To summarize the situation:
The company has hired a new position, a "head of design office". The company is building industrial installation and machines since 30 years. The position did not exist before. Practically, before he was hired, project managers were quoting contracts and were responsibles of the project. They worked with mechanicians, automation, electricians which were attributed from the engineer team to them by a business leader who had many other occupations.
So one day he deciced to hire someone to do this job at his place. Problem is that the guy he hired is clueless. He is an expert excel sheet producer that want to make a revolution and "reorganize" the whole office. He wants us to report to him every thing we do when we are outside the office every day. He expect us to respect his daily ridiculous planning when we are doing jobs requiring to work not according an internal planning but according a customer and project need. Before he was there the working schedule was very fluid, people organized themselves like they want, doing overtime if needed, leaving early if they had a personnal need or little work. It worked great as people were doing their work fine. To add an exemple to the ridiculous of this guy, he bought a giant TV screen and put it against the wall at the entrance of the building. He said that it was very important to print a "welcome" with customer name and required that we should announce when a customer came so we could print their name on the screen.
Now, I am 300 km away from home, working on a customer factory and I get a phone call from him and a message. He is basically saying, " I think you are coming back tomorrow (two days later in reality) I have new assignement for you call me back and by the way I have not received your dailyt report and I don't understand why". To be clear, he hasn't any clue about what I am doing. He doesn't know the customer, he doessn't know the project, he doesn't know anything about it. Completely clueless. He wants us the engineer to report to him "daily" what we are doing. Nobody is doing this. We got an email on January 2 of him complaining he had not received any "daily report" from people who were working during the holidays. Everyone in the office see him as a joke and a annoying and useless manager. I ignored his call and message and then got 3 emails from him about a project I know nothing (outside of them being late and under pressure). They apparently are planning a next week end intervention , and he is asking several people to attend a meeting tomorrow physically or by audio if not here, but I am at another site working and I have no time for his bullshit. By the time I leave my customer I will have worked 10 days in a row and will take two days off and certainly will not be working next week end.
He attended a "crisis meeting" in a big automotive factory, where the customer was unhappy and angry. He came in smiling and joking and got blasted off and sent off the meeting by the "continental technical director" of the group.
How do you deal with that kind of people?