Won’t Recant The Rant

I’m the supervisor in the prepress department of a small printing company. My now-long-gone supervisor used to storm in regularly and start screaming at me.

Supervisor: “Prepress has screwed up this job, and you need to figure out how it happened and make sure it never happens again!”

So I’d put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and chase down the history of the job (not really my job, but I’m really good at it) and twenty minutes later figure out that in 99% of cases it wasn’t the prepress department’s fault at all. In fact, a good 75% of them were this guy’s fault!

I’d show him the trail, and instead of apologizing for accusing us of something we weren’t responsible for, he’d just yell:

Supervisor: “Well, how am I supposed to know?”

Me: “Yes, exactly. Why would you know who the culprit is before we figured it out? And why would you repeatedly come in here and scream as though you know where the problem occurred instead of acting like, you know ‘We have an issue and I’d like your help figuring it out,’ when you know I’m just going to point out something you don’t want to hear?”

This happened so many times over the years that I quit caring about it.

Sometimes he’d tell me he needed a job fixed (not my fault, but he’d sure act like it was) and then instead of walking away and letting me take care of it, he’d stand over my shoulder yelling:

Supervisor: “We have a pressman out there with his thumb up his a** not doing anything, making [amount] per hour to stand around on the company’s dime while you guys are in here goofing off?”

This rant would continue the entire time I would work on the fix, and I heard the exact speech about three or four times a year in my tenure at the company.

Of course, this practice makes it darn near impossible to actually concentrate on fixing a (usually very complicated) problem.

He did this one too many times.

Supervisor: “Prepress screwed this up, and I need a new plate for the pressman!”

I pull up the job ticket to see what’s required, and he starts laying into me (again, not my fault, but he needs a whipping boy), and I turn to my computer, pull up a giant stopwatch on my monitor, and start it. Then I stop working and turn away from the computer to give him my undivided attention.

His eyes goggle.

Supervisor: “What are you doing?”

Me: “You say you want me to fix this job. But I can’t concentrate on it while you’re ranting. I’m not going to make a mistake, so you can run screaming in here again. Why don’t you get your rant out of your system so I can get a plate to the pressman so he can take his thumb out of his a** and actually do some work on the company’s dime?”

That’s the last time he ever read me that particular riot act speech but, unfortunately, he never learned that treating your coworkers like they’re your teammates would have given him much better results.