Tales of BAD BOSSES.

[CBHagman]

All right, you know you want to vent. Bad bosses happen to everyone. Let's hear your stories of incompetence, narcissism, harassment, and the like.

And if there are any repentant bad bosses, you're welcome to confess your sins her for some DU absolution.

The inspiration (?) for this thread is my supervisor, who is in her second-to-last week and just called in sick :eyes: on one of our busiest days. Did I mention she's just back from vacation? :grr: And that she's a right-winger?

[unpossibles]

1. I once worked for a guy who was a racist, sexist pig with no business sense

it was his fifth or sixth unsuccessful business - and no, he's not the President now....

I finally picked a (non-physical) fight I knew I would lose by standing up for an employee he was making fun of, even though I told him constantly that he should not do that. Then, right after he fired me, I ratted him out to OSHA and Microsoft for breaking a variety of laws. He ripped people off, dipped into the petty cash so he could go to strip bars, paychecks bounced, called everyone "Buddy" when not using sexist/racist terms instead, and yelled at me for being lazy because I only worked 12 hour days (salaried of course).

On the bright side, that experience made me able to appreciate every other job I've had since.

[CBHagman]

3. That takes the cake.

How is it that so many incompetent people get into positions of authority? How is that so many mean-spirited people get to lord it over people?

[unpossibles]

9. I have agonized over that very question many times

as in which came first, the position of power or the asshole. I finally decided - after having some good bosses - that it's a combination. Assholes are often attracted to powerful positions, and I've even seen some get promoted simply to get them somewhere else.

This guy was something else. I only took the job out of desperation after being laid off years ago, and left as soon as I found something else a few months later, but it was definitely a lesson learned. The "Buddy" thing was at least kind of funny in retrospect (we were not allowed to address him as "Buddy" too), and to this day he is at least a source of laughter within the people who had to deal with him.

I don't think I mentioned how crass he was either - he would yell at people for not dressing nicely because it gave the wrong image for the company, yet more than once discussed things such as having his thumb up a stripper's a** in front of customers. And since we were in the refurbished computer business, many of our customers were churches, schools, the State of Ohio, etc.

A real gem. When he threatened to keep my last paycheck because he discovered I had ratted him out to OSHA, I told him I could call the IRS too if he wanted. Amazingly I discovered later that he had not paid his workers comp AND that several of us were paying for health insurance but were not insured, which came up when an employee tried to go to the dentist and got denied.

[PVnRT]

19. You are promoted to your level of incompetency (n/t)

[CBHagman]

25. Yes, the Peter Principle in operation.

It does happen often enough. An employee does Task A well and is promoted, despite not being suited for Tasks B, C, and D, all of which are required in the new position.

A corollary to that is how frequently managers leave unsuitable employees (e.g., unqualified, underperforming, dishonest, etc.) in place. I even heard one supervisor say she was simply waiting for an employee to quit. She wasn't lifting a finger to retrain him or reassign him, either. :grr:

[Rambis]

2. Psycho boss

I had a written note from her one day that said I was doing a great job etc etc. I go to lunch where my wife tells me she is pregnant with our first child (5 years trying) and when I returned there was a furlough letter on my chair. The kicker was my job ended on the due date my wife had just told me. Then the boss followed up with an email exactly opposite of what was in the hand written letter of the day before.

I took both letters to the ombudsperson at our University just to make sure I didn't get a black mark etc. At my exist interview I told them this woman (head of personnel) was the worst person they could have making decisions. she proceeded to fire 12 people over the next 5 years blaming all her mistakes on each successive employee until she was the only one left. They finally woke up fired her and told her to work from home for a month and never come back.

Kid was born on the very day he was due (grandpa's birthday) I had over 500 hours of vacation so I went to an interview very relaxed and got the job I have now and couldn't be happier.

[WolverineDG]

4. Sent an email to a boss re: something that needed his immediate attention

Didn't hear back from him for over 24 hours. Problem worsened, so I emailed him again. Got a really snotty response about how I should "calm down" & not "act irrationally," when in fact I was trying to save his fucking ass. No "thanks for bringing this to my attention" or anything resembling gratitude.

Basically I got patted on the head & told I shouldn't be worried about "management concerns" because "management" had everything under control. :eyes: Sooooo, that's what I did & when things went :nuke: as I warned him they would, he went nuts & wanted to know why no one had told him. :eyes:

dg

[ThomCat]

11. My current boss is exactly like that.

:(

He's often a really good guy, but he has this myth in his head that he's on top of everything. Except when he's not.

