the blowhard

I can hear him down the hall (but only after 10:30am), voice booming through a conversation about nothing relevant to business. Next comes the requisite, spurious laughter, which is perpetually too enthusiastic for the subject at hand. He sweeps through the halls with his Nordic smile and perfect hair wave and then all but disappears for the rest of the day. Sometimes he comes over and sucks a half hour out of a random person for a "get-to-know-you" moment, but you can see in his face, you might as well be standing there saying blah, blah, blah. Nothin' you say is gonna stick.

Occasionally he will come back from an afternoon "meeting" freshly shorn or with a new and fun array of gadgets. He will also occasionally grace an actual meeting with my comrades and I, feeling fantastic about himself for having shown up. All of those things, while grating, are tolerable. It's when he starts talking in those meetings that I really start to bristle.

He begins to speak and it's like he grows....upward and outward, right before your very eyes. He inflates like Dig-Dug, seizes a moment and booms with all his might about productivity and responsibility and support and diligence. He talks about "putting in the hours" and passion for one's work and he glances softly up into the distance, as if seeing a vision of what is and will be. Sometimes he'll even lob out a threat, cleverly disguised as a "motivational" comment and finally, he will charge the group to go out there and giterdun.

What he doesn't take into account however, is that the do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do system only works on people in their pre-teen years. Mister Blowhard, we all know what time you come in, what time you leave and how many Fridays you take off. We are all aware that when you are in your office, behind closed doors, you are calling the pool company or the maid service or your architect to help you design a new hallway bath, that will look better than your next door neighbor's.

Your words fall on deaf ears because they mean nothing to those of us who make 1/5th your salary, but work twice your hours, hammering away to feed the machine. You are the one, despite your trumpeting and feigned inspirational monologues, who elicits the acidic review in the pantry because you are full of hot air and as you blow it all out on your lemmings, you dry up their patience and respect.

Ever wonder why it's hard to find good people, but even harder to keep them?