Little stuff our bosses do that make us insane

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The other thread about the little things our SO’s do that drive us crazy suggested this thread. Now that we’ve picked on our SO’s, it’s time to start bitching about our bosses’ annoying little habits.

I’ll start: One of my bosses has a habit of leaving me voicemails instructing me to come and tell him to tell me what he wants me to do. He could accomplish the same thing much faster with a single sentence e-mail, but no - I have to come in and ask him to tell me what to do.

Example voicemail: “teela, tomorrow come in and remind me to tell you what I need you to do on that real property issue.”

He also dithers endlessly over tiny unimportant minutiae which he feels he must control somehow. Example: should a letter to a doctor be addressed as Dr. Joe Blow or Joe Blow, M.D.? This decision took him 1.5 hours one day. Another: should the company’s name in an address block be all caps or just initial caps? This was another big deal that took a lot of wavering to decide.

Aaaargh! What a colossal time waster!

How about your bosses?

2

Asks me to earn my salary. How aggravating!

3

I used to have a Walgreens manager (now mercifully departed) who would give us all lists of minutely described duties to perform every evening, regardless of the fact that we had been doing the same thing every night for years. My duties every night have always been to take out trash behind all three front registers, put away all re-shop behind all three front registers, vacuum the rug, and face (straighten up) the candy aisle and the front batteries/phone cards wall.

Thus, my list, meticulously written out and handed to me as I came in, always ran, “Take out trash behind all 3 front registers, put away all re-shop behind all three front registers, vacuum rug, face candy aisle and front wall.”

" :rolleyes: "

The lists she used to give the Senior Matron who has been a checkout clerk at Walgreens since they were downtown and had a lunch counter, and who filled cigarettes (restocked them) instinctively, in her sleep, invariably began with, “Fill cigarettes.”

Like you need to tell Betty to fill cigarettes?

And THEN, as if the lists weren’t bad enough, this gal would get on the intercom as soon as we had closed, and she’d REVIEW our effing duties all over again. “Okay, ladies, now we need the trash taken out behind all 3 front registers, we need all the reshop put away behind all three front registers, we need the rug vacuumed, we need all the facing done…” And she’d go on to remind Cosmetics and Photo what they needed to do, like they couldn’t read their (totally unnecessary) lists and hadn’t been doing it for years, same as I was.

Micro-managing was the kindest thing I could say about it.

She was obsessive/compulsive about other things, too, and clearly needed to be on medication or something, which was why we tended to cut her some slack and did not confront her–courteously–about the sheer uselessness, and offensiveness, of the whole procedure. But, still…it was damn annoying, to be treated like some slacker teenager.

4

Re-work for the sake of re-work.
Example: I’ve completed an instruction for the Skipper’s signature and route it to his office. He’s already approved the draft. I’ve just finalized it by dropping the ALREADY APPROVED text into the “Official” format. He knows this, yet feels a compulsion to re-edit the document just to show that he’s re-read it!
Often he makes changes on this document which negate the changes he made to the draft!

Damn, I hate that.

5

Passing the buck egregiously.

She’s a really nice person, very professional, but ridiculously busy, and passes work to us managers at times where it’s not always appropriate.

We therefore all keep our heads down whenever a new project comes on board because we know it will end up delegated to the individual who happens to be in her eyesight at the time, and rarely where that delegation is appropriate.

Here’s an email I received today:

That was it, apart from an email below it that said “Conference call is Friday at 4pm.”

So, not wanting to use email when we’re in the same room, I approached her desk and said “uh… context?”

The context was established - it was an external supplier, I was only incidentally involved, and it was about an email she’d sent three weeks ago, on which I was merely CCed, but she expected me to remember (bear in mind I get about 200 actionable emails a day). So I said “well… ok then, I guess.”

Two minutes later, she emailed all participants to the call with the words:

WTF?!?

6

I sent my boss an email explaining my absence yesterday, the first sentence of which was: “I am having some vertigo this morning from the ear problem I sought treatment for this weekend.” His response was, “Is this related to your migraines?” Because apparently the only illness I can have is my migraine. I swear I could call off for a broken ankle and he’d ask me if it was related to my migraines.