[WolverineDG]

23. Hi Thom!

:hug: :loveya: :hi:

This particular boss isn't a "good" guy. But since I believe that management trains staff they way they want staff to act, the next time this happens, I'm tempted to be all :shrug: Not my problem.

dg

[ThomCat]

24. Hi dg!

:hi: :hug:

I have begun taking that attitude. I send a warning to my boss and then refuse to get worried about it. If all hell breaks loose I tell people that they need to talk to my boss. He needs to handle it.

[yewberry]

5. Think "Soup Nazi."

Yep, I worked for a guy just like that for two years.

The hostility, tossing people out on a whim, broken English...it was all there. Honestly, after a while, it just became ridiculous, and all I could do was laugh.

Chef lived to make me tell people to "get the fuck out" of his place, and the police had to be called more than once when he did it himself. He had me write angry letters to people who wrote to complain about their $38 lamb special or $45 beef whatever-it-was. He kicked out windows, hurled plates, pans, and potatoes, and swore at me and any customer that got in his sights. He started a fistfight with the sous chef (in an open kitchen!) in the middle of a Saturday night rush. Regulars would come in to eat and also to find out what he'd done that week. For some reason, people found it charming. Well, maybe 'fascinating' is a better way to put it.

He runs a great restaurant, but if you go, don't bother asking to go off-menu.

[Wcross]

6. Years ago I had a winner. CHEAP BASTARD.

We had department Christmas parties and they did spend a LOT of money (for our company) taking everyone and their spouse out to a good restaurant. The meals at the places they went were in the 40-60 dollar range per person.
It was a 24/7 operation so the night they selected was a night I was assigned to work. This boss comes down to the lab and gives myself and my co-worker a "chit" to EAT FREE (woo-hoo) at the company cafeteria that night! It was a 4.89 value!!!!!

I was so distraught a couple of years later when they "downsized" him out the door at the age of 53 two years before he was eligible for retirement! It seems that if you get caught drinking on the job the company takes a dim view!

[davsand]

7. Oh you mean the asshole that called women "that bitch____" all the time?

Every one of his female employees was called "that bitch_____" at one point or another. I was "that Bitch Laura" and we had that bitch Terri, and that bitch Lisa and that bitch Patty, and that bitch____ ad nauseum. One day he told me he wanted to spend $1000 on a new desk because his old one smelled like "that bitch Bonnie" (his predecessor.)

He ordered me to spy on my employees and would sit and speculated that his office was bugged (this is local GOVERNMENT, nobody gives enough of a crap to care even listen to him in person...) When I refused to follow him in his delusions, he fired me then rehired me an hour or two later after I explained that it was gonna cost him a lot of money in a wrongful termination lawsuit.

I was still employed AFTER he got fired.

Two weeks after he got fired I ran into him in a quickimart in a small town. I didn't even realize he was anyplace around when I heard him in the front of the store telling the clerk behind the counter about how "SHE's the reason I got fired!!!!" while he's pointing that "shaky finger" at me in the back of the store. I had a 2.5 pound bag of ice and two tins of sugar free mints in my hand. I was wishing for a ball bat, if you want the truth...

I was told yesterday that I should expect a subpoena to testify sometime fairly soon in some civil lawsuit involving this assmunch. I'm sure you can guess how much I'm gonna enjoy THIS one.



Laura

[XemaSab]

8. I've had only two really shitty bosses

One was a total sexist pig.

He referred to the botany team as the "Botany Bitches." :eyes:

He did much, much more than that, but my new, good boss is waiting for me now, so I can't go into further detail.

[ThomCat]

12. Kick his Ass!

I hope you get to help nail him to a wall.

[fudge stripe cookays]

22. I would have thrown the ice at him.

:D

But I guess that wouldn't look that great at the hearing, huh?

[davsand]

27. Ya know, I'm worried that something will happen to that guy.

I'm dead serious. If he goes missing or turns up dead I know that sure as sin the police will have my name on a LONG list of people who hate the f*cker. I can just se it now:

Police: (The assmunch) has gone missing (or, better yet!) turned up dead. Do YOU know anything about this davsand?"

davsand: Bwa-haaaa Haaa-Haaaaa. Are you shitting me? Somebody finally got rid of The Assmuch? Lemme get my checkbook so I can contribute to the defense fund! No--WAIT! Let me HIRE a BAND to serenade whoever did it!"


And then they will assume I did it and haul me off to share a jail cell with Paris.

____

That man made me suffer and I am still dealing with the physical and emotional effects of it all. Literally, this is the first time in my life that I can say I have seen the face of an evil man and that realization keeps me awake at night in spite of the fact that he has been fired.

One day he will reap his harvest. My choice is not to play any role in that.


Laura

[fudge stripe cookays]

30. Glad you got away from him.

My mom once worked for a (female) sadist while she was going through a divorce and menopause at the same time. That woman made her life a living hell. I had never seen anyone so close to the brink. And my mom is not the most stable person anyway.

