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Working Moms
shaindelr
member
Mac and cheese lover!
Share your worst boss story (a Friday fun-share)...
shaindelr
member
in Working Moms
All the other boards seem to have GTKY polls going today. I thought people might want to share worst boss stories. It doesn't have to be your current boss, just a crazy story from any time in your working life.
Mac and cheese lover!
This discussion has been closed.
Re: Share your worst boss story (a Friday fun-share)...
I'll start off. My worst boss ever was my first boss after graduate school. He was a very successful businessman who "bought a school"--like a charter school, and I was one of the three directors of the school.
He treated all of us like idiots. He would micromanage and tell me things like to use "small pieces of tape" when we were supposed to tape fliers or motivational sayings on the walls for students.
He didn't want the directors to talk when we entered kids' diagnostic test scores in the computers because he thought we'd be more efficient if we were quiet.
And he would bring his little daughters through and tell them that he was leaving the place to them, so they would be our bosses someday. There is nothing more humiliating than having a graduate degree, being an educator, and hearing someone tell a 6-year-old that they are going to be your boss. Ugh!
Mac and cheese lover!
I have had two horrible bosses:
First one wouldn't let me take the day off my DH graduated law school (and I had given her plenty of notice). It was a Saturday and she had plenty of coverage. My DH was so pissed he actually showed up to my work (I was not aware he was going to do this), walked in her office, shut the door and yelled at her b/c he was so mad. She had done a lot of other crap to me, but this was icing on the cake. I got the day off and was very surprised she didn't fire me.
The second one is my current one. She tried to tell me I am not doing certain parts of my job, when I have emails to back up that I am doing what she claims I am not. Also told me I don't follow up every time, when I am still waiting to get my review that should have happened last June. When she wanted to meet with me the next time to go over things I wasn't doing, I took my self review into the meeting and straight up asked why we had never gotten our reviews. She couldn't find the words to explain.
I have always been afraid of being labeled "insubordinate", but I think there is a line of standing up for yourself (and I am strickly talking about my current boss) and being "insubordinate". Just my two cents.
Goodbye little angel(7/22/2011)....see you in heaven
Goodbye my second angel (9/18/2011)
There is nothing more humiliating than having a graduate degree, being an educator, and hearing someone tell a 6-year-old that they are going to be your boss. Ugh! Damn! What a tool!
Okay my worst boss story:
I was hired by a grain/hedges firm as an accounting clerk right after college. My "department" was run by a loon - I'll call her Cindy. Her loony sister worked in that department too. There were 2 other girls. One of the 2 befriended me. When this happened, "Cindy" had a closed door meeting, telling me I shouldn't socialize with her because she was "bad news".
This played out like a bad High School drama. Cindy and her sister decided to harrass me, and every morning I was supposed to balance the hedge sheet. I was never able to - because either loon would "forget" to add one or two transactions. When I realized they were doing this on purpose, I would not do it until they "remembered" a transaction. Their little game stopped.
What followed was her getting one of the VP's to give me a "review" and in the review I was labeled "insubordinate". HE was a POS too - he had little man complex and I was bullied into leaving instead of being fired. They wanted me to stay on for 2 more weeks - so that I could train my replacement.
I declined and left that day. They paid me for 2 weeks vacation.
I actually had a really wonderful boss whose life completely fell apart while I was working for him. I was a "trainee" who couldn't do her job because for a year my boss was either drunk, in jail, or in-rehab . Things got better when his wife kicked him out and he moved into his cubicle. Fortunately, I got another job out of state and he got clean. He really was/is a wonderful person though,
Okay I have another one.
I worked at a very small redneck city back in 1993 - the only had about 5 police cars. The jurasdiction was divided between the city and the county (which was bigger) so we didnt' get a lot of action.
I was trained as an Emergency Police Dispatcher. During the time I was to be trained - the trainer decides to go on vacation and leaves the rest of the training for her back up. The back up took no initiative to train me at all. I would ask her and she would just drone on and on about the do's and don'ts - no actual book time like the other one did. I wasn't allowed to take the books home. So of course my training finished and I made mistakes. Thank goodness the town was small and there had been no emergency. When the trainer came back - the city manager complained (he had received anonymous complaints about me) and she let me go.
Oh, it gets worse. He "bought us" from someone else, and my paperwork for my salary had been lost, so he decided to pay me according to the offer I'd turned down.
