The Worst Boss Your Ever Had

[unc40]

I have been lucky and have had mostly good bosses but there is one that was just awful. It was when I worked at a resort hotel and this lady became an assistant housekeeping manager simply because she was friends of the manager. She had no experience in management or housekeeping and she turned out to be disaster. One incident I remember was getting called about light that was about to go out because it was flickering. The light was in a room where we had photos of famous people who had visited the hotel and a lot of people went there. I was told to go change it which was fine however I knew the reason it was flickering was because it was next to the air conditioner that was causing it to vibrate. I changed it anyway and a half hour later got a call from her telling me I needed to change the light again. I explained the light was just vibrating do to it being near the AC but changed it anyway. A little later I get a call from her again about the exact thing and still tried to convince her why the light was flickering but she said to change it because the light was going out. I changed that bulb six times before I finally got through to her what the problem was. There were other dumb things she did but wont put them here now.

I can tolerate a lot of things from bosses. I know they have bad days, can make bad decisions, and are human but one thing that I cannot tolerate is a boss who doesn't listen.

[Ultimo Gallos]

Been lucky had mostly great bosses. Only two that weren't was the manager of this now long defunct comic shop I worked at in high school and manager of a gas station.

Was the start of the 90s comic boom and she regularly lied to customers about how "Yea that book will be 50 bucks by next week might be smart to buy 10 copies today." and other crap. Lack of competing shops and location kept that place open longer than it ever should have been.

Then years later for a year while waiting for an opening at the place I wanted to work I worked at a huge gas station. The store boss was a lazy racist POS.

Didn't take long for me to notice a pattern she had. Hire someone train them on 2 morning shifts. Then put them working graveyards. Tell them the register came up short and they can either pay it or get fired. Most would quit when told this and hte boss was pocketing whatever amount she would claim they stole/lost.

When I got the job I wanted,I was waiting on someone to retire,I gave 2 weeks notice. 2 days after my last shift I go in to get gas and cigs. See the regional manager is there running it.

Go back in late at night talk to the graveyard manager and learn the regional had been suspecting the store manager of various shady things. Her plan was fire the store manager,move assistant manager up to store manager nad offer me the swing manager postition. Seems store manager had never told regional I was only there until a spot opened up at the local morgue.

[tirtefaa]

Most of which aren't worth mentioning mostly because it's stuff that was early on in the teens and early adult years, but the two that stand out are when I worked at a grocery store, we had one of those calm terror bosses who had to calmly find fault in every thing you did, then explain to you what is wrong, most of the time it was petty stuff that didn't focus on anything that was part of my job, it was more awkward than anything because he had the most forced smile I've ever seen out of someone. A later boss at a pizza place would have been fine, but he was a younger guy who didn't know how to manage people, so his default was to yell at them, and this was at a time when I needed a job and couldn't find one else where, so I endured it. Unfortunately, when you yell at people all the time for unintentional mistakes, that actually doesn't fix the problem, it only makes it worse. It's too bad because he was an otherwise okay guy.


Technically, this doesn't count but he did outrank me and had the ability to override me, but much later I was working at a company where I was one of the higher ups. They company brought in a guy who was there to fill a position that they created. Up to that point, the company was usually slow to make changes and had the "if it ain't broke" mentality. Now I admit, there were things to be fixed, and when it came time, I readily endorsed the ones that I knew were going to have an impact. But this guy thought it would be good to revamp everything. This was a ploy to create the illusion that he was needed. He created a very aggressive work environment in an environment that was not aggressive beforehand. No one liked him because he refused to compromise and never took other people's ideas into consideration. Funnily enough, he really wanted to be my friend and when he was just chilling out (which was most of the time) where he was outside smoking, he loved shooting the breeze, and sought out my company, or he was on his phone watching videos.

Now again, I gave his ideas some endorsements, but any time I saw a flaw or a problem I spoke up. Regardless, since he outranked me, he would dismiss my worries, and for some reason the owner always sided with him. The ironic thing was, any time I saw an issue...I turned out to be right. Every. Single. Time. There must have been 20 or so issues that happened, including us losing a client because this guy was okay with one of our employees lying in order to get sales. The fact that he wasn't fired for this or even reprimanded tells me that he was lying to the owner about the events and that I was making things up.

