I do not enjoy slagging off my superiors. I believe that work is a strictly 9 to 6 affair, and out of the office I do not partake in discussion about its frivolities because the downtime is meant to be savoured.
However, there do come moments when your patience is worn thin and it takes every single fibre of your being to simply rein yourself in, as the alternative would be to call out the blatant stupidity you cannot believe you are witnessing and earn yourself a one way ticket to the exit door. If there is one thing you learn at work, it is that bosses do not appreciate it when you point out correctly that they are wrong.
I understand the value of saving face for one's superiors, if only to better manage the superior-subordinate relationship, but if that means that I go ahead with a project that will eventually waste more company resources without bringing any real benefit to the company, for example the generation of countless reports that nobody will read that have no real use when there are ten other more pertinent things to do, sometimes there is a need to draw the line. After all, you inevitably grow tired of creating reports that get thrown into a pile of papers never again to see the light of day.
Sometimes, actually proving the boss wrong makes the situation worse when the boss takes a moment out to think, realises that you are actually right, and then proceeds to systematically show you why she's right despite not having a case by diverting the topic and beating around the bush before losing you in the midst of the verbal maze she has now woven into the discussion. The only reason you give up trying to win the argument is, it is now time for lunch or knockoff and you do not want to lose any more of that time on what would be an exercise in futility.
The latest episode involved clarification of a product feature for one of the product lines we carried. I suggested that we contacted the account manager handling the product, but the suggestion was quickly shot down because my boss insisted that we had no right to contact the account manager. I could not help but ask myself "If the account manager's job is not to manage his account (aka us) and handle our queries, then what exactly would his job scope be?"
Apparently, it involves not picking up our calls and trying to make the account more manageable by not managing it. A contradiction? Perhaps, but there is also a grain of truth in it. When people realise that you are not contactable, they stop trying to contact you, and your work actually becomes easier. When they actually need to contact you, they will do so anyway, so somehow not picking up calls filters out all but the most important calls.
All of this makes me glad sometimes that I learnt how to think on my feet in school, so that I can craft a story in my head while spinning another one to the boss, before tying it all together so that it becomes a beautiful coherent picture. Some days, I do it so well it brings tears to my eyes, but they flow on the inside, tears of stupendous amazement at how adroit on selling deception I have become. If this sounds cynical, I would qualify that these days, work is no longer about getting work done, but rather managing the boss.
Boss says something stupid? Let her know that she's right, but don't ever put the suggestion into action. If she ever asks, which she rarely does because she forgets, tell her that the situation has been resolved without going into the details. Rarely will bosses ask about details, because since they don't do the work, the details just confuse them. And sometimes, the best way to kill stupid is to simply let it die a natural death.