way, it has been so subtle as to escape my notice.

Tales of the BossLady is a series of rantings and ramblings that I wrote several years ago. I was employed by a pair of Realtors, one of whom was relatively normal and one of whom was a constant source of eye-rolling, head-shaking, and double takes. I present these entries as they were originally written in my private journal, in the present tense and with all the geekier-than-thou superiority of my former self.

I was once asked (well, I partially volunteered) to make a system for BossMan and BossLady to keep track of certain sales leads in a certain way. Because I’ve got some experience in creating and maintaining databases online, I thought this would be relatively simple, but BossLady’s hosting provider is a little different from mine in how they set things up.

In an attempt to temporarily get away from making a lot of technical comments, let me tell this story via an analogy. It’s a food-related analogy that I think a lot of people would understand.

So let’s say, rather than an online system to track leads, I’m supposed to make a certain chili recipe. BossLady knows I’m good at this sort of thing, even though she has never made chili from scratch herself. (She always just buys the ready-made stuff.) And so I do my best to make the chili, but then I realize that I don’t have all the ingredients I need. So I say to her, “Well, I’ve got a problem here, I don’t have the right kind of beans to make this chili recipe.”

Her response will be, “There’s a can of tuna right here in the pantry.”

I’ll shake my head and go, “Huh?”

And she’ll repeat herself, “There’s a can of tuna right here, what’s the problem?”

Me: “That’s not what I mean, it’s the BEANS that I don’t have.”

BossLady: “If you don’t know how to open a can of tuna fish, I can show you.”

Me: “Huh?”

BossLady: “See, here’s the can opener, and you just open the can, and there’s your tuna, and you can add the mayonnaise and the relish, doesn’t matter which one you put in first…”

So I’m standing there, trying to make chili and knowing that I don’t have what I need, and here’s this person who I thought knew at least a little about the basic components of chili even if she can’t make it herself, and she’s my BOSS so I can’t just call her a moron and forget about it, but I can’t make chili with tuna either and I’m between a rock and a hard place.

Ultimately she decides that I’m the moron and makes her own stupid chili with tuna, and it sucks, but she’s proud of herself.

This happens all the time, except instead of beans versus tuna, it’s HTML versus DNS or Outlook versus network configuration.

The thing that really gets to me about these exchanges — and they really do happen with alarming frequency — is that she always makes those little comments like, “If you don’t know how to open a can of tuna, I can show you.” I don’t know if she really thinks I’m an idiot or she’s just puffing herself up so she can feel smarter. Considering the unfettered delight that she expresses whenever I actually do something wrong or don’t know something, I’m guessing it’s the latter.