Time to Retire

I work in a family business, at least to the extent that my step-dad is my boss.  (No one else I work with is related to me, although I have informally adopted some of my colleagues after so many years of paddling up poop creek together.)  It's a mixed blessing working with my step-dad, and lately it has gotten more difficult.

He's gettin' old.  He had a hip replacement that left him with one leg functionally shorter than the other, so he kind of shuffles when he walks and his balance isn't good.  I suspect that he doesn't sleep well because he is very dozy some days; he should probably be wearing a CPAP mask.  I have seen him in meetings barely able to keep his eyes open.  His memory is also not reliable anymore.

He's always been disorganized.  Dr. Spark's opinion is that he has ADD.  He lets his papers pile up on his desk until there is a mountain of random documents, and then he sweeps them all into a trash bag and starts from scratch again.  My mother got into the habit of going through his trash bin before disposing of it because he's thrown out Very Important Papers so many times.  She does her best, but she can't always keep up with his impulsive mass disposals.

He loses things.  He's the type who would lose his head if it weren't attached.  Cell phones, his laptop (fortunately it has always been returned to him), two or three wedding rings (he doesn't wear one any more because it got too expensive to keep replacing them), credit cards, his driver's license....  You name it, he has lost it.  Sometimes he finds the things again, like when he found his cell phone in a shoe under his bed after it had been missing for three days.  Most times, not.

Lately, all of these problems have gotten noticeably worse.  He's on time for 25% of meetings, late (moderately to extremely) for 25%, and completely forgets about the other 50%.  Sometimes we're able to get him participating via speakerphone, but it's nowhere as effective as being there in person.  When I book a meeting, I ask him verbally about the time.  Then I e-mail him.  Then I remind him a couple of days before, and usually the day before and/or the morning of.  Sometimes he still doesn't show up for those meetings.

He can't keep situations straight in his head.  If you explain a situation to him, he'll have forgotten at least half of what you said, if it was complicated, by the next day.  If you work out what the solution should be together, and then you have a meeting a few days later to pass along that information to other people, you'd better re-brief him before the meeting or he'll get it all mixed up.  Except for certain things which he obsesses about, and wants to solve RIGHT NOW or he can't have a moment's peace.  Even if it might be wiser to just wait.

The worst part of it is that he gets excited by new business ideas and wants to participate.  We still need his signature regularly, even though it's difficult to get the cheques/papers signed because he doesn't come in to the office on a regular schedule.  Work processes stall or go around in circles because he has dropped the ball or given conflicting instructions to different people at different times.  He's aware that his behaviour creates problems, at least intellectually, but he just can't bring himself to step back.

There is no conclusion to this.  He'll probably keep going, at a slight downhill angle, until it's totally impossible to carry on for one reason or another.  And that is reason number 3,047 why Spark gets stressed at work.