In September of 2002, I took a job as the webmaster for the government of a nearby city.

My boss, the head of the city’s IT department, was a pony-tailed, marginally competent sad-sack, the kind of guy who spent his life trying to live up to his memories of Woodstock, even though he was only in 3^rd grade at the time. Stoner, as I’ll call him, was the worst boss I’ve ever had.

The day I started, I set out (with Stoner’s blessing) to radically revamp the city’s website. I met with various city managers and other key employees to gather requirements for the site, and then started building out the site.

Most of the project was what you would call a “back-end” redesign; that is, my job was primarily to fix the underlying structure of the site, not to make it pretty. But as you know, I’m also something of a graphics guy, and the site definitely needed a facelift as well. Like it or not, it’s a fundamental fact that people do judge books by their covers – you can tell people about all the wonderful improvements you’ve made to their web site, but they aren’t likely to be impressed unless it looks different. So as part of the project, I also redesigned the look of the site.

As I neared completion on the redesign, I did a demo for Stoner. He was thrilled with the back end changes, but seemed concerned about the look of the site. The problem, he said, was that any significant design changes would have to be approved by the city council.

Ok, I said. So do we have to present it to the council? I’ll be happy to go to the next meeting, if that’s what I need to do. He said he would try to get a demo on the agenda.

A few days later I asked if he had been able to get the web site demo on the agenda. Not this time, he said. Maybe next month. I was a little puzzled by his hesitancy to commit to taking any action, but I figured he just had a lot of other stuff going on.

Around this time I started to become aware of a lot of low grade grumbling about Stoner from the other employees in the IT department. I got the impression that he wasn’t well liked or respected by the people who reported to him. Still, I hadn’t experienced any serious problems myself, so I reserved judgment.

I moved on to another project, meanwhile continuing to occasionally ask Stoner about the status of the council meeting demo. Several weeks past, with city council approval of the design the only thing holding up the site redesign.

Then one day I was meeting with the city’s director of economic development when she asked what was going on with the web site redesign. When I told her about the holdup with the council, she laughed. “The city council has never had anything to do with approving changes to the web site,” she said.

I called another person who attended all the council meetings, and she confirmed what I had been told: it wasn’t the city council’s job to approve design changes, and Stoner knew it. What the hell? Why would he have made up something like that?

I went into Stoner’s office and told him what the economic development director had said. He hemmed and hawed for a bit, and then finally admitted the truth.

“I don’t like the design,” he said.

I was rendered nearly speechless. Stoner had stalled the entire web site project for six weeks with a ridiculous lie because he was afraid to tell me he didn’t like my design work. Now I know I look like a total badass on my blog template, but in real life I’m hardly intimidating. It’s pretty much inconceivable that someone (particularly my manager) would be afraid to give me some criticism on my design work. What did he think I would do? Burst into tears? Walk out? I can’t even imagine what was going through his head.

The thing is, design is inherently subjective. Anyone who has done design work has had the experience of creating what he or she thinks is a fantastic design only to have the client pooh-pooh it because they don’t like that shade of green. If Stoner had just said, “The back end is great, but the design blows,” I would have been disappointed for about 30 seconds and then scrapped the design and started over.

But not after six weeks of unnecessary delays. I don’t like being jerked around and lied to. You had your chance to give me your input on the design, I thought. Screw you. This is the design.

“Ok,” I said. “You don’t like the design. Obviously I do like it. But you and I aren’t the end users. We’re not the ones who really matter. Why don’t we send the design out to all the stakeholders in this project and ask for their feedback?”

He could hardly say no to that. So I wrote up a very diplomatic, even-handed email asking for feedback on the design. The response, as I expected, was overwhelmingly favorable. Everybody liked my design better than the old one. The new web site was launched, complete with my design.

Now a smart manager would have been happy with a win for his department, regardless of whose idea the design was. A particularly cagey manager might even have found a way to take credit for the design that he fought against. In retrospect, I don’t think either of those options even occurred to Stoner. He was too busy seething over the fact that I had made a fool out of him in front of his department. They already didn’t respect him, and now this.

