CMcL

Tales of the BossLady are entries from a private journal I kept several years ago, documenting the whackadoodle antics of a frustrating boss I once had. Re-reading these entries makes me cringe a little at times; please don’t judge me too harshly. I’ve grown up a little since then, or so I dare to think.

For the past couple of weeks, BossLady has been conspicuously absent from the home office. I’ve neither seen nor spoken to her for several days. Presumably this is related to the blowup; I don’t know what she’s up to, which makes me apprehensive, but every day when I come in I see some evidence that she’s been there, usually changes to my spreadsheets or files saved according to her kooky filenaming system.

Also for the past couple of weeks, my overtime has been removed. Business has slowed down a bit, so they didn’t feel there was enough work for me to do to justify having me come in on Saturdays while it’s slow. This is good in that it gives me a whole weekend to relax, but bad in that I was really rocking those six or seven hours of OT every week, and also bad in that BossLady has a whole extra day to mess around with my files and rearrange things as she sees fit. Sigh.

Today being Monday, I walked in the door with my usual amount of trepidation, wondering what I’d find this time.

BossMan had a pile of paperwork for me, including some documents that he wanted me to overnight to some old lady in Ohio. He explained that they tried “all weekend” to email her the documents in .pdf format, as we usually do nowadays, but were repeatedly frustrated in their attempts.

When I saw the lady’s email address, I immediately knew why: She had WebTV.

I just laughed. Laughed and laughed and laughed.

As most technically-inclined people know, WebTV is for people who are too stupid to use AOL. WebTV users can’t do anything but surf the Web. On their TVs. They don’t have computers; they have devices connected to their TVs that let them look at Web pages and Web-based email. They can’t download files or receive attachments. WebTV is meant to be idiot-proof: If you’re the kind of person who opens suspicious emails and clicks unfamiliar popups, you’re the kind of person who needs to surf without a computer, because if you had a computer, you’d wreck it with trojans and malware in five minutes.

(Apparently, the newer versions of WebTV have a few more features that somehow allow you to open .pdf files and whatnot. But even in the unlikely event that this lady has one of those newer versions, I still wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to send her a .pdf to print out.)

BossLady not being around all the time has its perks, but it also makes me nervous — I’d rather see her and know she’s about to strike than wonder if she’s in the grass behind me. Or something. In any event, I have to admit I’m disappointed that BossLady wasn’t there this morning to tell me about her adventures in trying to email the WebTV lady. I’m quite sure she would have said something unintentionally hilarious, as usual.

As it is, I can only sit back and chuckle at the thought of her wasting hours and hours and hours trying to figure out why it wasn’t working:

“Maybe if I try saving it under a different filename…”

“Maybe if I send the attachment at higher compression…”

“Maybe if I upload it to a different directory…”

“Maybe if I reboot…”

“Maybe if I email from the laptop instead of the PC…”

“I wonder if the lady has Norton’s installed, that could be screwing up her email program…”

“She probably has a virus.”