Meet The New Boss

I woke bright and early.

This was a terrible start.

I fell asleep again and woke up late and irritable. Ahh, here was familiar territory. This was to be a day of discovery and new beginnings. The first of which was finding the shower jauntily duct taped to its own rail, the silver metal snaky thing that protects the grubby plastic tubing having disintegrated some time before. Never mind, few things make me happier than cheerily calling inanimate objects: 'You vicious, bastard, cunt' early in the morning; it very nearly compensated for arriving (late, naturally) at work smelling of second-hand Mayfairs with an oil slick of unwashed shower gel in my hair.

Still, that was yet to come. I left my flat, confidence buoyed to unrealistic heights by the fuzzy ink jet Multimap scrag in my hand. I walked for 5 minutes before realising I should have made a note of my bosses name. Still, we're British, and muddling through is what we do. I would just make use of my encyclopaedic French and cunning hand gestures until they gave me what I wanted (and possibly a cup of tea too).

"Bonjour! Je suis Anglais! Je suis travaile ici! C'est vrai?"

Didn't work. Luckily she spoke English and was blessed with a bottomless well of pity. I trotted off to the right building and spent twenty minutes blundering into every room I came across shouting: "Questo e... uhhhh... il ufficio di ?". I would greet the inevitable negative, followed by incomprehensible Italian instructions, with a cheery "Ah! Grazie mille!", then resume my grim trudge through the labyrinthine halls.

It's always best when meeting your new boss to project a confident air that you know exactly what you're doing and are unquestionably the right man for the job.

If you're in Italy, working for a rabidly ideological company hell bent on changing the world. A company whose leader is regarded as a sort of living saint by the population, lauded by intelligentsia and peasantry alike. Well, you really, really shouldn't forget that guy's name in your initial interview. Particularly not if you mentioned how much you admire his work in your covering letter.

Fuck.

She didn't say as much, bless her, but my new boss couldn't hide the feelings of shattered disappointment she so evidently felt; that the new guy might not, perhaps, be up to the standards of the long line of phd candidates that proceeded him.

Never mind, I thought as I scuttled off to my desk, I'll restore her faith in me with some top notch work...

You know me too well.

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Italian office euphemisms:

1) "You won't find us looking over your shoulder all the time, checking up on what you do"

means

"Don't ask me what the fuck you're meant to be doing, penis face"

2) "A quick meeting tomorrow morning"

is

"A grim, 6 hour death march that will last til 3 in the afternoon, almost certainly involving at least one German who will break down and weep bitterly over the Italian concept of 'deadlines".