R.I.P. Boss From The Eighth Circle of Hell

Back in the 1990s I worked as a graphic designer at a marketing agency, for a rather colorful Boss. A Boss who knew little or nothing about the design process, and whose every move and decision made all our jobs that much harder. A Boss who came preloaded with so many outrageous quirks and bizarre character traits that it seemed like he stepped off the set of a hackneyed sitcom.

I wrote a series of posts years ago, outlining just a few of my experiences with this Boss— mostly as blog content, but also in an attempt to exorcise him from my psyche.

Alas, I was informed that the Colorful Boss died this past November.

I'm honestly not sure I feel about that. I guess I'm as saddened as I am about the death of any fellow human, but... dear lord, this was without a doubt the most annoying man I've ever encountered. Everything about him exasperated me— his personality, his managerial style, his mannerisms, his way of dressing and of course his voice. His horrible, grating voice that started droning the second he entered the building and never stopped until he left.

I once realized he was somehow annoying me even while sitting completely still and not saying anything. It was like his head was broadcasting "annoying waves," that only I could pick up. He was physically and mentally exhausting to be around.

And against all logic and reason his company is still around and fairly successful, despite his insane ideas and clueless management. The only way that's possible is if he made a pact with Satan, who finally came to collect his due a couple months ago.

Anyway, in honor of the Colorful Boss, here're the links to the posts I wrote about him. Enjoy my pain:

• The Interview

• The Superhero

• Email

• Color Correction

• Mexican Food

• Ear Drops

• The Flyer

• Restroom Surprise

• The Exercise Bike

• Chough

• The Wardrobe

And lastly, a special Bonus Boss From The Eighth Circle Of Hell Tale that I just remembered:

Back In the 1990s I worked as a graphic designer at a marketing company, for a rather colorful Boss. This was a man who came up in the 1960s, long before office computers and desktop publishing were a thing.

One day he came tearing out of the accountant's office, screaming at the top of his lungs, "Watch out, everyone! Tammy's got a fungus on her computer! Don't get anywhere around her!"

Of course he meant she had a virus on her computer. One that none of us designers were in any danger of catching, since Tammy had a PC and we all worked on Macs. Yet the Colorful Boss was convinced he was going to have to get her computer disinfected and fumigate her office, to prevent the spread of her deadly electronic fungus.

Seriously, that really happened.

Bosses From The Eighth Circle Of Hell: The Wardrobe

Throughout my career I've prided myself on working hard, performing what's asked of me to the best of my ability and being an all-around good employee. I've also done my best to get along with my various bosses. 

Alas, sometimes that's just not possible. Sometimes you end up with a Boss From The Eighth Circle Of Hell.

Back in the 1990s I worked at a marketing agency for a rather colorful Boss.

This particular boss prided himself on his sense of fashion and style, but the cold hard truth was that everything in his wardrobe looked like it came from the Herb Tarlek Collection.

One day he came in wearing a bright pink sport coat. Why it's even possible for a human male to buy a pink sport coat, I have no idea. A week later he walked through the office wearing bright pink polyester slacks. Another week went by and he came in wearing a bright pink dress shirt.

It occurred to me that it was only a matter of time before he wore all three of those items at the same time. A spectacular sensory overload in glorious pink. 

It never happened while I worked there, but I like to think at some point it did.

Bosses From The Eighth Circle Of Hell: The Flyer

Throughout my career I've prided myself on working hard, performing what's asked of me to the best of my ability and being an all-around good employee. I've also done my best to get along with my various bosses.

Alas, sometimes that's just not possible. Sometimes you end up with a Boss From The Eighth Circle Of Hell.

Back in the 1990s I worked at a marketing agency for a rather colorful Boss.

One day the Boss called everyone in for a lunch meeting (his favorite kind) and told us that in all the time the company had existed, it never had its own promotional brochure. I guess they were always too busy doing client work to promote themselves. He said it was past time we had our own brochure.

I worked on brochure concepts for a week or so and came up with some that the writers and other designers thought were pretty good. The only one I can remember now had sort of a drive-in movie theme. We were even going to include a little bag of popcorn inside the brochure, something to help us stand out in the mind of the clients.

Right before we were going to meet with the Boss to show him my ideas, he came running into the designer's room and said to stop working on it immediately. He was scrapping the brochure project (yet again). According to him he had a much better idea.

Not the real promo (or the real name of the Agency), but an incredible simulation.*

Instead of a tasteful promotional brochure he said all he wanted was a single 8.5" x 11" piece of paper to pass out to potential clients. The paper would have a large image of his face on it along with the company logo and the slogan, "Advertising isn't pretty" below. The topper came when he said he didn't want to use a regular photo of himself, but instead stick his face in the copy machine and use that image.

