The Exit

In a scene that played out all too often at work, our boss began the morning by dismissing my coworker's efforts, continuing to work deeper until he was attacking her personally. Walking into my office with tears streaming down her face she finally said she was giving up. She couldn't take it any longer. And while we both had entertained the thought of quitting we didn't expect it to happen quite so soon.

He took perverse satisfaction in belittling those around him, whether they be employees or artisans. In fact, a good amount of our time was spent conducting damage control, repairing relations with the various vendors my boss treated poorly. Many times I wondered how he made it this far, attaining his level of success while severing so many relationships. When negotiating, the terms were always drawn up to benefit him, the risk was absorbed entirely by the vendor. There wasn't much in the way of mutual benefits. I suppose enough of them wanted access to his client list to put up with all his crap.

You would be criticized for not being civilized for not hanging up your coat in the morning. Yet he would take meetings while in his bathrobes. In the middle of said meetings, he would waste plenty of your time by taking phone calls, yet yell at you when you spent too much time away from your desk (even though we were discussing work related matters). When we approached him about operational issues his eyes would gloss over ignoring our requests for as long as possible hoping that they would resolve themselves. Yet when it came to issues of design, he would hover over you nitpicking every little detail. He chose what he could understand and ignored everything else. Guess that's the benefit of having employees, to do everything he didn't want to deal with.

Annoyingly, he enjoyed having an audience and unfortunately, when no acquaintances or suppliers were available, he made do with his employees. The same old spiel about how he helped Clinton win the presidency, how great of a photographer he was; or the many times he patted himself on his back while taking credit for the work or ideas of others was mind numbing.
In the end, I think he wants to be remembered (he's been trying to publish a book about his travels). There will be few who will definitely remember him but for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, my coworker and I left without giving any notice. He didn't deserve the two-weeks anyway. But to bring closure to this dark chapter in my life I am going to finish up the project I was working on, I think I'm pretty close to being done anyway.

To get you all caught up to speed, this all played out on Thursday morning. 10 minutes after I made my decision, I spoke with Kevin and asked him when his Nagano snowboard trip was. Turns out he was leaving the next morning. While I packed my things, Retardo did me a favor and looked up pricing for tickets to Japan leaving that night and the next morning. At around a grand roundtrip, it wasn't bad at all. My mother's travel agent couldn't beat the pricing so that afternoon the flight was booked via Expedia and twelve hours later I was on my way to JFK.

Tune in next time when I review Japan Airlines Flight 047 and my first impressions of the Land of the Rising Sun!