7

Can I combine the two and bitch about my SO’s boss? My wife is medical person and, as such, sometimes has to deal with things after regular business hours. The 10pm call from her boss about a patient care emergency is completely understandable. What I haaaaate, though, is when said boss calls her at 9 or 10 pm to discuss stuff like the vacation schedule, agendas for meetings, and so on. Because, really, nothing is better than having our one hour of “couple time” a night interrupted so you can discuss the %^#! budget for next *@#! quarter. Conduct non-emergency business during office hours, you jackass!

8

I truly love my boss - he’s the best I’ve ever had. Except for one teensy, tiny, disgusting habit. He chews - Copenhagen, I think - and so he spits, usually into his starbucks cup. ick.

At least he’s not like the coworker of years gone by who used to spit into a regular styrofoam cup, that he once knocked over on a desk full of documents…

Anyway, I really do like Al, but sometimes I hate talking to him.

9

“Supposably.”

“For all intensive purposes.”

And similar.

Which is too bad, because otherwise he’s a really good guy.

10

He waits to the last minute to do things. He owns something like three businesses. He trying to do an advertisement for one of them for an event on the 9th. So he got me started on it last week. They want these postcards printed up - 2500 of them, I believe. He hasn’t found a printer that can do it. He doesn’t have any quotes. Nada. I designed it and gave it to him. Beyond that it’s not my problem.

He doesn’t read the emails I send him. I’ll ask two questions and he only answers the first.

11

You just made me spit my own liquid out! I read that as “I really like to do Al!”

Hee!

My boss is ok, but he’s a self-professed “trust fund baby” and acts like it sometimes. He talks about spending large sums of money waaay too much.

12

She calls me into her office for all manners of conversations that do not require any privacy and could easily have been send through email. Every time she calls me in there I panic, thinking I am getting fired or transferred or something, but it turns out she just wanted to remind me that she will be out of the office this afternoon.

13

A serving of endless repetition, with a dash of not listening:

“Did you get a chance to finish X?”
“Yes, last night.”
“Good, because we definitely need to make sure we finish X.”
“I did finish X. Yesterday.”
“Glad to hear it, because X needs to be finished before the end of the week.”
“That’s why I finished it yesterday.”
“OK, so once X is finished we can let the other teams know.”
“We can let them know right now. Because I finished it. Finished it yesterday. X is finished.”

Follow-up Team status Email: “Morbo is working on task X and should be finished by the end of the week.” AAAAAAAAUUUUUUGHHHH!!!

14

I like my boss. He’s very helpful. He even has great suggestions about what computer I should buy. A Mac. Because PCs are crap. Macs rule. Everyone should get a Mac.

He tells me this again…

…and again…

…and again…

…and again…

15

I have to manage multiple ongoing projects (I currently have 21 open projects that I can bill to). This, invariably, leads to scheduling and deadline conflicts. My boss’ solution to this problem is “We need to make that a priority.” However, we are stretched so thin right now that just about every open project is now in “priority” mode - and doesn’t that just put us right back where we started?

16

Well, I don’t like him *that * much. :stuck_out_tongue:

17

My boss doesn’t listen either. I can explain to him, in great detail and with accompanying step-by-step email including illustrations, how a particular process works.

He nods like he gets it, he asks some questions to make sure he gets it, and then he walks away to do something else whilst his newfound knowledge leaks out his ears… well, that’s what I picture in my head, anyways.

I’ll invariably get an email a few days later (and sometimes even hours later) starting off with “Hey, not sure if we talked about X, but could you give me a quick run-down when you get a chance?” as if it’s the first time he’s been asked a question about it. Soon enough, even in my sleep I’ll find myself answering the same ten questions with minor variations on the theme over and over and over and over and over.

I like the guy, I really do, and I know he’s overworked. But he might be a little LESS overworked if he could damn well remember what I say.

18

My boss is wonderfulterrificawesome. But she pronounced “mine” like “my-un.” :confused:

19

Wow. Too many to name them all. Well, I guess you want the little stuff, so I can find a few of those.

He has a few sayings that make me want to choke him:

I’d rather be good, then if luck comes too I’m even happier.

If I talk to him about contingency plans he’ll say:

20

On my last job, the timeclock (yes, we punched a clock) was off by 4-5 minutes and got about 1-1.5 minutes farther off each month.

I got nailed for being late by punching in at 6:03, when the Internet time just a few feet away said 5:59pm. Pissed me off no end. My ‘smiling Bob’ brain-dead (female) Assistant Director just said “You know what time it says” and refused to correct it.