Okay, so yeah, I've been kind of on the ambivalent side about the new job. I'm not really liking the new whole new employee thing. Again.

Luckily, word comes from the old job making me thank Jesus (or whomever) for getting the hell out of there. It's always nice to get those e-mails.

See, the company is run by the Head of the Company, the Big Head. The Big Head is a control-freak, the kind of boss who has to have everything go through him. You couldn't even take a shit without first asking him whether it was allright and then letting him know just exactly what kind of shit you took.

This, as you can well imagine, made things a little difficult to get things done. His company was rather big and getting bigger, yet everything still had to go through him. And considering he was running the company, he didn't exactly have a lot of team to proof-read marketing copy or approve packaging designs. Yet not only did he insist that he had to do it, even almost firing people for not doing it, he never quite understood that the entire company was almost unable to do a damn thing because of it.

It didn't help that he considered 9-5 to be his "prime time." It was the time, as he explained it, in which he'd spend all of his time selling. Or in meetings about selling. To see him, you either had to manage to catch him in between meetings, but you mainly had to sit around and wait for what he called "off-prime time hours" (I once asked his assistant about scheduling a meeting and was told that we could try and reach him sometime between 9-6. It was like trying to schedule appointments with the Cable Guy).

And it didn't matter where or when you met with him, you just had to. Especially if you had to get something done. He held meetings late into the evening. He held meetings at his house. He held meetings on weekends. He even, legend has it, occasionally held meetings at the doctor's office, Sopranos Style. And he would occasionally have meetings at the airport while he waited to catch a flight.

The thing about it is that he had abused and beaten down all the manager's and most of his long-time employees so much that nobody thought it was wrong to go to his house at 7 at night for a meeting. Or spend their Sunday afternoon's there. It was considered the norm. Nobody thought it was odd. Nobody bats an eye about it. So when someone would dare say things like "no, I'm not going to his house to go over proofs at 3 o'clock on a Sunday" a lot of people wouldn't understand why they'd think it was a bit screwed up.

So yesterday, one of the freelance copywriters, someone whose been screwed around like post-Justin Britney by the company was told that she had to go from work to SFO to have a meeting at the airport with the Big Head. Not only did it mean having to get home late, it was at the fricking airport. At the terminal. She, of course, said no. Which is what most normal people would have done, especially if they were freelancers. So, because he was a beaten down dog, her boss then drove off to the airport by his lonesome for the meeting.

Just your typical day at the place I used to call my home.