I hope your email is the smack-upside-the-head by reality that your boss needs.

all this nonsense that Nora and Sophia are seeing now makes m so grateful that my boss is 15 minuets across town. And she only stops by when she has to. Granted, when I ask what I think is a simple question 500 people get involved and I get a non-answer, but the stupid stuff is minimal.

The thing I don't understand is why my boss thinks that if I am not flipping out like a mammal, I am not actually doing anything.

"Be hyper and/or stressed" isn't in your job description?

That completely sucks, Nora. Completely.

R (my direct report) always laughs when work comes in that is going to be craptastically tedious because I'll tell him, "you're gonna need your iPod for this, and at a minimum, you'll need to create some of your own cuss words because the ones at your ready disposal won't be sufficient. I expect to hear them uttered at least once every 15 minutes."

The thing that does take some managing, especially when I had a group of 5 people, was when our tedious work was made 15000 times worse because someone in another department couldn't be arsed to do his or her work correctly, and the company was on a deadline so we couldn't just push it back to them. And often, because we're so small, we had MDs inserting tables in Word (which is not the best use of their time, but they're trying to help)without using the correct template, and therefore screwing up the whole doc, which would then take hours or days to fix. Anyway, keeping morale high when shit like that happened all the time was a challenge.

Which has nothing to do with Nora having to trek out in sleet because her asshat boss can't manage his own finances well enough to not need a payday advance!!!

Maybe its an efficiency thing. If you're not frantic clearly you could be doing more.

Trudy, that's probably a lot of it. Whereas I, if I see a frantic employee, immediately know I am not doing my job managing this person very well.

t feels the need to change careers again and move back to Cali to work for java

The penalty I paid for not showing stress was to get pushed into high stress situations. I wasn't sure how to explain I was feeling stress, I just didn't think it appropriate to show it like my co-workers did. But at my first Cali job I got all the stressful business users because I was always laid back. I think I took too much of that into my last job.

I'm so not laid back now, but I'm still refusing to act stressed. I'll just speak up before it gets to that point, as politely as I can.

t falls in love with javachick

Aims, I think it's time you had some of your own employees, because you have the smarts and the empathy required of a good boss.

ita, you're right. There is definitely the fine line of showing stress or not, and the results. That's a lesson I had to learn, and am still learning. I learned a long time ago that flailing the stress didn't do anybody any good, but I've also learned how to say "no", or at least calmly describe the projects I already have (and the repercussions) when I can sense that I am about to be overloaded.

Trudy, you're sweet.

Seriously, though, there aren't a lot of situations, as a manager, that just having actual compassion and a bit of humor can't resolve. And I have found that my willingness and tendency to jump in and take on the worst of the work (not all of the time, but when circumstance allows) goes a loooooooong way.