My boss had a meeting to select a new mentor today. He sent out a meeting request about 10 minutes before he actually wanted to have this meeting. It's a good thing I retain info fairly well or I might have been pissed that I didn't have enough time to prepare for this, not that there's much preparation involved in this kind of meeting. He also failed to mention he'd already made the selection and he just wanted us there so he could shoot down our ideas.

Ok, so I have two questions:

1. What's the point of calling a meeting to select a new mentor if you've already got a mentor selected?
2. Why make that meeting last over an hour?

Just send out an email. For fucks sake, we all know you're the boss, we've been bitching about it for more than a year now. Don't waste my time making me think my opinion, my thoughts and ideas, mean something when you have no intention of paying them any head. If my boss had half a brain, he would be able to kind of conceal the fact that he's doing this, but he doesn't. Just to know where he stands, I always move these kinds of meetings away from the person I think he's favoring. I want to see how far he's willing to bend the rules to accommodate his choice, and today, he bent them quite a lot.

I'll have to admit that in this instance, I had an unfair advantage over my boss. I had known about this for a while and made it a point to contribute lots of ideas to the person who made the requirements for this position. I made it so the person I knew he wanted would have a hard time meeting the requirements. I did not do this because I don't like this person, but because this person's idea of customer service is "What's in it for me?"

My job is readying the new hires for the job. I have to help them put all of their training together, show them how to use it, and guide them into the real work experience. I have 3 or 4 mentors who help me to do this (in addition to their work responsibilities). I want to be able to trust these people to give the new people the facts about the job, not what they do to cut corners. If these new people come out and start doing their job in a bad way, that doesn't make my boss look bad, that makes me look bad because I couldn't change the people he appointed to me into quality trainers. This is all fairly difficult stuff in the best of situations, even more difficult when there are language and culture barriers.

Maybe I should just shut up and do the best that I can with what I'm given. Maybe I should get a little louder and stop requesting and start demanding.

Maybe I should just get a new job.

Note: I'm not making an assumption about this person's character, this is something this person has told me when I was personally mentoring this person.