My boss was leaving for another job, and when we found out that her replacement was going to be slightly delayed, she asked me to cover for her until the new boss showed up. I wasn't wild about the idea. I hated management and much preferred being the department techie, messing with hardware and software. But unless we put one of the mainframe folks in charge, I was the only reasonable choice.

I decided I could handle the "opportunity to excel" for a couple of weeks. My boss actually apologized that I wouldn't be getting the post permanently. But apparently senior management didn't feel that I had the necessary experience. Hey, that was fine by me!

My new-boss-to-be was finishing her master's degree in computer science at a university on the other coast, a process that ended up stretching into months. Meantime, I managed new equipment rollouts, user complaints, network outages, endless staff meetings, and all personal problems of the crowd of people who now reported to me. It wasn't quite as bad as I had feared, and I even succeeded in making a case for the new PCs.

Finally my savior arrived. "Naomi" didn't make a very good first impression. In fact, she didn't make a very good second impression, either. She was unkempt, she interrupted people when she found them boring (which was most of the time), she wore too much perfume, and her PC know-how was all theoretical and mostly wrong. As the lead manager of a group that had to deal with department heads on occasionally touchy matters -- particularly deploying PCs -- she was a disaster. Her only frame of reference was the mainframe.

After about a month it became painfully clear to me that Naomi was an absolute disaster; she was alienating my users and driving my tech people nuts. I briefly considered quitting, but that was not a reasonable option, for reasons that I won't go into.