The most egregious thing was that before he came into the company, there were some bad decisions made and our company location was having difficulty finding new employees. The decision was made to open a secondary location in another city, and put two managers over there. Unfortunately, despite my attempts I did not get the opportunity to switch, but after a terrible start in the second location, they had me and another manager switch. The result was a thriving location where we went from 10 employees to 60. Unfortunately, after 18 months I was moved back to the first location to help get performance up there (which I did), but this is where the idiot guy stepped into the second location in a role to oversee the new managers due to a quick succession of promotions and losses.

He hurriedly trained two people for a role that they weren't equipped for. The results were what you'd expect, since now that I was back in the original location managing that one by myself, I was getting routinely twice the performance from half the amount of people. Meanwhile this guy was hiring anyone and everyone to work there, so after 6 months I filled in for a shift in the second location, and it was AWFUL. Rude, obnoxious employees who were breaking the rules and not held accountable, there were multiple incidents that happened that were borderline illegal. And this guy was in his office watching videos most of the time. Over time, it at least became clear that I was a bit of a 'fixer' when it came to problems. So I was eventually given this guy's job and he was moved into another role...more on that later.

In his role, I first set out to change the environment through being an active participant on the floor, I was a part of everything the managers did to make sure they were following through and being respected. I was amazed at how much better both of them got, and while there were some losses from employees who didn't want to follow the rules, the environment did get better. Unfortunately, when a business develops a reputation as a wild place to work, no one wants to apply there, so despite an aggressive campaign to get people to apply, we struggled to ever get back to the numbers we were at a few years prior. Despite this, performance drastically improved and incidents were few and far between.

Then Covid happened, and when we had an outbreak in mid 2020, that meant everyone who tested positive had to quarantine. Well it was during this two weeks that this guy helped convince the owner that things weren't profitable moving forward with our department. This was something he implied multiple times over the years, which is why he was always scheming to change something. When something got changed and performance didn't improve, he would claim people weren't following it. When this didn't work, he would then go find something else to "fix". He had finally gotten to a point where he no longer had any other "fixes" to fall back on, and that myself and the managers just didn't do what we were supposed to do. He finally convinced the owner to shut down our department and let over 50 people lose their job, some people including myself who had been there over a decade.

[Fade]

Current job I have, I have had the worst and the best lol won’t bore with details, but, it’s not easy. Gotta be strong, but can’t be mean. It’s a thankless position.

[Allie Kitsune]

Current one.

He's an asshole, intentionally misgenders and calls me "Sir" (while bitching if anyone calls HIM "sir" because it makes him "feel old"), used his influence to make it so the entire office is on his side (and I've actually been written up for asking someone to not use my birth name) because they don't want him yelling at them.

He makes me come into the office every day when literally everybody else gets 2 work-from-home days.

He has forbidden me ever taking time off because "I need you as the always-available backup in case the receptionists want to take or call off.", and insists that when he makes me answer the phone, I only use my birth name and not my preferred one.

He's abusive to two other people in the office as well, but he's especially abusive to me.

There are some things about our processes that he's never done, and don't know 100% how they work, but he thinks that he does, and when I try to explain to him that things don't work the way he thinks they do, he drags me across the hall and screams that if I ever make him look bad in front of someone else again, he's asking his boss to start firing proceedings.

According to his boss, HR considers him untouchable, and there's no point in anybody complaining about him.

[Push R Truth]

I work in government. Every 2 to 4 years there's a new asshole that puts the previous asshole to shame.

[Natural Born Farmer]

Enterprise Rent-A-Car promoted people to management positions largely on sales. I was good, not great, at sales so it took me a long time to move up, and in the meantime I found myself working for some people who were absolutely fantastic at sales, and total shit at every other aspect of business. In a lot of cases they were less than a year out of college and had never held any sort of authority role before, but hey, they were great at sales.

Still had a good time with the company, but when the supervisory situation was bad, it was REAL bad.

[The Ichi]

On definitely my current one. Ranting about him ruins my mood though.

[Mighty Attack Tribble]

About four years ago I had one of those co-workers who will throw anybody under the bus to make themselves look good. For the purposes of this story, let's call them Nick. We had a guy enrolled in the management training program who was next in line for a promotion to supervisor when the role became available. A new manager was hired, and Nick's nose found a new home about four feet up the new manager's ass, which resulted in Nick's surprise promotion to supervisor, which they rubbed in the face of the guy who was due that promotion to the point where he wound up being transferred to another site after telling her to shut the f*** up.

Unsurprisingly, staff morale dipped with Nick as supervisor. Everybody else would break their backs doing their jobs while Nick sat in the office f***ing around on Facebook and taking 3-4 smoke breaks per hour.

