Bosses from Hell
February 12, 2010Jon Brooks Comments OffIf you’re out of work, sometimes it helps to know what you could be missing. From the OddTodd site, home of yesterday’s Laid off cartoon, another regular feature: Friday’s Boss From Hell.
A few sample entries:
Our software team has regular meetings on Tuesdays from 11:00 am to noon. Our boss sends out the agenda about a half hour in advance. Sometimes he’d forget to send it, and sometimes he’d cancel but forget to send the cancellation. We tried to break him of both habits.
That Tuesday, we had a huge deadline. Quite often the meetings get canceled near deadlines — and even when not canceled, the whole staff doesn’t always show up because they’re meeting the deadline. I was working furiously, checking email every five minutes for the agenda. None came, and then I accidentally let 11:00 come and go. At 11:10, I ran to the meeting room. No one was there. I stopped by my boss’s office and said, “I guess the meeting was canceled because we’re on deadline.”
He said, “No, they are never canceled unless you receive a notification.” (Except all those times he forgot to send one.)
I said, “But I didn’t receive an agenda. And there’s no one in the meeting room.” He said, “We had the meeting. It was 10 minutes long. You missed it because you were late.”
He later wrote me up and included “missed meeting” in my performance review. Yeah. The 10-minute meeting he forgot to send an agenda for. The one I was 10 minutes late to because I was working so hard.
Heavy sigh.
My first job out of college was as a pharmaceutical “detail” rep with a large pharma company. They liked us to say “detail” instead of sales.
My boss (who BTW was not use to working with women since I was the first in his district) had two VERY annoying qualities when he would work with me. We would be in a doctors office and I would start into my little sales story equipped with “detail aid” and props and he would get all worked up and grab the sales aid out of my hand and basically push me out of the way and finish the pitch. Of course I would look like a complete imbecile to the Doc I was supposed to be impressing. When we would get back into the car I would have to listen to his lecture on why I should be more pushy and aggressive like him.
The second and most annoying thing this guy did was if I ever challenged him on anything he would start ranting and raving like a weirdo snakeoil maniac and it was always when I was driving. He would start beating his fist on the dashboard and I would start to freak out because I was behind the wheel and I was forgetting where I was supposed to go. I once got really mad and told him that if he continued to do that I was going to slam his side of the car into a wall. As a retirement gift (I bet you could see that coming) we gave him an actual dashboard with a dent in it.
That was a long time ago…now I can laugh,
My boss Rick did not like me because, as he explained very clearly, I was responsible for the low morale in the office…because I missed two weeks while recovering from injuries sustained in an accident. The doctor told me to stay at home for a minimum of 6 weeks. Rick said two weeks was more than enough – two weeks and one day meant I would no longer have a job to come back to.
One time, this other employee wasn’t feeling very well so I took over his project which had a fast approaching deadline. Which meant that I worked that day from 9 am until about 2 am the next day. Overtime? No such thing at this company. And no appreciation from Rick for the extra effort, or for coming into work at the regular time the next day.
It got to the point where, every morning during the short walk between the elevator and the office, I would give myself a pep talk about not quitting in frustration during the day. I needed the paycheque.
I was really looking forward to a nice two week summer vacation with my kids when Rick made it clear that I had already taken my yearly vacation: the two weeks I took to recover from my accident.
However, the best moment came when Rick fired me – on the last day of work before the Christmas break, right after the staff Christmas party had ended but just prior to handing out the Christmas bonus cheques. Rick walked into my office, told me I was “too damn slow” and gave me five minutes to clean out my office, hand over my office key and get lost.
The end result of my sudden firing? Within six months of getting sacked, only four of the ten employees remained, the others being replaced by people who remained only a few months before deciding that Rick wasn’t worth their eight hours a day.
And since the job was fairly technical and required specialized training, it would take a couple of months before a new employee had learnt the ropes well enough to start producing real results. Rick was terrified of staff turnover, since it cost so much to train new people.
