>We met a few years ago at a conference. You seemed normal enough! But I guess I'll have to reassess my opinion. You must be crazy as a loon. THIS IS THE BEST PLACE YOU HAVE EVER WORKED? I don’t even want to think about the other places! ROFLMAO

Hi Jeff. Yeah that was at the Orlando 2001 conference. Nice hotel! What ever gave you the impression that I was normal? :-D

Aside from these bad employees and the spin-offs from them, the boss, the other co-workers and the work is great.

I have created an ASP.NET application that tracks our medical device maintenance, I am now converting that to use SQL Server, and I get to admin a Win2000 and Win2003 server. Basically I get to try my hand at lots of different technologies. I get a huge degree of freedom of choice in how I work and even some flexibility in the work hours. I get every 2nd Friday off and 5 weeks vacation. Good benefits. I rarely am required to work overtime. My boss sends me to conferences and courses and I have a white card to by any technical book I need. My main application is used by our regional dept, but we have sold it to most of the province of BC, some day I expect to to be run as the provinical standard. I rarely have onerous deadlines. My boss is a nice guy and extremely good at understanding his employees and anticpating and accomodating their needs. I don't think he has ever said no to any request to purchase something that I've made, which makes my extrenely judicous in what I ask of him so as not to take advantage of him. He also is just a pleasant guy to know and be around. In additon to this, I get to create courses for our technical people to train them in computers. I also have little projects to create custom applicationns to bridge medical systems and extract data. Oh and the entire mgt team (I'm included as a quasi member of the mgt team) goes for coffee together in the morning. Something that is the envy of other depts in our hospital. And 2 years ago, my union received a 15% pay cut maindated by the provincial government and my boss fast tracked some changes that all but eliminated the pay cut.

As you could see this is my (or I would imagine anyone's) dream job. This is why I haven't left and why I can only confront my boss in the most gentle of ways. I try to ignore the weird stuff, but sometimes it gets to me since it is so Alice in Wonderland. Posting this thread is part of my venting and moving on. :-)