One evening Nick called one of my colleagues into the office and said that they had been monitoring me on CCTV and felt they "had enough dirt" on me to get me fired (said dirt being that I spent too much time not doing anything, despite my primary job role as a hotel night worker being to simply be present in case of emergency), but needed my colleague to file an official complaint to get the ball rolling. My colleague quite rightly told her she would not have anything to do with it and warned me of what had transpired. I promptly dropped a copy of the company policy manual on Nick's desk with the passage stating that spying on staff using CCTV is a gross misconduct offence highlighted, and gave them the business card of my union representative if they wished to discuss it further. I was left alone after that.

A few weeks later, one of the other night workers quit suddenly, and was replaced the same day with – wait for it – Nick's spouse, who spent their first shift filling out and backdating a job application. Not suspicious at all.

Morale continued to tumble over the following months, leading to several staff quitting, a drop in customer feedback scores, fewer returning customers and a drop in revenue. The manager, unable to figure out why this was happening, declined to take a demotion to deputy manager and re-train at another site and resigned. Nick was promoted to temporary manager.

Over the next four months a number of strange things started happening:

• Staff routinely found their wages being underpaid by 5-10 hours per month
• The charity donation pots, which averaged about £50 per week, dropped to literal pennies
• Entire boxes of supplies (milk, teabags, coffee sachets, sugar, toilet paper, hand soap, and shower gel) would go missing, as they did at our sister site, where Nick's spouse was covering shifts several times per week
• Nick, previously quite open about their dire money problems, bought a new car, a new wardrobe, and would eat out for lunch every day when previously they'd bring a packed lunch

One night, while doing a seurity check of the hotel, I saw Nick and someone I didn't recognise sneak into the hotel using Nick's override code on one of the fire doors. Naturally, I followed, saw them duck into a room that was marked on our booking system as closed for maintenance, and stuck around listening long enough to establish that kinky shit was going down.

Did I mention Nick's spouse was working at our sister site that evening?

At this point I informed the reception supervisor what had happened, and they were able to establish that Nick's staff card had been used to access rooms that Nick had taken off for maintenance on nights their spouse had been working at our sister site, and had been doing so for some time.

About a week later Nick and their spouse resigned with immediate effect, having been notified by head office that they were being investigated due to the financial irregularities, the missing supplies, and breaking safety and security policies to conduct an extramarital affair on the premeses.

Nick soon got a job as an deputy manager at a local golf club a friend of mine was working for at the time. I warned him of what had happened here, and not long after he told me Nick had left for a new job quite suddenly after management had noticed the charity pots had started taking in fewer donations and, on his advice, contacted my regional manager, who Nick had conveniently not listed as one of their employer references. From what I've gathered, Nick is now divorced.

["Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay]

I need to remember to come back to this thread

[Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!!]

I've never had a bad boss per se. Closest I ever came was when I got on with my current career as a tax man, they did an employment reference check with my then-current employer at a call center. My team leader was nothing but supportive of me but the department manager came in and said, without naming me, that leaving for a significantly higher paying job with way better hours where I didn't have to hear assholes problems all day would somehow be a terrible mistake for "whoever" was jumping ship. Probably just sour grapes.

[bob]

Horrible stretch when I worked at a restaurant.

officialfan.proboards.com/thread/543062/dear-work

[Timeless Hayterade]

15 years ago, my first job was in retail. I worked at a Wal-Mart, and if you have a choice in employment, steer clear of Wal-Mart. Most of my bosses were cool, but there was one that was in charge of my area of the store, and she was a horrible person. It seemed like she was always the hardest on me. I get that there are bosses that are harder on some workers than they are on others because they see something in those workers, but this wasn't the case. It seemed like every slip-up, every moment I took a chance to breathe, she'd be right on my ass just to f*** with me, if anything.

I wasn't doing anything differently than anyone else. There were lazy people on the payroll, though that's universal. However, the lazy people at my Wal-Mart never got chewed out by our manager. I, however, seemed to always bear the brunt of the manager's ire. It was like if I took a couple of minutes to go to the bathroom, she'd get angry. I think she expected me to piss my pants or something.

[WoodStoner1]

Oh I dunno...the one who listened to someone's exaggerations about me and ruined my professional life?

