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When your boss’s son hangs up on you, the first thing you want to know is whose side that boss will be on. So I asked him.
Tim has been out of town for a week and a half, but before he left he told me he had been unable to get the Kennel’s website back on line. He knew a guy who knew a guy, but apparently none of these guys knew what they were doing. Julie had offered her expertise months ago to keep the site live, but as you know, Tim hates Julie, so he took it on himself. And promptly dropped the ball.
So it was my assignment to get the website working again. Naturally, I handed it off to Julie. Now, I knew at the time that there would be repercussions when Tim got back to town, but the Boss (remember him?) wanted the site back on line as soon as possible, and I knew Julie could get it done. We have been losing revenue during the months the site was gone, and the Boss was anxious to get it back.
And Julie came through. We now have a temporary site, with the promise of a highly interactive, multi-page permanent site, along with a contract to maintain the whole shebang that means no work for me. I heartily endorsed this turn of events, especially since she reversed the disastrous spin Tim had put us in. Somehow we lost our domain name, which ended up in the hands of a reseller from whom she managed to extricate it.
So this morning Tim was back in town and phoned to ask me if the problem had been handled. I told him it had been handled, and that Julie had done it. Well, you’d have thought I told him I handed her the key to his safety deposit box and the password to his secret porn sites. If I’d been in the same room, I think he might have taken a swing at me. Then he hung up on me.
These things are best handled through channels. I phoned Julie to give her a heads-up, and she phoned the Boss to pass on my concerns. Then the Boss called me. Apparently he thought he was going to have to take me down off a ledge, but I just related what had happened. Tim was upset that he was “left out” of the decision-making, even though he was on a job site in Southern California during this whole time.
My hope was that I could get all this information across without seeming to try to come between the Boss and his son. That’s a minefield I’d rather not venture into, if you know what I mean. I didn’t want to whine, “Tim was mean to me.” So I told the Boss that I would be very disappointed if Tim screwed up the good thing we have going. By that I mean specifically the new website, but the Boss took it to mean the whole organization in general, including Julie.
The Boss assured me that he wouldn’t let anything screw up the good thing, as he understood it. He said he would always support his son, but he wouldn’t always agree with him, and he wouldn’t let him do anything that was against the best interests of everyone. I don’t know how he’s planning to reconcile the apparent contradiction, but believe it or not, he’s pretty good in a minefield. He should be. He’s created enough of them. | 
