….The mice will at least calm down and not be so likely to have a heart attack. The boss is actually out for a week, so everyone is just sitting here calmly doing their jobs, except for me. But it’s cool – I’m on an official break.

Last week it was a different story....

My first mentor got a “red letter” saying that she had ignored somebody’s e-mail and then another one saying that her e-mail box was disorganized. My first mentor is not easily upset. She has a two year old. So she just calmly replied to the boss that she was absent the day the complainer first wrote but that she’d taken care of it. The she deleted every single thing in her “in” box. “Solved that problem” she said, calmly. I was impressed.

The next day Mr. Rookwood fairly came rushing into my cube. Depressed as he is, he never seems to hurry, or indeed even walk, but more to float in a gaunt, dispirited Dickensonian way through the office. But he was so angry he was actually able to let some of it out and I guess he came to tell me about it since I’m probably the only person in the building who actually listens to him, “You would not BELIEVE the e-mail she sent me!”

“Oh, I bet I would. But tell me.”

He’d accidentally messed up his phone message because he hadn’t used the program before. I don’t mean he messed it up in the kind of way that said, “Eff off you stupid people” – it just made it sound like he was in the office when he wasn’t. But he was so shocked and upset by the nasty tone of the e-mail that he approved one case, thinking it was another. The one he approved he really meant to decline – oops – and so he called the agent to try to sort it out. The agent didn’t want to hear it and sent an e-mail to the head honcho of the whole place and now poor Mr. Rookwood is up to his ass in alligators. This whole thing is an example of why, if you are a manger, it pays to be nice to people, because Mr. Rookwood would have never made such a serious mistake if he hadn’t been upset from being called on the carpet for such a minor one.

Well, as Mom used to say “When I’m Queen of the World things will be different!”