I am about to explode with my boss

[FuckingWonderwoman]

I am feeling stabby and want to kill him. Several weeks ago, he asked me and a colleague to organise an awayday for our team. He said it should build on the last one. OK, we said, we can do that, but people will want some fun activities as well. He, and another colleague, have emailed us a vast list of "helpful" suggestions as to what we might do on the awayday. We realised there were some politics here, so said yes, how helpful, we will look at these and see what we can come up with.

We came up with several options for the day using the Shit Sandwich approach - a fun, team building warm up exercise, which will take around 45 minutes, then a quick coffee break, and onto the next exercise, which is his serious work one, finishing with a fun, but relevant activity after lunch.

He has vetoed every single fucking suggestion we have come up with, both for the fun activities and the serious bit in the middle. We are now a week away from the awayday, and I cannot tell you how much time we have wasted on this, as he won't consider ideas, but wants concrete plans, set out in writing.

We have come up with what we thought was a good plan, still using the Shit Sandwich approach. I have emailed him to tell him our latest suggestion which is exactly what he said he wanted for the serious bit. I have said that I don't want to divulge details of the two "fun" exercises, as it is important that everyone comes at these "blind" and doesn't have time to think about them.

I've just got an email (yes, sent this evening). He has vetoed our serious activity and has said we don't seem to have thought about Susan's suggestions. We did think about them, but Susan is as mad as a box of frogs and her suggestions were too. He has also vetoed our "fun" parts to the day, unless we can tell him concretely what they involve.

We have one week to go.

AIBU to tell him to shove the whole thing up his arse and he and Susan can come up with something between them.

And then to crack his fucking head open with an axe and leave the building?

[Grincherella]

Never was a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau more well-earned. Gwan, have another one.

[CointreauVersial]

Wow, you really did run it up the flagpole to see who saluted. Then you picked up the cliche and ran with it. Just keep pushing the peanut forward.

[ThinkAboutItTomorrow]

flow er, how did the managers take that? Was there a real tumbleweed moment when they showed the puppets off?

[flow4]

Actually, it wasn't too bad, Think. There was a lot of good humour - and when I thought about it, I decided that staff simply wouldn't feel safe to make that sort of model if they didn't basically trust their management. There was an open, heated and critical discussion afterwards, which was uncomfortable but useful. If managers are really committed to improvement, they have to get brave about criticism!

[LineRunner]

So that's all good, then. Moving forward.

[BonzoDooDah]

Bloody brilliant! This has made me smile so much!!

[edam]

Excellent, ruddy well done that woman (and Keith)! Loving your work: wang theory and the Chinese five year cycle.

Flow, love your paper plate people but interesting you say that about Myers-Briggs, I've always thought it was exactly like horoscopes. I scoffed at it the first training course I went on, then the trainer pointed out they were a mother-daughter team and I thought that was quite interesting (but perhaps the trainer was lying and had merely spotted what would make me interested in it...).

[KenDoddsDadsDog]

You totally caught the low hanging fruit on the tree there! Now turn it into

[NotQuintAtAllOhNo]

Excellent.

What do you think will happen when your boss sits down tonight to google Wang's Theorum ?

Will he find this thread?

[NotQuintAtAllOhNo]

Oh boy.


Wang?s Theorem characterises the set of invariant connections on a principal fibre
bundle. Here the point of the theorem is illustrated via an example.

