Bad Bosses & Bed Bugs in New Beginnings

If I’ve been fortunate in any particular regard, it’s that I’ve never really had a bad boss. I’ve had bosses I weren’t crazy about, like the Winn-Dixie grocery store manager when I was a bagboy/cashier in high school. I remember him referring to a sign on the wall stating:

Rule 1: The customer is always right.
Rule 2: When in doubt, refer to rule #1

Then, of course, when a customer got upset when an item didn’t ring up at what he or she thought was the correct price, and I manually marked it down to what he or she contested it to be, the manager got mad at me for giving unauthorized discounts. I suppose the unwritten rule 3 would be, “Use latent mind reading powers to know when the manager wants you to ignore rules 1 & 2.” I wouldn’t consider him bad, though. What else should one expect at a throwaway after school job.

Mike Thurston, my first post collegiate boss, or rather my boss’s boss, wasn’t exactly a picnic. He was competent and friendly enough, but his sense of humor included using teasing as a form of affection. He thought it was amusing that I trained in martial arts as a hobby, so he would mimic “kung fu” hands and poses when the mood struck him. I still wouldn’t say he was bad, just a clash of personalities. He perhaps should have known how to read the room to tell who was okay with that kind of joking around and who found it hurtful or, in my case, annoying.

Of course, I didn’t appreciate my manager’s manager at my previous position screwing up my responsibilities, ignoring it, then covering it up when we had our audit. He was facing pressure from above him, so I can’t neccessarily fault him for what he did. I fault myself more for not standing up for myself (and tattling to the auditors when those above me concealed their screwup).

My current boss, the Dean of the business education program, may be the #1 contender for the bad boss title. He’s competent, and friendly enough, but his paranoia is great, and his memory is not. In my new position, I’ve been chastised for being too thorough in my email communications. We’re a state organization, which means all of our emails are public record, save the portions that include a student’s private information (phone number, home address, etc.). We had an issue with one of our adjuncts wanting to change a face-to-face lecture class to an online course because of the pandemic. To be eligible to take online classes, our students must maintain a GPA of at least 2.0. Dean asked me to check if those students in the f2f class had high enough GPAs, which some didn’t. I communicated in an email that we couldn’t turn that class in to the online format for that reason, and the Dean called me on the phone to fuss at me for communicating that information via email. Apparently, doing so was giving the adjunct ammunition to use against us because…well, I’m still not sure why. If the students don’t qualify for online classes , they don’t qualify for online classes. I know that, the Dean knows that, and the adjunct knows that, so what’s the problem.

Later on, I sent the Dean a preliminary version of the Spring course schedule. In it, I said that I only gave the aforementioned adjunct the online class was holding off on assigning the in-person class to him. I figured he wouldn’t want to teach in person again, which I said as much in the email. I knew I was in trouble when the phone rang almost immediately. I warned me again that I was giving this adjunct ammo to use against us for not assigning him the in-person class, which he said he didn’t want to teach. He then called to my attention that I had already been warned about not doing that and then accused me of trying to get him fired, so I could take his job. I would have been insulted had I not been so amused. My next stop is early retirement via financial self sustainability. I’m not chasing after where he’s at; he’s chasing after where I’ll soon be. I held off on telling him as much, but apologized again, assuring him that I would be more diligent in the future.

Just last week, I was teaching class. Specifically, I was hosting a review for the upcoming exam. I had already begun our review game and transitioned to game host mode, when one of the students came in late. The current school policy is that all students and faculty are required to where a mask in the class rooms, so of course this was the one time the student didn’t have his mask, and I didn’t recognize his error because I was focusing on the lecture. Of course, this was also the one time that the Dean just happened to pop in to check on things. I’m sure my mortification was readable on my face when I then noticed that this student wasn’t wearing a mask. Shortly after class adjourned and I was back in my office, Dean called me on the phone to chastise me for my blunder. Fair enough, it was my mistake and I should have caught it, but I’m not about to be faulted for mistakes I haven’t made. When he started to say that this was the second time this had happened in one of my classes, I had to interrupt. I was not confrontational, but I did politely ask him to clarify when that previous instance occurred because this was the only time all semester I had made this mistake, so naturally it would be the one time the Dean walked in on one of my classes (I didn’t say that last part). If there’s any positive, he seems the type to back off when I stand up for myself and can defend my position.

I’m going to have my first good night’s sleep in months tonight. A couple of months ago, I started waking up with a slightly itchy minor blotch on my skin. I didn’t think anything of it. I continued thinking nothing of it when the itchy blotches started to spread. I had been working in the yard (mowing, trimming, weeding), so I guessed I had come in contact with a plant to which I was having an allergic reaction. While changing my bed sheets one weekend, I saw it. The dead carcass, or molted exoskeleton, of some sort of bug. I looked up a picture of bed bugs online, and confirmed my culprit. The itch blotches were all on my fingers, shins, and feet, so I bought adult sized footy pajamas and tried sleeping with gloves on to isolate them from my body, but I forgot that footy pajamas come with flaps on their butts for dropping late night deuces. I think there might be bed bugs living inside my footy pajamas, now. Then I stumbled upon a bed bug mattress cover and interceptor cups, which I promptly bought.

I had previously thought that bedbugs lived inside the mattress and would crawl out of the interior at night to feed. Imagine my horror and disgust when I pulled the mattress of the frame to put on the cover, and discovered that they were nesting at the head of the bed. The corners of the mattress were all stained with the blood droppings. I must have pulled off 30 or 40 bed bugs from the head of the mattress and bed frame. I know squishing bugs with ones bare hands is gross, but I was so pissed my natural revulsion was suppressed by my desire for vengeance. Some of them were so fat with my blood, that when I dropped them in one of the interceptor cups, they couldn’t move. I gathered them all up in the cup, took them outside, and crushed them into paste (then washed my hands…outside at the hose, then once again inside).

I know that bedbugs can live for up to a year without feeding, which makes them so hard to eradicate. I think my plan for exterminating them is a good one. I tossed the old mattress and ordered a new one. While the new one was on its way, I bought an air mattress from Wal-Mart, and put my bed frame’s legs in the interceptor cups. I spent the past week sleeping on the floor to lure any remaining bedbugs out of the frame. I haven’t found any in the interceptor cups, so I’m guessing my bed is now clear. My new mattress arrived on Wednesday. It’s a memory foam mattress that was vacuum sealed, so I cut it out of the bag and let it expand for the previous three days per the instructions. Once it was fully expanded this morning, I put it in the mattress cover, and now have it on the bed frame. I’ve washed and dried my bedding, and bought new sheets, so I’m all clear to have my first good night’s rest in while now. I think I’ve developed a Pavlovian response so that anytime I’m in my bedroom, I start itching from habit. I’ll be checking those traps and the head of my mattress with obsession from now on, but tonight, I’ll likely fall asleep before my head hits the pillow.