Channeling the Inner Psycho

In any given situation, I make the perfect supervisor. I don’t pull rank. I don’t make demands, and if you do what you’re supposed to do, or at least look like you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, I don’t care. I’m pretty easy going, and at the place I work, there are three other people in my group who are fairly casual, or so I thought.

The assignment I gave my co-worker was simple, and I thought it would break up his usual, mundane routine. He is the department admin, and spends most of his days dealing with numbers and the software system, so when I pulled him in to help me with a component of an extravagant event I’m currently working on; I thought he would be cool and take to it.

All I wanted him to do was put together a simple 60-slide PowerPoint. This entailed getting photos (many of which I already had on file), and putting them into a presentation. The background of the PowerPoint was a little intricate, but he told me he had done websites, so I figured he was competent enough.

For the first few days, all was good. Due to our shitty, ancient work computers, he had to work on the PowerPoint at home, but the background to the presentation looked killer, so no one doubted his abilities. It came time to gather the photos for each slide when his inner psycho began to show. He demanded that I make a list and get the photos for him, which pissed me off. Like I said, I’m not one to pull rank, but in our department, I’m higher on the food chain than he is, plus I don’t appreciate anyone making demands on me.

Opting to keep the peace, I informed him that it was his duty to get the pictures, because he agreed to do the fucking PowerPoint. He quietly agreed, and began going home on a regular basis to work on the presentation. My supervisor and I became a little concerned when nine days stretched into 15 days.

When my supervisor, who is second down from the top, asked him where the presentation was at, his inner psycho revealed itself in a harsh way. He began yelling about how it was his project and when she continued to press him about what slide he was on, he was illusive and defensive.
At this point, it was up to me to take the bull by the horns. It was my event, so every project was inherently mine, plus unlike my supervisor, I knew PowerPoint, and I know that a simple, 60-slide presentation doesn’t take 15 days to complete.

I waited for him and confronted him about the PowerPoint. I was determined not to take, “I’ll show it to you when it’s finished” as an answer. I demanded to see the PowerPoint, and slowly he revealed the reason for booking nearly 40 hours of overtime. This fucking loon was actually emailing every website that had a photo he wanted to use and asking them for permission to use the photo, plus he wanted to have a selection of photos to choose from, so he would pull a minimum of ten photos per slide.

When I told him that he was wasting time, and demanded that he give me a disc with the PowerPoint, he got all Green River Killer on me, and snapped telling me that he wasn’t going to give me something that wasn’t done to his standards. Little did he know that he wasn’t dealing with some sweet, suburb mom, he was facing off with one hardcore bitch who was not about to have her ass handed to her by a fucking subordinate. Although he towered over me, I got in his face and told him he had one more weekend, and then he was done.

The next day, the number one guy in our department talked to him and got the same psycho defensiveness. Who knew that the sweet person who kept our data perfect would turn into a complete nut over a simple assignment and take it way out to left field. My supervisor and I are somewhat in awe about this person, although I have to admit that I kind of got a little bit of a weirdo vibe when I first met him. I inherited my grandfather’s sixth sense about people, so I knew there was something strange going on in the upstairs office, but I didn’t know the extent until I asked him to complete a simple PowerPoint.

I guess the lesson is never underestimating the ability of someone who seems normal to go completely psycho on you over a random request. The kicker is that today he asked me what I wanted him to do after he was done with the PowerPoint, I guess “fuck off and die” would have been completely inappropriate, but I would have felt a lot better. Instead, I just shook my head, smiled, and told him that he could go back to his normal duties. After all, I wasn’t going to be rude to him, or you probably would have seen some mug shot of him on CNN with blaring title “Workspace Killer” running underneath. The story would have started out with the chiseled newscaster dryly announcing, “It began with a simple request to see a completed PowerPoint, and ended in bloodshed…”