Oblivious to Stoner’s fragile mental state, I continued to work on other projects. I had been meeting with the economic development director about the creation of an interactive web-based map that businesses could use to find office space within the city. This project had languished for over a year with little progress because no one involved had the technical expertise to make it work. Now, after three weeks on the project, I had built a rough prototype of the application. I sent an email to Stoner apprising him of the progress, and included a link to the development copy of the application so that he could see for himself.

Unknown to me, Stoner set up a demo of the application with his manager, a bigwig with a title like manager of city services or something. Now demo-ing a development copy of an application is iffy at best. Demo-ing a development copy of an application without telling the developer what you’re doing is like driving a random car off the blocks at your mechanic’s shop without telling the mechanic. You’d have to be borderline retarded.

Predictably, the application broke during this unplanned demo, and Stoner ended up looking like an idiot in front of his manager. After the meeting, Mr. I’m Afraid to Tell You I Don’t Like The Design stomped up to my desk in a rage, telling me that I had just made a fool of him. “Do you even bother to test your work?” He demanded.

This time I really was speechless. Was he serious? Was it possible for someone to be that stupid? I just sat there, dumbfounded. What did he expect me to do, test the code before I wrote it?

Soon after this outburst, he left for the day. Now as it happened, this was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, so the office would be closed until Monday. I stayed at my desk late that evening, fuming about Stoner’s absurd tirade. I should have let it go, but I knew that Stoner’s words would be echoing through my head for the next five days if I didn’t do something.

So I shot off an email to him, noting that I had specifically told him that what I had sent him was a link to a development copy of the application, and that it was unrealistic to expect an early prototype to work perfectly, especially considering that I was working on the code while he was doing the demo. I brought up the fact that under his leadership the project had gone exactly nowhere for over a year, whereas I had made significant progress in only three weeks. I closed the email with the observation that every failure related to this project had a single point of commonality: him.

In hindsight, it should have been clear to me that Stoner was a psychologically unstable individual. I should have known that my email would set him off. I mean, hell, even a well adjusted person doesn’t like being told he’s an idiot. But I foolishly believed that he was, at some level, a rational individual who would act in his own self-interest. With the amount of recognition that Stoner was getting for my efforts, it would have been insane for him to fire me, no matter how much he personally disliked me. I thought he would read the email and think, “Damn, I’ve pissed this guy off. I need to back off or he’s going to quit.”

But here’s the lesson: Stupidity trumps self-interest. If you have a choice between working for a stupid person or an evil person, pick evil. Evil people are predictable. They won’t screw you unless it does them some good to screw you. Stupid people will screw you because they couldn’t figure out what else to do. And stupid people who are paranoid from smoking way too much pot are even worse.

I came in the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend to find that I had been locked out of my computer. That’s how I discovered I had been fired. Stoner’s door was closed, and he wouldn’t answer when I knocked. Finally, after an hour of sitting at my desk wondering if I should just pack up and go home, he called me into his office.

“I have to let you go,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“The official reason is ‘no reason,’” he replied. I was still on a probation period, so he could fire me for ‘no reason.’ Presumably firing me for a reason would have caused all sorts of havoc.

“Would this have anything to do with a certain email I sent last Wednesday?”

“It might,” he admitted.

I eventually gathered from his comments that he thought there was a “conspiracy” against him in his department. He couldn’t easily fire any of the other conspirators, but he could get rid of me.

The sad thing is that he was right: There was a conspiracy against him. Unfortunately for him, the conspiracy consisted of everyone who worked for him. His employees had long since tired of his unstable behavior and capricious management style, and had been plotting to get him replaced. As a conscientious employee who did my best to stay out of office politics, I was actually the closest thing that he had to an ally. And he had just fired me.

I’d like to report that Stoner eventually became a victim of his own delusions and got fired. I would have wagered that he’d have been out on his ass within six months. Unfortunately, a Google search reveals that he’s still there, five years later.

So I suppose the real moral of this story is that paranoia and rampant stupidity are no barrier to a long and prosperous career in local government. Go figure.

Labels: Jerks, Work