And then I got fired for what he considered an "inappropriate relationship with a student." This girl's mother was in the hospital in a body cast (no exaggeration) and couldn't take her prom dress shopping, so I offered to loan this high school girl a dress. He just knew I had made arrangements with a student that were non-school-related. Basically, when she could pick up a dress from me. He later begged me to come back, but there was NO WAY.
Mac and cheese lover!
Oy vey...my prior office had an insane asst. director; and the office director loved her until the very end so there was no one to turn to. I still have issues from her mind games. For example I was new to the professional side of the university, and doing a pretty high profile job running commencement. For the first mini-group meeting, she told me she would run the first meetings to help me out. Five minutes before the meeting started, she said 'by the way, you know you're running this meeting, right?' No agenda, no mental planning. Then after the meeting, she told me that I wasn't as dynamic as she expected and she was disappointed.
She also had family members with health issues at one point, and in a pinch she asked me to take care of her cats. This turned into her asking me every time she went out of town, and I felt I couldn't say no. Then one weekend I had an unexpected conflict and couldn't make it; she was out of town for only 3 days, so it's not as if they were neglected long term. She came in that Monday yelling at me in front of the whole staff. Then she had a meeeting with me 2 days later in the quietest, most evil voice ever telling me that I had a 'questionable moral compass' and she couldn't trust anything I ever did even professionally because of that. I ended up running to our EAP office for support; they were appalled that she even asked this of a subordinate. And I was set up for regular appts with the omnsbudsman to track behavior and monitor; but she had tenure so it was basically suck up or get out. I found a new position at the same time she took a promotion at another school (and her boss realized that she was really a whack job). Very glad that's over....
While I was finishing my teaching credential, I taught summer school at a private school. The principal/owner was pretty much intolerable. It was not unusual for her rip people down. A former co-worked requested a letter of reference from her and was angry to discover that the principal had listed all of the teacher's faults.
My only confrontation I ever had with her was over a broken tape player. The office manager told me that the reg. teacher had left notes on classroom items that needed to be fixed or replaced and to bring them down to the office for her. Later that day, while I was outside on playground duty, the principal storms up, gets in my face and starts screaming at me for being stupid. I guess a tape player that I was told to bring down still worked and I was stupid for not knowing that. Parents, kids, other teachers all witnessed it. What a nut job.
TTC#1 2003, 5 angels above, IVF-PGS-FET, DD b. Aug-2011
TTC#2 2012/13? FET
My worst boss was my first principal when I started teaching. She had never taught before - her "teaching credential" was in adult education, arts & crafts. Just a couple of gems:
-She had her doctorate in theology from an online university. She would only answer us if we called her "Dr." If we called her "Mrs." she would ignore us until we called her "Dr."
-She would leave school every Tuesday at 12:45 and return at 3:00 with a new hair-do.
-One time I walked into her office to speak to her about a student issue and there was a parent in her office giving her a mani/pedi. I told her I had a confidential student issue and her reply was "we can just talk about it now. Don't worry about [the parent]."
Beyond her general incompetence, she was also accused of embezzling $60,000 from the PTA. The district promoted her to the central office.
Screw up, move up. Gotta love it.
I am too paranoid to share bad boss stories.
I had one job that was just a train wreck. I was a shift supervisor, and there was an assistant manager that pretended to love me, but in reality she hated me. Looking back, I think she knew that she was dumb and felt threatened by me and others who had minds of our own. I have tons of stories, but this is my favorite...
We had a camera system whose tape needed to be changed at the beginning an end of every shift. There was only one button on it - the same button stopped the tape and started it recording. Before the shift supervisor left their shift, they were supposed to switch the tape and restart the recording.
One morning, we opened and discovered that the cash box in our safe was completely empty. Obviously the next step was to watch the security tape and see if it caught anything. We made popcorn (seriously) and the assistant manager called everyone in to watch the tape with her. We put in the tape, and it starts playing the previous night's footage and the assistant manager starts getting really nervous. Pretty soon, we see her walk into the office, open the safe, and put the contents of the cash box in her purse. She walked out of the office and the tape went black.
We all sat there in silence, staring at her for about five minutes. Eventually, someone called the police and the rest of us excused ourselves. Awkward.