[schma]

I don't have anywhere near the horror stories that others do. However, I had two bosses that I would consider terrible. The first one was made supervisor of my section of a grocery store where we made food that people could pick up. The first supervisor was fantastic, actively worked with us and was genuinely a joy to work for. This one didn't really want the position and pretty much spent her day talking to anyone and everyone and basically avoiding doing any work. She frequently foisted her duties on us despite us making minimum wage. She would often go for excessive breaks and essentially ran the department into the ground to the point where they started reducing hours. I remember I had been the first person to be left alone in that department and it was only so the first supervisor could have a break and even then she was apologetic and it was treated like a big deal (she was only gone 15 minutes). Only 2 years later when I left it was common for people to be left working alone for hours at a time. Literally everyone in the department complained about her and management figured we just missed our old supervisor. Nope, the new supervisor was just that bad.

Another was my first supervisor at the factory I've been working at for almost 16 years now. I had never worked in a factory and truly had no idea how dangerous the job could be (though thankfully our facility is actually pretty damn safe relative to most places thanks to an awesome health and safety manager). This guy was a bully on a power trip. I always think of Scar in the Lion King when he says "I'm a king, I can do whatever I want" mirroring child Simba's understanding of being a ruler and showing how unfit he was. That was my boss. He had knocked someone up and basically ended up in a shotgun wedding that led to a miserable marriage as they stayed together for the kid. Why is this relevant? Because he was the kind of guy who would take his bad moods out on his workers. We learned when he got a certain look on his face, things would be getting bad. The guy took so many smoke breaks that if I was looking for him, I would walk right past his office without looking in and go to the smoking section first. If he was not there, then I would check his office. Anyone that didn't stand up for themselves or who were quiet were bullied by him when he was in a bad mood. Some of the jobs required you to be near a machine so you had limited movement and he would make sure to place himself where you had to be in earshot of him as he ran you down and crapped all over you.

The funny thing is one day he finally pushed me too far, and I got in his face and yelled at him. He immediately backed off, backpeddling and never bullied me again. Like some sort of after school special. I was still pretty young and me standing up for myself was rare back then to my detriment. He was eventually fired for many reasons including gross misconduct and falsifying numbers among other things. I remember I felt bad for literally about 5 seconds before all the bullshit he had pulled came rushing back and I realized that he totally deserved to be fired. Even today 14-15 years later, all I have to do is mention his name around some people and I get "ugh" and then a rant.

[Vanilla Gorilla]

I worked as a bank teller. The dress code was business casual. I came to work meeting the dress code, but I forgot my belt. My manager berated me for looking unprofessional and sent me home. Not just to get my belt and come back, but for the day. I couldn’t believe it. I ended up quitting shortly there after.

I had a boss at another job that wanted me to participate in a scheme where a lady was committing fraud against her estranged husband’s credit card account. Once I realized what was happening I reported it was told to keep quiet because she was a high net worth client. I continued with my reporting and quit shortly afterward. She ended up being fired and they offered me a raise to stay, but I said no thank you. I left for my current employer, which I have been with over 19 years.

[Mike Strike]

Man, **** this guy. Everything about him sucks.

Wait, what were we talking about?

[An Dog On An Skateboard]

I had a regional manager who used to show up at the branches he oversaw with a woman who was basically on the lowest rung of the ladder in this company. No one could really work out why but it annoyed a lot of people because she didn't really seem to do any actual work, and because she was being paid to never actually go to work, but they couldn't hire anyone else because officially she was still employed and her branch was fully staffed. It turned out later that he was sleeping with her behind his wife's back (but in plain view of all the staff) and all the times I called him for something and was told he was "in a meeting" and couldn't answer the phone it was because he was busy banging her somewhere. We got along OK, and he never did anything to personally offend me and was actually quite complimentary about my work once, but that was pretty bad.

He also broke the combination dial on our safe trying to change the battery, and it took until yesterday to get it replaced.

[darbus alan]

Last time I worked at Gamestop, the store manager was a miserable prick.

Granted, it was Gamestop, so the bosses above your boss always sucked. But my previous stints there I had a great store manager who shielded his employees from a lot of the corporate BS and treated people with respect which in turn made us want to work hard for him.

[Mozenrath]

There is more to it, but the current boss I have has issues, mostly with dumping a lot of work into my lap because I'll do it and do it correctly. There are worse things to be than reliable, so I tend to not complain too much, but it can lead to hectic situations when I am doing literally the tasks that'd normally fall to three people some days. (It does actually mean skipping the parts of the job I actually dislike more, so I don't usually mind, granted.)

Worst boss was easily at a car wash. He'd log people out to commit wage theft, he'd give all of the better tasks to his buddies, and he'd have zero qualms doing stuff like dumping me in a position power spraying wheel wells for literally 6 hours in direct sunlight. I quit because I was severely sunburned and getting paid the most minimal of minimum wage was not worth that.