As much as I enjoy working with my manager’s imaginary friends, they aren’t exactly productive. Sometimes it feels as if I’m doing everything myself.
Still, I shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that they’re model employees: they work for free; they don’t waste paper; and they don’t make personal phone calls.
Other pluses – no one to argue/disagree with, no one to get it all wrong – you get to do it (ALL!) exactly how you want it done.
(I’m not a fan of group projects & don’t delegate very well…)
you could start having conversations in front of the boss with the phantoms… “What? Oh, dear. What a horrible thing to say about the boss! I’m sure those panties belonged to his wife…”
I knew my Ghostbusters costume would come in handy one day.
I worked for a week as a “temp” (always thought that was short for “temperance”) in an engineering office and every morning, I’d be sent to get coffee, always one cup more than the number of engineers. I thought perhaps one person needed the extra caffeine.
I met one of the typists in a pub some time later and asked her about the coffee. Turns out, one of the big cheese engineers had an imaginary friend.
True story.
Sounds like a bad case of religion to me.
Well, come to think of it, one of their clients was the local Diocese!
I’ve got two assistants but I wish one of them was imaginary
I imagine that must be difficult.
I had an assistant but she decided she preferred to be somewhere else so my boss hired me another one – but this one turns out to be imaginary. She makes far less mistakes than the last one but she’s much slower.
I hope your boss has a better imagination than mine does.
i’m surprised your manager has that many friends, imaginary or otherwise.
I know. It’s hard to imagine.
The flip side of that is having someone assigned to you who drags your ass down and makes you look bad. Choose your poison carefully. Look what’s happening to poor nursemyra.
You raise a good point, although I don’t think my ass could look any worse than it already does.
But … it can be so gratifying to say “I told you so.” I’d hate for your company to let you down by not letting you down.
I guess this is as close to a win-win situation as I’m going to get.
On the other hand, you could always go to your boss and complain that the imaginary assistants are doing a sweet FA. Tell him that they’re always chatting by the water-fountain and take too many coffee breaks. Tell him you’ve arranged a meeting for him and your assistant so he can address the situation directly.
At which point, he’ll probably be convinced you’ve gone mental and hire some actual assistants just to fill in the blanks.
I suspect that my boss already thinks I’m mental. He’s probably hoping I’ll confuse the voices in my head for new staff members.
For a while there I had an imaginary boss. It was great, he actually listened when I told him I probably shouldn’t design plants to make stuff whose name I had to furtively google during the project kick off meeting…
Glad you’re back mate!
Perhaps you could design imaginary plants?
I’d have my imaginary assistants be sniveling sycophants, always telling me how brilliant, beautiful and wonderful I am, and groveling around like Gollum.
That’s what husbands are for. Don’t be greedy.