“Ha ha, like your old boss”
– Wife, on Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt sticking his fingers up his nose while watching hockey.

Bosses, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few great ones to mention. I’m probably not an easy employee, and it’s not because I want to be difficult or because I think I’m smarter that the rest – although I understand that even writing that as a possibility probably qualifies me as a jerk – or because I ask tough questions. I sometimes do ask silly questions and I often tried to make everybody laugh at a company meeting, back when I still had bosses.

These days, I have clients.

And looking at my bosses as objectively as I can, I think it’s safe to say I haven’t really been lucky with them.

My first boss turned out to be a white-collar criminal who, to get around royalty fees, smuggled magnetic tape into the country, then loaded it up in VHS tape cases and sold his tapes cheaper than anybody else. That was one side of the business. The one that he hired me for was the videotape holder business. For a brief moment in my career, I was Project Manager, Exports, in charge of the UK market for the NTC International’s videotape cases. Amazing product. Injection molded, came in a variety of colors, and you could even turn it upside down, and the tape wouldn’t fall. (That was the trick to do during a sales call).

He was an OK guy, I guess, except that he was a crook. He already had a couple of bankruptcies under his belt when he hired me with the help of government aid. I didn’t know about those bankruptcies. I just wanted a job. Those were hard times, the early 1990s, and the government of Finland subsidized companies that hired college graduates.

The CEO, my boss, was a real character, to say the least. He drove a Jaguar – “once I was on my way to Estonia but realized that I had forgot my passport so I had to come back and drive the 100 kilometers from Hämeenlinna to Helsinki in 35 minutes” – and sported a manly moustache, and wore colorful sports jackets. His right leg didn’t work properly, it seemed to be always straight, which I suppose helped him break those speed records on the highway.

The week the government aid ended, he summoned me to the headquarters and duly fired me. In between, I had also been in charge of putting the finishing touch on the company Christmas presents, by packing chocolate candy into small plastic bags.

And yet, I was devastated.

When I sued them, my lawyer said it was an open-and-shut case. He was right, but unfortunately, not in my favor. My boss marched their accounting assistant to testify that the company had shut down their UK operations completely, and therefore, I had been let go simply due to lack of work.

For a while after that, I didn’t have a boss. I had a few clients.

My next boss was French Canadian, the head of trade department at the Canadian Embassy in Helsinki. He was the guy who hired me, so obviously, he was a smart fellow. He was in the third year of his four-year stint in Helsinki, and a lot of his time was spent lobbying for his next stop. He came to Helsinki from Morocco, and desperately wanted to get back somewhere warm.

Every day, when I left the office, he’d still be at his desk, waving to me while either talking on the phone, or holding, waiting to hear the latest from his buddies in Ottawa. Sometimes he’d wave me in, and we’d talk about an important project, like an incoming delegation. Those were important, because they were a way to get the good word back to Canada.

Once, when he was deep in thought, contemplating a strategy – and I am being only slightly sarcastic here – he leaned forward, resting his chin on his left palm. And then he rested his left index finger on his nose, pushing it sightly upward, creating a nice pig nose effect. I sat in the leather arm chair on the other side of his desk and tried to put on a pondering look on my face and stare at the ceiling.

“What do you think we should do?” he said suddenly.

I looked at him, still deep in thought. His nostrils were still aimed at me.

“I have to think about it,” I said, got up, and left for the day.

Our entire trade division consisted of him, two commercial officers – me and a colleague – and our two assistants. One of the assistants was basically only his, but she would also assist me and my colleague when she had the time. Or the energy.

One time, our boss was in a particularly good mood and he practically tap danced from his office to the printer we all shared as well. While waiting for the printer to spit out his documents, he was fiddling with two pencils that happened to be lying on the desk next to the printer. Suddenly, he held the pencils against his forehead and wiggled them a little.

“Look at me, I’m horny,” he said, with the ‘h’ barely audible.

The assistant looked at him stunned, and he realized what he’d said. Saved by the printer, he grabbed his papers and went back to his office and closed the door for the day.

His successor was the complete opposite. He came to Helsinki from Pittsburgh. America. The land of the pioneers, the go-getters, the country where anything is possible, and he was going to turn our sleepy little operation around.

Right after he arrived, he had one-on-one meetings with everybody. We had lunch at the classic Kappeli restaurant in downtown Helsinki, across the street from the office. We small talked our way through the appetizers, and once they brought us our pyttipannus he asked me where I saw myself in five years.

“Not there anyway,” I said, and pointed to the office.

“Good. You shouldn’t stay there. You’re too young,” he said.

And it went downhill from there. He wasn’t a bad person, and I don’t think of myself as one, either, but we just didn’t really get along. He wasn’t a great boss, though. He would get an idea in the morning while watching CNN, come to my office, tell me what he had learned, suggest we do the same – like the idea about importing Chupa Chup lollipops, which was a mystery to me because they weren’t Canadian, but Spanish – and then he’d forget about it.

After about a year of that chaos, I wanted out. And when I did get another job, I waited a whole week to resign because I wanted him to do yet another stupid thing, in which case I would have loosened my tie, torn off my jacket and said, “Oh yeah? Well, I quit!” Then I would have just walked away without looking back.

Of course, he messed that up. That happened to be the one week when he didn’t do anything stupid.

On Friday afternoon, I knocked on his office door, and asked him if he was busy. As usual, he was sitting on a chair buried deep inside the mess he had built using binders, folders, officer paper, books, magazines, and different kinds of product catalogues.

“No, no, get in, there’s something I want to tell you,” he said.

“Wait. I just wanted to give you my notice. I’ve got another job,” I said.

He leaned back in his chair, and smiled.

“Good for you.”

“Yeah, well, thanks.”

And then I walked away. To a new boss. Same as old boss.

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