Be Careful What You Wish For

I have relearned a horrible truth. I should have kept my mouth shut because my life has become amazingly busy & none of it is fun.

My current supervisor is going to retire this Dec. The 31st is his last day. I am thrilled for him & all that hoopla. The problems lie in how it will be April before his replacement starts. So between now & then, his supervisor will be here and she is not my favorite personality type. My least favorite personality type is actually one of my employees. She is the passive aggressive/oblivious type with a dash of smug self righteousness thrown in to just grate. Since she also stinks of mothballs, I have a hard time dealing with her. Throw in the fact that my retiring supervisor has let her continue all of her bad behavior with nothing but occasional verbal warnings & "reviews" of her evaluations, and she has had no reason to change. So now that he is leaving, I now have to joy of dealing with her without any buffers. Since I also now have the authority to say "NO!" to her, there is going to be hell until all the little quirks are shifted out & I am sooo not looking forward to being the one to point out that, no, she can not rearrange the schedule just so that she can go see her daughter play soccer. Since I am understaffed even when everyone is healthy & there are no problems any more, this is going to be a big issue soon.

But my retiring bosses supervisor is the annoying type. I will be among the 1st to say that she is highly intelligent and has made several major improvements to the system and has made life vastly easier with her mania for rules and methods. However, she can not carry a thought to its conclusion to save her life. She has managed to tick off almost everyone I have dealt with within this organization. She has those annoying speech habits that are enough to have me screaming. If I hear, "the scoop is . . ." one more time, I will present her with a freaking ice cream scoop and say something snarky out of sheer rebellion.

My peer within the county & I had a meeting with her to discuss the changes that will take place in January, and she "closed" the meeting with a statement that bewildered & infuriated. Seems that she is grooming various individuals within the system to become leaders and she hopes to include us (though I think she really meant my peer & not me). She feels that leaders tend to be more people oriented and able to lead others to become even more outstanding than they already are. But as managers, all we do is take care of the building and let our supervisors and leaders handle the people.

She then continued to tell me that I was too negative - which I am but that is a matter of growing up in a catholic Italian household & serious trust issues - and that as a "devil's advocate" I needed to become more positive and stop questioning.

Can anyone guess why I am bewildered & infuriated? Especially since, up until now, I have not even spent 8 hours in contact of any sort with this woman over a 2 year period?

What makes these comments bearable is that my retiring boss (waah!) & several others have all pointed out that I do tend to have rather intelligent questions that require an acknowledgement that I do now how to think. Even worse, she has to acknowledge that I am as well educated as she is. Since that is not acceptable to her as an ALA accredited supervisor, then I am (obviously) a pesky thorn in her side. To compound my flaws, I am not a bubbly personality & lean more towards suspicious, anti-social, & generally ready to be stabbed in the back.

I am sure that this will all work out, but it is going to be a miserable few months until our replacement coordinator arrives.