Wow, the planets must be aligned just right today. I finally snapped at my boss for this very thing and gave my two weeks notice! I, too, am overly careful after a mistake is pointed out to me, especially in a manner that squashes any amount of confidence I had in my job. Then I make subsequent mistakes because I’m overthinking things!
It doesn’t matter what I do, it’s never to his liking (even when it’s done absolutely perfectly). Everything that goes wrong is my fault until I can prove otherwise, and when a mistake is pointed out to me, he doesn’t say, “In the future…”. It’s “You were supposed to remind me of X, now it’s too late!”
That was the last straw. I’ve been working 60 hour weeks trying to keep up with the workload. Everything is a priority, you know. :rolleyes:
I should have listened to all the people who warned me about him before I started working here.
After I confronted him (very loudly, I might add), he turned it all around on me. I’m too sensitive and he tried to tell me that he doesn’t yell and that he means well. They would be crippled without me and he knows it. It’s a small office and I’m the only one who knows this job (Controller), so he was really trying to sweet-talk me.
If I’ve learned anything from my asshole co-worker, it’s that you have to listen to your gut. If you feel like he’s being an asshole to you, he is. I often wondered if I was being too sensitive, too - looking back, I should have just shut that b**** up the first time she sharpened her claws on me, but that’s not particularly my nature. Bullies like this can smell less-dominant people from miles away, like sharks sniffing blood in the water.
Getting the boss a pencil, taping his envelope for him, being told you are not in good enough shape? WTF?
Having had enough years to feel fairly secure, I don’t let them do this to me. One boss expected me to make his coffee, get his mail, etc etc etc. I simply told him “I’m an engineer, not your damn maid or your delivery boy” and walked off. However, this is California, not some so called “right to work” or “at will” state.
This kind of reminds me of one of my managers at the tutoring center. For some reason, her #1 priority is that there are enough pencils for the kids at the beginning of the day. When I am in charge of cleaning up for the night, it is my job to make sure that there are enough pencils. Not enough pencils? Sharpen some more. Oh no, Incubus, don’t use the good sharpener, the noise gives me a headache! Use our crappy little battery powered sharpener that takes 30 minutes to sharpen one pencil but more often than not merely reduces it to a pile of wood chips instead :mad:
Several nights ago I was cleaning up. I heard her say, “Incubus, just take these pencils and put them with the rest, that should be fine.” so I did. The next day we were swamped, and I noticed we were out of pencils. The manager pointed out to me, “see what happens when you don’t put enough pencils out, Incubus?” and I said calmly, “But I put the pencils out like you told me last night.” and she replies, “Were there 30 pencils like I had always told you to have?” and I clarified, "I don’t know, you said that the pencils I put in there were enough. She went on to explain that when she came in that morning, there were Not enough pencils! and they suffered through the whole day of a crippling pencil shortage. Did the director sharpen any when she noticed this? No. Did she ask another employee to sharpen a few more pencils? No! I believe she deliberately left things be, just so she could rub it in when I came in that evening, and she also REMINDED me 2 or 3 more times again that evening about how I didn’t put enough friggin pencils out the night before. Geez, how passive agressive can you get?! :mad:
This is my boss, to a tee. Is it enough to point out someone else’s mistake? No. He has to leave mistakes where they are, further compounding errors, in order to ‘make a point’. Often if someone else in the office makes an error in something and they are not in the office when he notices, even if it’s an important document or time-sensitive material, rather than having someone else correct it and speaking to them about it when they return to the office, he will leave it as-is so he can make them scramble to fix it. I think he’s just sadistic.