It's really difficult to glimpse true evil and realize that people like this DO exist, and they DO want to hurt you. I dated someone like that about 15 years ago, and it was terrifying to realize that I'd gotten mixed up with a pathological liar. It really just makes you wonder what makes some people tick.

fsc

[BleedingHeartRN]

10. Mine have all been your typical, oppressed, passive-aggressive mid-level hench women

But my poor hubby has had some real doozys...

One place he worked had a boss that was a cross between Mr. Burns and the boss from "office Space" Not to mention a greedy, money-grubbing, sexist asshole that basically tricked people into signing his iron-clad contracts and then screwing them over. He worked everyone to death, and would promote them for like $2500/yr if they lived up to his ridiculous expectations, only to pile on even more work. He expected them to work every Saturday, and some Sundays too. Whenever he got mad, he would advertise my husband's and others' positions on Monster. The turnover was unbelievable, and every week there's at least 5 advertisements for different positions. No one works there more than two years. My husband found a new job and left after 18 months.

The next one seemed alot better, being much more personable and "family-oriented." He promised the whole "we work hard and we play hard" line of bull. He had the facade down pat, right down to his mormonism and slew of kids. Turns out he was a pig, and rumor had it he was involved in sexual relationships with multiple women in the office. My husband worked like a dog for him, and initially he was recognized and got a raise for his extra effort. Because he was relatively new, he didn't get the red flags of many long-time employees leaving under fishy circumstances. One Monday, he was called into the office and let go for "working too hard." Turns out there were major financial problems, embezzlement, blackmail, and enough problems that whole division was closed by the end of the year. Employees were as disposal to him as toilet paper.

[Squatch]

13. I once had a company commander who was so bad, that if we ever

deployed to war, I swore I would have put a bullet in his head to keep him from killing my soldiers. He was criminally insane/dangerous.

[purr]

14. I had one..

real jackass he was. Told me he was going to "make an example out of me" because I was the only female working there. Jackass got demoted to a lower volume store in a bad neighborhood hahahahah!!

Hubby just got a promotion from King Jerk. Guy thought he was better than everyone else because he was the store manager. Would take 2 hour lunches to go out with his wife, told hubby that he was his "tool" and can use him as he wanted to, worked him 70-80 hours a week because he didnt feel that he had to work, sundays was "gods day" even though this man had no religion in him whatsoever and used that line so he didnt have to work a sunday. Hubby found a new job, told the HR woman about his 2 weeks and she promoted him to a different store. The kicker was, I went into labor and King Jerk said "ok you can have today off but expect to be in here tomorrow at 7am". Meanwhile, when his wife had his spawns, he took 2 weeks off and got paid for it even though he used up his vacation.

[BelleCarolinaPeridot]

15. I have posted on this board so many times about bosses from hell ...

I don't know where to start ...

- If you are female and you don't kiss his ass and make him feel like the King Almighty that he is not , you don't matter.

- If you are male and you don't come up to him and talk about sports or roll over like a dog , you don't matter.

- Treats other trainers like shit and he is not even their supervisor. Gets a kick out of making people look bad because he thinks it makes him look good.

- I don't even speak or look in his direction because I can't stand him. He is not there everyday but when he is there, even if its only 5 minutes, its 5 minutes too long.

- There are two different departments in our department of only 15 people. 10 of the people who don't know what is going on , don't know how to do their job , he lets them get away with everything. The 4 of us who do our job well are the ones who don't kiss his ass and we ignore him, we get treated like shit.

- He does'nt know how to seperate worker from friends. I don't want to be friends with my manager because it messes up a lot of thing in the end. There is a line that you don't cross.

[CBHagman]

17. Number 6 is a biggie.

He does'nt know how to seperate worker from friends. I don't want to be friends with my manager because it messes up a lot of thing in the end. There is a line that you don't cross.

There are boundaries you don't cross if you are any sort of professional. Unfortunately so many of us are dysfunctional and don't know what inappropriate behavior is. One thing I've observed is a supervisor making a junior colleague her confidante and also encouraging bad-mouthing of other employees. Unbelievable.

[BelleCarolinaPeridot]

18. Yes and that happens.

My department is all messed up ... I just get lost in the music of my ipod and zone out. It sucks because some of my fellow co-workers and I feel like we don't have anyone to voice our concerns to without retaliation . Because the higher-ups go out and drink with our managers ... the company I work for shall remain nameless but damn ...

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

16. I have one now

who is ok when we talk about the kids, the weather etc. When conversation tunes to the job, she gets WIERD.
It's hard to explain, you sorta have to experience her. I think she might be bi-polar.........
Now she hardly communicates at all and when she does its via email. No fun here in the office, she sucked it all out. :(

[NewJeffCT]

20. I had one like that before, but he was my boss' boss

and the Controller for the whole company.

