My first real job was as a part time IT guy in a small company.
It wasn’t anything fancy, I just knew how to do a few things in code and the small company my mom worked at hired me to maintain their site.
So they didn’t have to pay the company that made the site a few hundred dollars every time they wanted to update the text or something. It seemed like a great job, I was getting paid above minimum wage and being my first job, I was really excited.
I quickly learned the boss/manager of this small company (about ten employees) had the most narcissistic personality I’ve ever encountered.
She lived in this weird delusional world where everything wasn’t her fault, and when something went wrong and was clearly because of her, she just went silent.
Being the only computer-savvy person, my job quickly went from updating web pages to solving all the issues, which I was fine with. I even automated a few things, setting up a file sharing service so they didn’t have to keep running flash drives back and forth, which everyone loved.
But there was one moment in particular that really stuck with me.
It really showed my boss’s faults. She had just purchased a brand new laptop and had been using it for a few days and kept complaining that her mouse would jump all around the screen for no given reason.
I took a look at it and it didn’t seem to be doing anything weird, so she thought I had fixed it. When the problem kept happening, she screamed at me that I intentionally broke it to make her frustrated, but I assured her I hadn’t done anything (she watched me the entire time I was looking at it).
She kept screaming about it for a few days, until one day I heard her scream (and I mean scream) like a toddler down the hall.
I walked in to ask what was the issue and she complained her mouse was jumping around the screen again. I watched what she was doing, and sure enough, the mouse was jumping around. Then I noticed, that her fingers were hitting the touchpad while she was typing, making the mouse move out of whatever field in the excel document and click on a different cell so her typing would be all over the place.
She insisted that’s not what was happening, so I took a coaster (like, what you put your glass on) and set it on top of her touchpad. She started typing and the mouse stopped jumping.
She didn’t say anything. I would have gone through the settings to disable the mouse while typing but she never really let me.
After I stopped working there, she emailed me every once in a while asking if I could update her site again, for free.
I just said I was too busy with schoolwork. I noticed recently that the site domain is for sale, so I’m guessing she went out of business.