It's not right but it's okay

That's what the boss said yesterday. "It's unethical but she's smart enough not to register", when in fact she had to. The way I see it, she has breached her contract. And, by saying that, he's condoning it. OK, there is a loophole somewhere in the contract; but by that statement, the boss is undermining the project; a project under his own umbrella. How ridiculous is that?

You see, we've got this client. One of many. This particular project of ours involves all clients to sign a contract prior to joining. Once signed, you can't withdraw and you'll have to take the repercussions. I didn't draft the contract, it was passed on to me from previous bosses. This time I'm the boss. I made the assumption that the contract included statement that upon signing the contract there's 'no escape'. My mistake having overlooked the contract. The point now is the contract is signed in full agreement by the client that he or she will go through the project, and will stay until completion, and to produce what needed to be produced by him or her. Failure to do so would mean that action would be taken on him/her.

Now this unethical client of ours decided to be elusive. She can't be contacted and refused to return our calls. What else, she's got the TB Syndrome. Typical Bruneian Syndrome: lack of dedication, fu*ked-up attitude, bother-less, ... (negative descriptors goes on to infinity).

Then, my boss simply wants to let go. How daft is that? There's no money involved, but it's not about that. We are talking about the amount of work and time put into by my team to get this going. We are also talking about our alliances in this project. One client does wrong, we get the bad name. Anything we produce would be deemed as not marketable.

The organization has been seen to be one. A producer of sub-standard products. Regardless of the (quality) control mechanism we've put in, we cannot insure our products as first class. The major ingredient of our products is our client. You get one f*cked-up client, the whole production line is affected. Imagine if you've got plenty of foul clients.

I've countless times been involved in defending our reputation, giving and searching all sorts of excuses. Sometimes, you just got tired of doing that. Especially, when you know your boss couldn't care less. But doing that is unfair to the other bosses and everyone else who's put every decent seconds of their time on building the image of the organization.

I don't have the power to boot my boss off his office, but I can always do this... (Try if you wish to de-stress).