Chuckie, one of the victims of the "staff reduction", is now working here on a contract basis. We are not supposed to help him prepare his Power Points or technical papers, as he's a hired gun now. Since he has no idea how to use Visio, Freehand, PageMaker, or even Word, (he doesn't even know, despite being told a number of times, to save drafts of his long-winded e-mails while he's working on them, and is always mad when his laptop locks up and he looses a morning's worth of work) you can see that this is going to prove difficult for him, as well as my department, since we still need to get the work out of him.

I can't believe I actually almost miss the old man. He was out of the office half the time, so he'd call me periodically and bug me (he likes to repeat himself, so I'd wind up hearing what he'd eaten, who he'd met, and how his presentations went at least twice per conversation). Then when he was here, he'd make me do all his work first. His office was very messy and cluttered with volumes of paper, it must have taken a day of him throwing stuff out into a giant office paper dumpster to clean it. I wondered if they had to pay him for his time to do that? Anyway, things just aren't the same without him around.