The House Always Wins

It is clear from the start that The Big Cheese has three qualities that will be problematic:

1 - She has a very crude, elementary understanding of the function I would be coming there to perform and will not be at all impressed with any of the innovation that I have to offer, since it leapfrogs two decades over her last foray into the function.

2 - She has no interest in what I do.  She is laser-focused on brooming it out of her office and into someone else's circle of influence.  It is icky.

3 - In spite of 1 & 2, the position reports to her. A necessary evil. And this, my friends, is the kiss of death.

The lethal combination can be summed up thusly:  I could excel at this job and would thrive tackling the enormous challenges it presents. I would suit up in full battle dress every day and look like a war hero inside of a month.  However, instead of embracing all of the innovation and fearless creativity I would bring to the operation, The Big Cheese and my merry band of idiot direct reports would be breathing into paper bags. They'd resist. They'd complain. I'd be explaining the rationale of every widely accepted recruitment convention known to modern man every day, be asked to cease and desist, resort to the tried and true methods, and we'd all fail again. 

Yet, still, I like the challenge.

But there is a fourth problem that might just land my resume in the No Pile. It is the Nerd In Charge Phenomenon.  It often happens when the dork who got teased on the playground and got picked last for dodge ball, and had to sit at the Peanut Allergy table in the cafeteria with all the other outcasts, and sat at home knitting on prom night, and sat with the teacher in an otherwise vacant Chem Lab on Senior Skip Day while the rest of us when to an amusement park, finds herself having been promoted into a fairly responsible position, hanging with the Cool Kids in an organization, and finally gets to exact her revenge on the girls whose hair never got compared to hemp when they were teenagers.

The Big Cheese sits across from me (waaaay across from me but not so far away that I can't make some observations) with her Hubble Telescope glasses on her Moon Pie face, her flat, lifeless hair hanging straight to her beefy shoulders and the bangs accentuating the wideness of her melon-shaped head, and absolutely no indication that there is any distinction between her head, neck and shoulders.And wearing what could be most charitably described as a circus tent.

In this situation, I am The Pretty One.

Time to take my beating.