There were a couple of reminders of bosses of the past for me this weekend. First, an old boss from Tedious Systems came into the store. I worked under this guy from 1985-1992 and let me tell you, it was not that thrilling. Blowhard is too kind a description. Blowhard had delusions of grandeur. Once when I was on vacation in Colorado, he called the police station in Glenwood Springs and had them track me down so that I could be on a conference call. It was his monthly staff meeting and he thought I should attend even if by phone. But that is not his most egregious display of buffoonery. He called another guy at his hotel in Rio de Janeiro for the same reason. He was in town to have lunch with an old friend who unfortunately is a regular in the store. During their lunch, one thing led to another and they decided to pop in for old times sake. I hate the pop in. The first words out of Blowhard's mouth were, "You have sure put on weight." He has always been a weight bigot. I thought of asking if he was still a drunk, but of course I didn't. In about 1993 Blowhard got fired for mistaking his boss's explicit instruction for a suggestion. It was a happy day for many, me included. I gave Blowhard the bum's rush, telling him that a lowly hardware man couldn't stand around chatting. Hopefully, I'll never see him again. I read about the other former boss in the newspaper. Nothing is better than reading bad news about a former boss in the paper. During my brief and undistinguished public teaching career, I spent one year in a middle school, herding miscreants. During that year, my principal was a very unfriendly woman, who mistook her principalship for the monarchy. She simply didn't think that she had to interact with the likes of me. During my year there, even though my room was the first from her office, she never engaged me in conversation. Her policy was that the little folks could communicate with her through her staff of assistant principals. Hooterville Unified Schools has a new superintendent. According to her, she is loaded with good ideas for turning around the bastion of failure that HUSD has become. The jury is still out on how she's doing. Anyway, the new superintendent had this idea to survey the school staffs in the district, to see how they thought their principals were doing. She got a big old vote of no confidence from her teachers. She resigned to "pursue other opportunities". Bureaucrat speak for fired. Good riddance. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky