According to the National Day Calendar, this is the day you should hug your boss. This made me look back on the many bosses I have worked for over the years. Taken all in all, I have been very lucky.
As a secretary in London I was nearly always late for work and had to pass my boss' office on the way to my own. We invariably had this conversation:
Me: 'Morning David'
David: 'You're fired!'
As you can tell, he was a lot of fun - as long as I did my work right, of course.
I had another boss who lived not too far from me and who was often late himself so he nearly always gave me a lift while pointing out to me that if he hadn't, I would be late.
As a very inexperienced typist in the typing pool of a large company in Dublin, I was asked to stand in for the Chairman's secretary for a week. She instilled into me the absolute necessity of watering all the plants both in her (luxurious) office and the Chairman's. I was so afraid of doing the wrong thing that I watered just about anything that stood in a pot. When she returned to the office she congratulated me on salvaging two plants which she had given up as dead and asked me how I had managed it. She hadn't time to chuck them out, she explained, and wasn't it lucky that I was so skilled at plant management. The Chairman was so impressed that he insisted I filled in for his secretary whenever she went on holidays after that. He was a gentleman of the old school, who felt I was overworked if he gave me more than three letters a day to type. Those were the days!!
Of course I have had some bad experiences, too. Everyone is only human, after all. I'd better not go into that, I think. Suffice it to say that my somewhat naive notion that the boss always knows best was shattered. As were my idealistic ideas that the boss is always fair and if you work hard you get rewarded. But this was all part of growing up.
So here's a toast to all bosses, the ones I worked for and liked and the ones that made me cringe. God bless them all!
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