So, guess who’s back? Ross. Yeah, that Ross. I nearly choked on my coffee when I heard the news. We all thought he was gone for good, you know? Like, sailed off into the sunset of some other company’s misery. But nope, he’s returned.
The Day the Memo Dropped
It all started a few weeks back. Just a regular Tuesday, or so I thought. Then the email landed. “Welcoming back Ross McSomething.” My jaw just about hit the desk. Immediately, the old group chat started buzzing. “No way,” “You’re kidding me,” “Hide the good staplers!” That kind of stuff. Because, let’s be honest, Ross wasn’t exactly Mr. Easy-Going. He had his ways, and those ways were, well, Ross’s ways. Very specific. Very loud. And usually involved a lot of sudden changes.
We’d spent the last two years, since he left, kind of fixing things. Streamlining processes. Actually talking to each other before making massive decisions. It was… calmer. Productive, even. Now, the old bull was back in the china shop, or so we feared.
First Week Shenanigans
His first day back was an event. He waltzed in, same old booming voice, same slightly-too-tight shirts. Said he was “thrilled to be back and shake things up.” Oh, he shook things up, alright. My practice, and the team’s, immediately became damage control and adaptation. Here’s a little list of what we went through, just in that first week:
- Meeting Mayhem: Suddenly, our calendars were slammed. Morning huddles became hour-long “strategy sessions.” Afternoon check-ins turned into another hour of him mostly talking. I basically lived in the meeting room.
- The Whiteboard’s Revenge: Ross loves a whiteboard. He’d grab anyone walking by to “just quickly sketch this out.” Our carefully planned sprints? Out the window. It was all about his new grand vision, scribbled in aggressive red marker.
- “Just Do It My Way”: We’d try to explain our current workflows, the systems we’d built. He’d nod, say “interesting,” and then tell us to do it his old way. The way that usually involved more steps and more shouting. I found myself having to re-explain the same things over and over. It was tiring, man.
- The Paper Trail Resurrected: We’d moved a lot of stuff online, digital approvals, shared docs. Ross? He wanted printouts. For everything. My desk started looking like a recycling bin exploded.
My Coping Strategy: Observe and Adapt (Mostly)
So, what did I do? Well, first, I updated my resume. Kidding! (Mostly). My actual practice became a sort of cautious observation. I decided I wasn’t going to fight every single battle. Not worth the energy. Instead, I focused on a few things:
I started documenting everything. His requests, our attempts to follow them, the outcomes. If things went sideways, I wanted a clear record. Call it self-preservation. When he asked for something truly bonkers, I’d try to gently steer him, asking questions like, “Okay Ross, so if we do that, how do you see it impacting X and Y which are already in progress?” Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
The team and I had a lot of “offline” chats. We tried to present a united front on the really critical stuff, the things that would genuinely break our projects or our sanity. We picked our battles. We learned to translate “Ross-speak” into actual actionable tasks, or at least, tasks that wouldn’t set everything on fire.
It’s been a few months now since Ross returned. Things are… different. Not all bad, surprisingly. He’s shaken us out of some ruts, I’ll give him that. But the chaos factor is still pretty high. My main practice these days is still navigating the whirlwind, trying to keep projects on some semblance of a track, and keeping my own stress levels manageable. It’s an ongoing experiment, let me tell you. Some days I think we’re making progress. Other days, I just order a bigger coffee.