The last holdout from my time in that company is the receptionist, who is the only person holding that company together. She can’t even get a morning off to take her young daughter to the doctor because he is scared she will actually be going to a job interview. Which is actually what she wants to do, and get away from the most narcissistic, small-minded, vindictive boss in Canada.
I just left a boss from hell. He was controlling, inept and less competent than I am. He attempted to sabotage me from the minute I got in the door. He was giving my team members direction contrary to best practices and not telling me about any of these side conversations. He held onto a bunch of invoices that, when processed, put the project in red. Not only had he unethically held onto invoices so that he was not linked to a project going red, but he made many mistakes in the spreadsheet that tracked the burn rate on the project (a half million in errors). I unknowingly walked into this mess and received absolutely no guidance on how to handle seeking additional funding, etc. The things he should have been doing became a high priority with me with no responsibility being taken by him for the mess he had left behind. (Did I mention that I was taking his place, was more experienced and he told someone he felt threatened by my level of experience?)
When I asked if I could work from home like others, he said no. When I needed to travel to other offices, he wanted to know my every move. I asked for a flat screen monitor like even the interns had and received a 1985 model monitor. I asked to have my $120 professional association fees paid and he denied it. I asked if I could pursue a further professional designation and he said if I did go after it, to make sure he knew because he would too. How insecure!!
He was such a jerk!! I can’t even begin to list all the things he did that were wrong. Worst boss ever!!! I left amidst some made up scandal and left that very day. I just couldn’t take it another day. Reading other people’s stories has provided me someone virtual to relate too…hope some can gain some solace from my story. There are better opps and better bosses out there – I know there are. I do believe in Karma…so in time, he will get his due. Believe in yourself, as I must, and look to a brighter future that does not include the boss from hell.
I worked for a boss from hell for about 10 years. Then he finally got fired (after we turned him in at least three times). His problem was that he couldn’t keep his hands off himself. Really! He was addicted to porn, too. We had an office of him and about 12 young women, who all knew exactly what he was up to.
For instance, we had a little meeting room with a door that locked. After he’d leave, I would go in and find his porn stuffed under the cushions in the furniture! He would grab his envelopes of porn and head to his private bathroom for 40-45 minutes at a time several times a day. Once he came to me for $15 for his COD shipment from a hooker. When he’d leave the building for meetings, we would go through his drawers. Oh, what we found in there! He even had a portable VCR under his desk so he could watch porn videos during the day.
This was all going on almost blatantly in our office every single day for years. Unfortunately, this was before there were sexual harassment laws that were enforced. As I mentioned, we turned him in 3 times and finally after they fired him, his boss threatened our jobs if we ever told anyone. I immediately turned that guy in, too. What was the business? Legal publishing! I had nightmares about him for years.
In my first job out of college, I went to work for a temp agency…My boss, obsessed by status (always had to be right on obscure points of fact, worked her social club membership into every other sentence), wanted a personal assistant far more than a marketing coordinator. So she started slipping her personal business into my inbox. I started with securing lines of credit for the company using her personal information. It then moved on to calling the insurance company to see why the costs of her antidepressant medication had not been reimbursed. Soon after, I found myself filing the paperwork for her sister’s Curves franchise. But in the most ludicrous of all assignments, I did property deals for her. She had me call owners of undeveloped plots of land within a particular ski resort community. I was then to ask each and every person if he/she were interested in selling land to my boss. One guy actually said yes. So, without a title search or any other due diligence, she asked me to go to “legaldocuments.com” and draft up a sales agreement.
I had made friends with the receptionist in the office, and we commiserated over the ridiculous and inappropriate things we were asked to do. I once walked out to his desk and casually asked what he was working on. His reply: “illegal things.” He had been asked to falsify pay records for the former owner of the company who was no
longer working a full time job, and simply living off of the proceeds from the sale and her husband’s income. Apparently the couple were applying for a jumbo loan and needed the fake paychecks to qualify.My former coworker and I are waiting for the statute of limitations to run out on a few legal issues. I’m also hoping that no future personal assistant misuses my boss’s personal information; if that happens, I’ll be one of a very few suspects who ever had access to her SSN, DOB, personal address, etc.
