Is she from Massachusetts? That still throws me for a loop and I’ve lived here for 15 years now.
This confused me when I first saw it, but now I get it.
Listen, manager of the department: I like you well enough but I’m about to throw you out of the window.
You’re a manager and I’m a staff assistant. You manage and have a vague idea of how I do what I do. When you decide you will try to do what I do and you ask me a question about procedures and I answer you, DO IT HOW I TELL YOU TO DO IT!
Don’t reply, “But that’s not how I did it 10 years ago.” No, it’s not, but it’s how I did it 10 minutes ago and it’s how I did it already 10 times this morning!
If you’re going to ask me that type of question, LISTEN TO WHAT I TELL YOU, or DON’T ASK ME!
And if you tell me it’s time to go to lunch at a time that I’ve been going to lunch for the past 2 years, I will throw you out the window and MAKE SURE YOU LAND ON THAT FLAG POLE SO YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU SO OBVIOUSLY NEED!!!
And later that afternoon she continues with the “How do I do this again?,” but wants me to come to her desk. As I repeatedly (try to) show her, she gets up, “You sit and do it, I hate people looking over my shoulder.”
What in the Fannie-Farkle-Flying-Finger-of-Fickle-Fate is that!
“Coming up on the 10:00pm News: Defenestrated Manager Anally Impaled on Flagpole. Details in Sixty Seconds.”
Are you SURE you’re not in Ohio? Cuz this is pretty much my life right now.
The comment on my performance review from last month was a doozy - I have trouble managing my PTO … and am on step 3 [next anything is a firing offense, no matter what it is]because of absenteeism.
Hm, OK - I get 2 weeks off. For the whole year. Pretty typical for the US contingent.
Last feb I broke my foot and was out for 3 weeks, which oddly enough got my hyperparathyroidism diagnosed, which resulted in about 10 different days of assorted bloodwork and radiology of assorted types, and 2 weeks off to get my throat cut, and an additional bonus of pseudogout, which flared for 2 weeks each in november and december. Did I mention that the hyperparathyroidism and pseudogout have FMLA paperwork associated with them?
I would love to know how I can prepare for breaking a foot, and getting diagnosed with a fairly nasty condition that required getting my throat cut. Hell, I even cut my recovery to 2 weeks and turned down the 3d week my surgical endo really wanted me to have. If there was a way to diminish the amount of time a flare keeps me off my feet, I would jump on it. I can take colchicine for 3 days until the sores start popping out in my mouth forcing me to stop taking it. Between the Byetta, Metformin and indocin [for the pseudogout] I spend about the first 4 hours after medding up morning and evening as nauseous as when i was pregnant and had morning sickness noon and night … which does nothing for my diabetic need to follow a sched and diet…so i tend to stop the indocin, and deal with no nsaids to control the yurps. :rolleyes: and still have to deal with the various insane work requests…
Now I telecommute [started this morning] and dont have to deal with someone walking up to me with an absolutely insane request… my new boss is phenomenal and understands chronic illness! I only have to go in for half a day once a month for any sort of training or meetings I need <squeeeee>
I totally sympathize with you on this one. When I was at American Express in the mid-90s, I had something like 10 sick days. One of my annual reviews included the comment to the effect of “The 3 sick days you took during the [entire] year is acceptable and within our limits.” 
If I get 10 sick days (and called in the requisite two hours before start time), why even mention it in my review?
Sign in the scheduling department of a company I worked at:
So let me get this straight. You want me to rush this rush job in front of the rush job I am already rushing to rush?
We used to call my old boss Mike Romanager. Does that give you an idea of what we put up with?
“Could you take care of the Fnord presentation for me? It needs to be done tonight.” :walks away:
The Fnord presentation is a two-month project involving translations, interviews, copywriting, photo retouching, graphics, storyboards, recording, video editing and packaging. “Take care of” has in the past meant anything from “proofread what I’ve done for typos” to “write 10 pages of dialog and create mock-ups of the visuals”.
The real problems are threefold:
1 - He doesn’t realize he’s being vague. He has a perfectly formed idea in his head of what he wants, and doesn’t grok that other people don’t see it.
2 - He’s never not talking. He’s busy and hard-working, but also non-stop talkative. The challenge is to get him to stop and sit still long enough to spell out precisely what he wants.
