h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am in an awful way, because I am so frightened of losing my job, that I cannot refer to my boss when I need to.

The example that has come to the fore recently is the reporting of service failures in our activities. The failures are infrequent, mostly due to misplaced resources or notifications not received, but they are embarrassing and potentially damaging (in terms of punitive fines) for the company I work for. My boss, to whom such problems should be referred in the first instance, even at two o'clock in the morning, is an incredibly unpleasant person - deceptive, ignorant, rude, demanding, accusatory, disorganised and inevitably unrecognising of the trouble his own disorganisation puts his workers to. I do not feel at all at ease, in a position where I am compelled to wake him up to describe my own inadequacies or obstacles to him at two o'clock in the morning.

It is my fear that makes me unable to talk to this man. In ordinary circumstances I try to have to have nothing to do with him, and I try in all circumstances to maintain this position. As a result, momentary problems meeting service criteria are usually negotiated by me directly with the clients. Acting in a junior supervisory role, as I now am (reluctantly), means that the position is harder to maintain, but I am still attempting to do so. The direct consequences of this kind of action for the company, of course, are not known, but I am concentrating on performing the service, rather than excusing or preserving a peformance lack.

I am genuinely disturbed about this, because I do not want to lose the money that the job I am doing provides me with. I also want not to lose the conditions to which I have been compelled to adapt, and to which I have adapted reasonably successfully. I also bitterly resent the implication that I should be ashamed of not asking the boss to excuse a performance lack that would not occur if the boss was actually doing his job, and enabling mine.