1. Setup
   

Let us define the ingredients for the example we use to illustrate Wang?s Theorem.
1.1. The frame bundle of R
n
. We consider the principal bundle L(R
n
), the frame
bundle of R
n
. Thus a point in L(R
n
) is a basis {X1, . . . ,Xn} for the tangent space TxR
n
at some x ∈ R
n
. We use the natural identification of TxR
n
with R
n
so that we think of
X1, . . . ,Xn ∈ R
n
. We use this same identification to allow us to write L(R
n
) as a product:
L(R
n
) = R
n × GL(n; R). Let us recall how this is done, explicitly. If {X1, . . . ,Xn} is a
basis for TxR
n
then we write
Xj =
Xn
k=1
a
k
j
∂
∂xk
, j ∈ {1, . . . , n},
defining some unique matrix a ∈ GL(n; R
n
) by a(j, k) = a
j
k
, j, k ∈ {1, . . . , n}. We then
make the identification
L(R
n
) ∋ {X1, . . . ,Xn} ≃ (x, a) ∈ R
n
× GL(n; R).
The principal GL(n; R)-bundle structure of L(R
n
) is then defined as follows. For (x, a) ∈
L(R
n
) and for b ∈ GL(n; R) define
(x, a)b = (x, ab).
Summarising, in the language of Kobayashi and Nomizu [1963], we have a principal fibre
bundle P(M,G) with P = L(R
n
), M = R
n
, and G = GL(n; R).
1.2. The canonical flat connection on L(R
n
). Let us define a gl(n; R)-valued oneform on L(R
n
). First let us represent points in T(L(R
n
)) in a convenient way, using the
identifications above. We have
L(R
n
) ≃ R
n
× GL(n; R)
=⇒ T(L(R
n
)) ≃ (R
n
× GL(n; R)) × (R
n
⊕ L(R
n
; R
n
))

[NotQuintAtAllOhNo]

Or a different Wang I hope.

[Felicitywascold]

My favourite 'away day' memory is from when I worked for a boss who had swallowed an 80s management dictionary and got stuck in the decade for good measure- I mean the man couldn't hold a conversation without using the word 'synergy' at least twice.

He had us literally doing 'blue sky thinking'. I mean we had to literally draw a beach scene with a wave and a big blue sky and then add labels and pictures to it to describe where the company was now, and then on the crest of the wave where we wanted to be in five years, huge piece of paper stuck on the wall.

One of our more earnest colleagues drew a seagull in the blue sky and described it shitting on the wave and the surfers (workers -us). He then explained earnestly that he felt our boss was the seagull.

I still nearly hyperventilate at the awkwardness and suppressed laughter. Best. Awkward. Work. Moment. EVER.

[Zorayda]

Brilliant! Loving Wang theory... well done to both of you - I'd love to have either or both of you pitching with me!

[cerealqueen]

Great story. Your boss is a lazy fucker though. He is the manager and should be doing this stuff for his team. Part of the territory.

[riveroise]

I reckon "Wangs Theorum" is where you get out your Casio calculator, tap on the keys and display the word "bollocks"

[SminkoPinko]

lolololol @ the seagull boss shitting in the surfer workers. Thank goodness I wasn't there. I would have had to leave the room to cry with laughter.

[FuckingWonderwoman]

I hate to come back to this thread, but he came back to me today on the catering (which I thought was all done and dusted) and said he thought it was a bit expensive. He wanted me to buy bread, butter, ham and cheese on my way in, and we could have a "team building session" making the lunch.

I laughed hysterically and told him that we would have to cancel the caterers and pay full price anyway (he has already moved the date of the awayday, so we have inconvenienced them once already - it is now happening this week). He has still asked me to cost out making sandwiches, and to ask the caterers to waive the cost if he cancels at short notice. He is living in La La Land, isn't he?

[AwkwardSquad]

This is making me think wistfully of that Armstrong and Miller sketch - the one where Armstrong is terribly pleasant to some hapless fool and then when they leave, he presses the 'kill them' button...

[Bobyan]

What a knob. You have my sympathies!

[DeckSwabber]

Make sure that when you cost up the change of menu you include your hourly rate for the time it has taken you.

What a draining person he must be to have around.

[BRANdishingMistletoe]

Now is the time for gaslighting, just serve the catered lunch and deny ever having had that conversation with him.

[DeckSwabber]

What a therapeutic thread.

Feeling pretty stabby myself.

[motherinferior]

He wants you to do his fucking shopping for him???????

[FryOneFatManic]

Your boss could ask the caterers all he likes about waiving the cost if he cancels at short notice, but from bitter experience, they will still charge full whack even if cancelled.

Definitely he's living in la la land.

[DeckSwabber]

I can see that your boss doesn't think of you as part of his 'team' at all.

He clearly wants this task to fail and by the sounds of it he wants to pin it on you.