Turns out that the shift supervisor from the previous night had accidentally never started the tape recording. So, when the assistant manager came in, she pushed the button on the system, thinking that she was temporarily stopping recording. In reality, she started the recording and taped herself stealing the money. Oops.
A Little Bird and a Monkey Butt
Theres so much to say about her, I'm not sure where to start.
She had been with the company for a while so she understood the workings of the company and the corporate hierarchy, which did help in her position of Ops Mgr. She did not, however, make it a habit to show up on time. Generally she graced us with her presence after 10a. We (her direct reports) never knew when she was coming in, and had to fend off other departments. It was embarrassing.
When we would ask for training or help, she would normally hand us a piece of paper that was out of date and give us the name and number of someone who hadn't worked for the company in a few years.
Personally, I don't think a manager necessarily has to know how to do everything the people under them do, but they also shouldn't lie about it, or try to tell us how to do something they don't know anything about.
We all (Om included) sat in on conference call training for a new system. After the call, she decided to sum it for us, except she got it wrong, We JUST got off the call, and she didn't get it right.
She only heard what she wanted to, thought she was smarter than everybody in the room, lied as easily as breathes and regularly threw every one of us under the bus. The worst part was that she was our only link to our branch manager, so we never knew what the truth was.
She was completely incompetent. I don't how she lasted as long as she did. Oh yeah, I do. We covered her ass because we we're worried if we let her sink we'd be the ones in the unemployment line. On more than one occasion she told new employees their health insurance would start earlier than it actually did. At least one person canceled their personal policy based on her info. Luckily, nothing happened in the interim.
She finally got fired after all of the staff who actually did work left, and she failed a couple of professional exams (exams I had to take and pass because she hadn't done it yet, and someone in our department needed to have them done).
Good Lord, do we work for the same person? I'm waiting for my evaluation since October (second year this has happened), while my co-worker (my boss' favorite, but I really like her too) got her evaluation in the same month it was due (also for the second year in a row). My boss doesn't have to come in on Fridays and leaves at 3 each day she is there. AND she passed out her job description in both departments she manages to the top performers (which is me in my department) and told those people to reassign to themselves what they already do (which between all of us is EVERYTHING). None of us can go to HR about it though, because the VP of HR is also the CFO and hired my boss herself. They are nice and tight. The only thing keeping me at my job at this point is that I work with an awesome team, though I get crap pay and I'm doing my boss' job.
January OAD Siggy Challenge: Creative Snow Sculptures
WOW
January OAD Siggy Challenge: Creative Snow Sculptures
I was an active duty pharmacist in the Air Force and had two horrible bosses, but the second was far worse than the first.
First, as a pharmacist, he was completely incompetent. I honestly have no idea how he ever passed the licensing exams.
He would make extremely rude jokes. For example, during lunch one day, one of the technicians was talking about how difficult of a time she was having losing the baby weight from her second child. She was about 6 months pp. He said, "What? I thought you were pregnant again." She almost cried.
He was not understanding at all of illness. Once, I had strep throat. I was miserable. I could barely swallow, felt extremely weak, and had a fever of 103. I came to work, immediately used the walk in clinic in the building, and was waiting on my throat swab results. He thought I was just going to stay at work even if my test results came back positive. I actually had to get a doctor's note to leave (it was completely within my boss's authority to dismiss me for the day without a note). I was not one to stay home sick often, but I certainly was not going to stick around with a confirmed contagious illness and a high fever.
After my first boss left, I took over all of her duties in the interim. I continued to do all of them after my new boss arrived. When I left 10 months later, I was still doing 90% of my boss's job in addition to my own. This was despite having multiple meetings with him showing him how to do different things, making PowerPoint presentations with screenshots of running different reports, and writing a 14 page Word document that described different tasks that needed to be accomplished on an ongoing basis.
Recently, I was talking with one of my friends who still works there. She said that he habitually comes in late, takes naps in his office, and takes two hour lunches. A couple weeks ago, the commander of the medical group had repeatedly paged him overhead. After not getting a response, he called the pharmacy to ask where he was. No one knew. They looked all over for him. Finally, one of the technicians called his cell phone. She asked him where he was. He said, "I'm in my office." She said, "Sir, no you aren't. I just looked in there for you." He said, "Oh, um.... I'll be there in a few minutes." He was at home.