Now I'm THAT Guy.

I find myself suddenly catapulted into responsibility.
After a lifetime of pursuing maximum freedom at minimum cost, I'm now responsible for the following things:

Hiring people
Firing people
Evicting people
Motivating people
Telling people when to work
Telling people to stop doing what they're doing
Owning up
Following through
Managing stock levels
Managing staff levels
Managing cashflow
Quality control
Building overhauls
The business' public image
Maintenance planning
Staff reporting protocol

It's that last one that sounds the scariest. It's the short way of saying: If one guy doesn't write down what he did and what has to happen next, the other guys won't know it happened until something goes wrong. That happened a LOT, and still happens too much, and there's cascades of blame to go round every single time it happens. People don't like being blamed for anything. Especially when it wasn't their fault and they can't do anything about it now. Hence, Staff Reporting Protocol, the wide-eyed, youthful first stage of choking bureaucracy.

I never wanted to be That Guy. The person who wears deliberately neutral attire. The imported-beer-drinking, form-enforcing, under-sleeping, over-working, beige-coloured package of bourgeois respectability. The man who fakes a grin of camaraderie through pointless, interminable stories. The eternal subjugator of personal preferences to business responsibilities. The scourger and lasher of pyramid-building peons. The creature of habit; the grey flannel suit; the company man.