Your Boss as a Baby

BebeSnout:
Where Thinking Happens

Picture Your Boss as a Baby...
And Other Strategies for Taming the Shrews

When I was a kid, mean people made me cry. Thirty years later, mean people still make me cry, just not as often or as easily.

My secret? Well, there’s experience, for one thing. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it is that humans get irritable. The trick is in not letting everyone else’s discontent seep into your own sweet soul. Here, some visualization techniques that can morph any monster into the mere mortal she is.

1) Picture the person as a baby.

Not just any baby, either. Try to really imagine how this person might have looked, say, forty years ago. To make it work, you MUST see them a) in their diapers and b) sitting in a high chair. The other details can be furnished by you accordingly, but the diaper and high chair are essential.

Now go ahead and try to hate that baby.

2) Conversely, picture the person's tombstone.

Now, I don't mean to nurture any macabre fantasies you may have, but death is the great leveler. No matter how stuck up someone might be, they will die. You would NOT be happy about their dying, of course! But you should be comforted in knowing that as often as they might have beaten you out for a raise, you’ll both eventually get the ultimate promotion.

3) Visualize the person's home life.

What kind of mother could that sullen woman at Motor Vehicles actually be?

Can your conniving coworker really have a happy marriage?

Ever wonder why your boss works weekends?

Seriously, when it comes right down to it, we're all just fools for love. Maybe your nemesis didn't or doesn't get any. And that’s too pathetic to piss you off.

4) Imagine the individual’s innards.

Remember the episode in "The Brady Bunch" where Marcia is nervous about making a speech, and Greg advises her to picture the audience in their underwear? Well, this strategy goes one better.

Next time someone cuts in front of you on the check-out line, picture their intestines. It’s bizarre, it’s gross, but it works. Others to try: the lining of the nose, gallbladder, and gum line (with all that plaque).

5) Give Mr. or Ms. Snootbooger your hang-ups.

Chances are that you don't intimately know many of the obnoxious people you encounter in daily life. If you did, you would use their faults to rationalize the way they treat you, and wouldn't feel quite so annoyed in the first place. With difficult near-strangers, however, you have to imagine the neuroses that make them maddening.

Start by assigning the adversary in question one of your own insecurities, such as the way you look in anything Lycra. Remember how cranky you feel about this issue from time to time. Assume the moron now flashing you the finger at a red light has many more such insecurities, thus much greater reason to be grumpy.

In short, the next time someone ticks you off, remember: There, but for the grace of God, goes you.