Bone In The Throat

All our lives are defined by patterns.

Some of us are more attuned to sensing and or seeing those patterns.

As a Software QA person, I honed that ability to a fine point.

Sometimes software demonstrates a highly repetitive defect in a very short period of time. At other times, a pattern of failure is demonstrated over a longer period of days, weeks, or months. A person like me, tends to start noticing patterns in everything around us.

We’re all familiar with fractal patterns whether we know it or not. The waves crashing on a beach and the water receding, the view of a hurricane from space, the form of a maple leaf.

Another pattern defined by math is the spiral of a nautilus shell. That pattern is seen in nature everywhere. A fern leaf getting ready to open, the nautilus shell, snail shells, usually demonstrate “The Golden Mean” mathematicians call it the Fibonacci sequence.

The point is, once you see the sequence, you can’t unsee it.

This is a brief view into how my head works. 

It’s not just math though. I’m not gifted with the ability to see equations like some people are. For me, doing math is actually kinda hard. But If I can see it represented in some kind of three dimensional space, I suddenly get it.

I suppose I’m more a creature of spacial equations than theoretical equations. A physicist can work out the math behind velocity, mass, gravity, and distance to tell that a monkey can leap the gap in between buildings, or from branch to branch.

The monkey, on the other hand, feels it and “knows” he’ll make the leap to the nice bit of fruit on the branch without a whiteboard. It’s instinct and spacial relationships.

People behave on the boundaries of chaos. Groups of people move and react in generally predictable ways, but when it comes down individual decisions people get very chaotic.

That being said, sometimes people are insanely, tediously predictable.

This appears to be the case with the other half’s employer. 

For the second time in 10 years a female boss appears to be drunk with power, feeling that she’s above reproach and deciding that the other half isn’t communicating.

The other half has responded by producing the emails, and text message exchanges. Instead of putting the issue to bed it’s only exacerbated the conflict. Now the boss is becoming more erratic, generating multiple changes in direction within a week, or day, not clearly communicating the changes and expecting people to read her mind.

I’ve seen this pattern before. In my own life with female bosses and in my other half’s previous female boss.

The pattern appears to be based in vengeance. It’s designed to create an overload of changes in hopes that the targeted individual or individuals will drop the ball and be demonstrably incompetent.

Incompetence equals unfit for job, which equals a termination offense. 

It’s a straight up process, and it works. All it takes is tenacity and the targeted individuals making mistakes.

The mistakes happen automatically because the boss is at the same time is usually haranguing the targets, increasing their stress and waiting for the targets to slip up, like a hungry shark in shallow water under a well greased bridge.

There are variations, of course but generally either the stress makes the target find another job, or they get fired.

One of the more common flourishes is to make sure that the target “fails” very publicly, securing the Bosses “High Ground” of righteous indignation.

It’s a similar system used by wives and mothers to “win” arguments with husbands and children. 

The only time I’ve ever beaten this system is by producing 5 different presentations and being able to give one of the five presentations to the boss at a moment’s notice. In that case the boss changed her mind 3 times in the conference room. My ability to produce whatever she wanted clearly irritated her. My “win” still cost me my job for being a smart ass.

Not to worry, she fired me, but one of her male colleagues hired me the same day. He & I worked well together for several years until the company was sold.

Essentially my experience in these situations has always been fatal. As such, I don’t fight the battle anymore. I save myself the stress and aggravation by finding another position. No win scenarios are pointless to fight.

When women are drunk on power, they’re egalitarian about how they abuse it.

Remarkably other women are less prepared to fight on equal terms than men.

For most men, it’s aggravating beyond belief (See American divorce rates). For women, it’s kinda like a double whammy. The women feel betrayed and aggravated. It makes women easier targets, because they do the wrong thing, & slip more easily off the greased bridge.

This of course makes finding new jobs more challenging. I’m not by nature a misogynist. When it comes to bosses I’ll always prefer to work for a man.

Things are just a whole lot easier.

All this is to say I’ve noted the pattern occurring with the other half, and yesterday I described my concern.

All I got from that was “I’ve noticed and thank you for your concern…”

Okay I’ve said my piece. Unfortunately, now the chips will fall where they may.