He stood there looking at us all, his hands in sort of a "Ta-da" big finish position, waiting for the applause and cheers to begin. We all just sat there with our mouths agape, not really sure if we'd heard correctly.

Finally when the shock wore off we all spoke up at once, pointing out that a single sheet of cheap copy paper with a xeroxed image on it didn't exactly shout class or quality, or that his choice of subject matter left something to be desired. Most importantly, what the hell did that "Advertising isn't pretty" slogan even mean? 

He got all petulant when we shot down his brilliant idea and said, "Fine, I guess we just won't ever have our own brochure then!" and stormed away into his office.

I left the company for greener pastures not long after that, so I don't know if they ever managed to put out a promotional brochure or not. I have a feeling they didn't, and never will.

* It occurs to me that I've probably made the fake promo look far better than it would have in reality. 

Bosses From The Eighth Circle Of Hell: Mexican Food

Throughout my career I've prided myself on working hard, performing what's asked of me to the best of my ability and being an all-around good employee. I've also done my best to get along with my various bosses.

Alas, sometimes that's just not possible. Sometimes you end up with a Boss From The Eighth Circle Of Hell.

Back in the 1990s I worked at a marketing agency for a rather colorful Boss.

One day The Boss was all excited because he'd just come back from a successful sales meeting with a new client. They were some kind of food distribution concern whose primary product was Mexican cuisine. The Boss immediately called a meeting with the Copywriter and me to discuss ideas for an ad campaign for this new client.

We sat around trying to brainstorm ideas for a while without much success. Suddenly The Boss spoke up and said, "I've got a great idea! It's Mexican food, right? So here's the perfect slogan: Si Si Senór, Our Tacos Won't Make You Snore!"

Cue the chirping crickets sound effect as we stared slack-jawed at him.

Fortunately the Copywriter and I were able to talk him out of using that one. 

Bosses From The Eighth Circle Of Hell: The Interview

Throughout my career I've prided myself on working hard, performing what's asked of me to the best of my ability and being an all-around good employee. I've also done my best to get along with my various bosses. 

Alas, sometimes that's just not possible. Sometimes you end up with a Boss From The Eighth Circle Of Hell.

Back in the 1990s I worked at a marketing agency for a rather colorful Boss.

When I first interviewed for the job, the Boss and the Co-Boss— let's call them Chad and Jeremy— took me to a local restaurant for a lunch interview.

We were shown to our table and sat down. I handed Chad, the Boss, my resume and he and Jeremy, the Co-Boss, looked it over. They mumbled and nodded to one another and apparently liked what they read. So far so good.

But then the mood at the table changed. Suddenly the Boss looked nervously around and said, "Um... we're pretty well known around town and some of our competitors may be here in this restaurant. We don't want them overhearing our secret business and trying to poach you away from us. So don't call us by our real names. Call us Carl and James." 

I laughed, but then to my horror realized that he wasn't joking. He was deadly serious. I looked to the Co-Boss for comfort, hoping to see some reason in his eyes, but he was serious about it as well. They really wanted me to use code names when I addressed them. I looked around to see if I might be able to spot a hidden camera filming the incident, but no such luck.

So I was interviewed by two grown men using fake names because they were worried about corporate espionage— in a town with a population of barely 50,000.

That should have been a BIG red flag to me. If I'd have had any sense I'd have excused myself and left the restaurant right then and there, but I didn't, mostly because I needed a job and also because they'd driven me to the restaurant and my car was back at their super secret headquarters. But it made me uneasy.

Turns out I was right. I liked the work that I did at the agency, but the "code name" incident was just the first drop in a big sloshing, leaking bucket of insanity that the Boss carried around with him all day.

Bosses From The Eighth Circle Of Hell: Color Correction

Throughout my career I've prided myself on working hard, performing what's asked of me to the best of my ability, and being an all-around good employee. I've also done my best to get along with my various bosses.

Alas, sometimes that's just not possible. Sometimes you end up with a Boss From The Eighth Circle of Hell. 

Back in the 1990s I worked as a graphic designer at a marketing company, for a rather colorful boss. One day my Boss came into the designer's office all in a tizzy. He was holding a color photo in his hand, moaning and fretting and pacing back and forth. After several minutes of questioning I finally got to the source of his strife: the color photo he was holding needed to be converted to black and white and sent to a print shop in Indianapolis by noon. The Boss (who wasn't exactly a technical wiz) didn't know how we could possibly accomplish this in time, as he said it would take days for a color photo to be turned into black and white and mailed halfway across the state.