One time, a woman had a teen son that had gotten hit by a drunk driver. The kid was in a coma and was sent to some special hospital and was perilously close to death. She had asked for time off to be with him (naturally) and he told her that she could have the time off as long as it didn't interfere with her job responsibilities.

Another time, we had a heat wave in April (April of 2002) and the whole department was working late. However, because the heat wave was in April, the air conditioning in the building (which housed a good 5,000+ employees during regular hours) was shut down some time around 5pm. That made the area where we worked swelteringly hot in the early evening - and, when we opened the windows to get fresh air in the area, a lot of bees started buzzing about the room. Not exactly stellar working conditions... the next night, the guy sends an email out saying that for our working pleasure, the A/C will stay on until 10pm that night (with the implication being that you'd better stay until at least 10pm)

[Aristus]

21. I once had the bad fortune to work for a guy who offered training in car sales.

My job was to sell the training program to the dealerships, and then follow up with them after the training seminar. What an open sewer of a job. The boss was a pretty intelligent guy with a degree in industrial psychology; but he was the asshole of the world. Way too enchanted with himself and his psychological acumen. The job interview consisted of him asking me idiotic questions to gauge my reaction to them, and psycho head tricks designed to disorient me. He did a good job, too. Why the hell he hired me, I don't know. But I ended up regretting it pretty soon afterward.

Not only was the boss a dickwad, but I had to work with f*****g car salesmen, for Pete's sake. In my training follow-ups, I had to sooth touchy egos and try to get these pathetic losers to see some value in the training they'd paid for. All the complaints they had about the company (and there were many, and justified, too) got dumped on me; when I passed them on to the boss, his reaction was "You deal with it; they're YOUR clients!" (No, they were HIS clients when they were paying money to him, anyway...)

I lasted a couple of months.I still have unpleasant memories of waking up in the dark of 4:30am to get to this putrid job on time. Mercifully, he fired me. It was the first time I'd been fired from any job before.

[baldguy]

26. I worked at a place where the Pres had anger management issues.

Every door had fist-sized holes in them at about face-level.

[LeftyMom]

28. This crazy woman used to snap at all the employees and customers

And she'd walk around singing off key at the top of her lungs to irritate people. I have no idea how she got away with it, she'd been with the company forever but you'd think that seniority would not be enough to protect an absolute bitch like that. :shrug:

[Writer]

29. My first boss.

My first job was at a television station. When I started, I actually had two bosses who each despised the other. Each would pull me aside and criticize the other. Let's call them Muffy and Duffy. After a while, the station moved me strictly under Duffy because my skills suited her needs best. As I began to work with Duffy, I realized that she was at the desk less and less. I also began to realize that she didn't know how to do her job and (because I had done some work during college) was having me do the work for her so that she could present that work to the department heads. She was completely incompetent.

I also realized that Duffy had made up stories about Buffy and that she was incredibly paranoid about anyone who threatened her. One week she asked that I sit in for her at a staff meeting with the department heads (I was only 22 at the time... with department heads of a major television station. The definition of intimidating.) I suited up and prepared a presentation that was very well received. Word got around to Duffy and very quickly I was on her hit list. She began gossiping about me, telling everyone that I was after her job, trying to get her fired, and that I was sleeping with the programming director. She was an exceptional liar and knew how to play the victim. She began setting me up to fail when we had to complete various projects for the stations group - giving me projects at the last minute or when they were already past due, so that I had to turn them in with my name attached - making me look like I was derelict in my duties, not her.

I put up with this for nearly two years. Finally she pulled me aside for a meeting. She accused me of being insubordinate and cocky. She said that she had a chat with HR about me and that I needed to shape up. I went straight to HR and spoke with them, but she had done her work. She had completely convinced this person that I was indeed everything she said I was, and I had no real recourse. He simply didn't believe me, without showing me a shred of evidence supporting her claims.

So... what did I do? I TOOK MY TIME. ;) In six months, I found a better job, and at 24, I went to New York City and started working for the network. My replacement back at the station kept in touch with me. Within six months she was enduring everything I had endured, but much, much worse. I took some moments to counsel her, sometimes when she was in tears - support I wish to God I had had when I was going through the same thing. My replacement lasted for only nine months.

But the network knew that Duffy was incompetent and destructive. She pushed for promotions but they never moved her up. In a year she moved to a new station group where she festered and faked her way to a network job... the last I heard, however, she was being forced out.

My first boss was an insecure narcissist and I wish companies would make a greater effort to identify this personality type in the workplace. She cost me what I think should have been a good teaching/growing experience at my first job.

But I more than made up for it after. By 25 I was managing and had my own office overlooking Central Park. She didn't stick.


~Writer~