Sign out for lunch, seriously?

I’m pretty easy going about most things, particularly things in my professional life but one thing gets under my skin no matter how hard I try to just go with the flow. I can’t stand to be micro managed! I am an adult, I can handle managing my time efficiently, and forcing me to account for every minute of my day just makes me irritated to the point of hating my job. This is partly why I like where I work, my boss is fairly laid back on time management and provided I get things done on schedule, I have free reign on managing my own time; or I use to. I’m not certain what his deal is now, maybe it’s putting on a show for the newB, maybe he’s getting pressure from his manager again, but for the last two weeks working under him has gone from irritating to down right infuriating! He is constantly on my back asking what I am doing, when I’ll be done, if I did this and that, and in the event I answer no I had better have an “acceptable” reason for not completing said task. Today he’s also decided that we are no longer capable of managing our own lunch times and now have to sign out on the department grease board with the date and time that we left. It won’t be long before he also makes us sign back in I’m sure just so he can be certain that at least one of us is in the department at all times and nobody is taking a lunch that is too long. His reason seems understandable, since we are after all Tech Support for the whole company and need to be available from 8am to 5pm with no lapses in coverage. However, the timing of this new development is suspicious.


Today I left for lunch at roughly 12:50, we get 45 minutes Monday through Friday. At 1:15 I was at my desk eating my lunch when my boss walked in and asked me if I had gotten his voicemail. When I told him I had not yet listened to it he walked away in a huff and less than 10 minutes later there was a department wide e-mail telling us of the new lunch policy of signing out on the board. When I finished eating lunch, by 1:30 I might add, I listened to my voicemail already knowing it was from my boss. I have no idea what happened in the 15 minutes I was out of the building but apparently he wanted to speak to me and all his voice mail said was call me when you get back to your desk. I followed his instructions, he was not at his desk, and I left him a voice mail that has yet to be returned. I guess it wasn’t such an emergency after all yet it was enough to make him feel he now needs to micro manage every detail of our days, lunch times included.

How many more days till he retires?