While he was gnashing his teeth and rending his garments, I took the color photo from him and scanned it into Photoshop. Once in the application I selected "Grayscale" from a drop-down menu and converted it to black and white. I then saved a copy of the file and emailed it to the print shop. The entire operation took less than five minutes. I interrupted the Boss' fit and told him it was all taken care of. Instead of thanking me though, he just stood there giving me a wary look, like he suspected I was some kind of witch. He hurried out of the office, suspiciously glancing back at me the entire time.

A few weeks later the Boss came into the designer's office with a new project for me. You can probably guess where this is going. He handed me a black and white photo and wanted me to "work my magic" on it and turn it into a color shot. I stared at him for a few seconds and then told him that was impossible. He said, "Well you turned that color shot into a black and white one, so why can't you do it the other way around?" 

I tried to explain that going from color to grayscale was easy— you're simplifying the image, taking millions of colors and distilling them down to 256 shades of gray. Going the opposite direction is just not possible. How would Photoshop know what color shirt a person in the picture was wearing? What color's their car? The building behind them?

As you might well imagine, this (and any kind of technical explanation) sailed far, far over the Boss' head. He snatched the photo back in disgust and said, "Why do we have all this expensive equipment around here if it can't do what I need it to do?" and stormed out.

Bosses From The Eighth Circle Of Hell: The Superhero

In the mid-1990s and I got a job as a graphic designer at a marketing firm. As my first official duty I was assigned to design an ad campaign for a client's new product. 

I had a meeting with my brand new Boss, the copywriter and the art director. It was decided that I would design two posters featuring a superhero. The first poster would be a teaser, featuring a Batsignal-like beacon in the night sky. Instead of a stylized bat though, the signal would incorporate the client's logo. Clever, eh? The second poster would depict the superhero holding and announcing the new product. As a long time comic book fan, this project was right up my alley. 

I drew a couple of quick mockups of the two posters in Photoshop and showed them to my Boss. He was confused about the "big light in the sky" on the first poster (even though he'd already approved the idea). I told him it was like the Batsignal. Still no comprehension. Amazingly he had little or no knowledge of the Batman mythos; something I thought was pretty much common knowledge by that point. I told him that when the Joker robs a bank, Commissioner Gordon goes up to the roof of the police station and turns on the Batsignal, which alerts Batman that a crime has been committed, he arrives at the police station, gets the relevant info and he then goes out to capture the crooks. Of all the things I thought I would have to do on my first day at this job, explaining how the Batsignal worked was way, way down on the list.

He then said, "What's the deal with Superman anyway (completely missing the point that we'd been talking about Batman)? He's the one they found in a basket in the river, right?" I said, no, that sounded more like Moses than Clark Kent. I swear to you I am not making up any of this.

The Boss then looked at the other poster (the one with the superhero holding the product) and very bluntly said the character looked "gay." When I asked him to elaborate, he said the guy was wearing form-fitting tights with his underwear on the outside, which apparently to him was a sure-fire sign of homosexuality. I realized then that this man had never in his life ever seen, much less read, a comic book. I pointed out that this was standard superhero garb and had been since 1938 when Superman first appeared. Several other people in the office backed me up, saying it just looked like the average superhero to them. Outnumbered, the Boss sighed and reluctantly approved the mockups.

I finished the posters and a week later accompanied the Boss to the presentation at the client's office. Before we went in he told me to keep quiet and let him do all the talking. "And for god's sake don't say anything about the superhero being gay! We'll lose the whole account if you say that! Don't say gay!!!" he exclaimed. I assured him I would have no problem with that.

We went into the client's conference room and my boss unveiled the two posters. Before the client could utter a single word my Boss blurted out, "I think it looks gay!" The client looked a bit startled and I just stared at the Boss, my mouth agape in amazement. He didn't stop there though, he went on about how he didn't think they'd want their company spokesman to be a guy flitting around in a purple cape and silver tights.

I have never come so close to beating someone to death with a tube sock full of Hot Wheels cars than I did in that meeting.

Luckily for me (job-wise and jail time-wise) the client liked the posters ("gayness" aside) and heartily approved them with only a couple of minor changes.

On the ride back to the office, the Boss looked over at me and said, "Well, I think that went pretty well, don't you?" I declined to comment.

The Boss

Just a generic grouchy cartoon boss, and not based on any particular one I've ever had. I drew this shortly after I got my graphic tablet, and I was still trying to figure out how to use it.

My favorite thing about illustrating in Photoshop (or Illustrator) is that I can quickly and easily try out tons of color combinations until I find the one that's right. Sometimes I find a color combo that I never would have thought of in a million years. The computer helps me push myself farther than I would if I was working on paper with paints or colored pencil.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.