My boss is an older guy and is not comfortable with computers. He is forced to use them to run his business, which is retail, because he makes a lot of money on internet sales, but he really does not like, and does not understand computers much.
I am currently working on upgrading his website (which was perfectly awful, by the way), and during the course of the day/evening I come across some questions that I might have about the product or the price or the shipping weight (I am new to the company and not that familiar with the extensive and highly specialized product line).
When I come across the question, I shoot him an email. It never fails that, instead of him answering me in an email, providing the information that I need so that I can continue in an efficient manner, he insists on picking up the phone and CALLING ME. This requires me to stop what I am doing, answer the phone and talk with him for five or ten minutes, not only about the question that I had, but he also has to sit there and "chat" with me about something that happend to him that day, or a new product that he is looking at, etc., etc., ad infinitum ad nauseum.
All I want to do is get the answer to my question and continue working, but he is from the "old school" that you have a conversation with someone when you talk to them on the phone. If I can get out of there in a minimum of 5 minutes I am lucky, usually it takes much longer. Unfortunately, I have many questions, so talking with him on the phone is really becoming a time-consuming matter and eating into my work time. (By the way, I am not being paid hourly).
To make matters worse, he is always talking about things that either A. I don't care about or B. Repeating something he has told me before. The worst part is that often he tries to tell me how to do things on the website when he does not have a CLUE what he is talking about. But he is the boss, and I do not feel comfortable correcting him or telling him he is wrong.
The other day, I signed up for a service that will assist us in sending out newsletters to people who have signed up to receive them. During the course of checking out the service I sent out a dummy email to myself and to my boss so that he could see what they looked like. The email came through as "noreply@emailservice.com".
He told me that he didn't want to use that "No-Rep-Lee" service, because they are spammers. He gets A LOT OF JUNK EMAIL from them (i.e.
noreply@viagradrugs.com,
noreply@paydayloans.com) and he does not want to be associated with those kinds of companies. I could not make him understand that noreply simply meant that you cannot send an email to that address. He was convinced that this "no-rep-lee" guy was a big time spammer that would get his newsletters ignored. *sigh*
He also wanted to sign up with eBay to sell some of his products but he would not provide any of the personal information that hey require. He says... "I don't want those people to have my personal information". Well, then they aren't going to give you an ACCOUNT, dude! But he can't understand that. He thinks I am doing something wrong and that if I knew what I was doing, we should be able to have an account without all that bother.
He also will not load email addresses onto the internet (again the newsletter service), beacuse he is convinced that they take them out of our account and sell them. (Even though, their TOS state EMPHATICALLY that they would never do that).
I am so frustrated. Do any of you have any suggestions how to deal with all this? I am at my wits end here. Thanks.
20yrsinBranson
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