3 - He can be extremely picky about what he wants, in ways that can seem completely random and arbitrary, and gets pissed off when things aren’t as he wants. It leads to an environment where nobody wants to push ahead and do what they think is right (something he frequently complains we don’t do) when we know that 90% of the time we’ll be berated for doing it wrong.
I’ve managed to work around #3, but #1 and #2 are a big pain in the ass.
That is awesome and so unbelievably accurate I don’t know what to say.
We actually turned our boss’ first into a verb as in -
“What the hell is going on with Project X?”
“It got Larry’d.”
I work with someone who has me call people to tell them to call him and who, when you ask him for a phone number, says something like “Call Sanora and ask her for the number for the lesbian that use to live next door to her sister-in-law’s cousin, cause she use to be married to the guy’s brother.” WHAT?
Print it out in a large bold type face and post it at your work station. If someone comes up with a stupid request, point to it.
Correcting his employees in a manner that’s supposed to be cheerful and positive, but comes out as extremely passive-aggressive. Example:
“Wouldn’t it be great if we all could reply to customer emails within two days? :)” or “It sure is great to have that three o’ clock coffee, but some of us need to remember to go back to work on time!”
I always say “mines.” My Boss once pointed out there was no such word. I replied “If you have more than one gold mine, what do you have?”
I’ve mentioned this before, but my boss, who appreciates me and is very supportive of my family vs. work life refuses to accept any percentages I calculate. I do use a calculator and everything, but I am also pretty good at estimating when it comes time to explain myself. So, let’s say we want to report how many sophomores have been in for counseling and we have 420 of them registered and 40 of them have been in for counseling. Well, that’s 9.52%. You know, just under 10%. Well, I guess she wants it to be higher. Or lower. Or something. So out comes the scrap paper and the pencil and she starts with the long division because that can’t possibly be right. Except it always is. And the thing is, I’m am the Mistress of Spin and can turn any statistic into a winning argument so there’s no need to go through all this! Just tell me what you want to prove and I’ll prove it!
Oh that sounds so familiar.
I have been told to answer the phones as part of being ‘a team player’. This also entails screening calls.
Recently boss was working from home, and in an attempt to be ‘proactive’ (something else I have specifically be asked to do) I sent boss an email. Knowing that boss is not very good at answering questions, email consists of the following:
‘Is there anyone specific you would like to speak to today that I should direct to your cellphone?’
(note the word ‘specific’, used in an attempt to elicit the answer ‘I would like to speak to X, Y, and Z’).
The email that came back said ‘Yes, great, anyone I’ve spoken to in the last few days’.
Well, last time I looked, ESP was not on my job description. So when people called in and asked for boss, I said ‘Is this with regard to an on-going issue?’. Naturally, they all said yes, including the cold callers. And got forwarded to boss’s cell.
This is actually a gripe about a former boss of mine, not who I work for now, but –
He occasionally acted like a nice, down-to-earth, easy-to-work-with guy.
I mean, every so often, that ball-busting, condescending bastard acted like a decent human being - someone who was actually pleasant to work for, and for whom I actually felt like dealing with, not avoiding. Not often mind you, but just often enough to make me wonder why he had to be such a complete asshole all the rest of the time.
No, I don’t think so. She’s lived in Florida from childhood, and I think they were from Ohio before that. I’ll have to ask her again.
I like my boss, really. But one day she came to us and told us that it was now OUR responsibility to ensure that the doctor’s info contained in the history and physical’s that they perform and dictate is accurate. Huh? 
If not, the pt cannot go to surgery. Double huh?
Thing is, we nurses do our own hx and px. We verify that a current (within one calendar week) H & P is on the chart. We verify that we are indeed cutting off the left foot or whatever. But, as a professional with my own license, I am not responsible for the tripe or utter BS a doc puts in an H & P. (of course if the doc writes that pt is blind or diabetic etc and pt is not, we will call him/her–but whatever s/he put in that H & P is on him/her).
We are all still scratching our heads over that one. There was no talking to her about it. So, what will happen is that one day, one of us will dig her heels in and refuse to send the pt to Holding d/t a mistake within the H & P, and all hell will break loose and this new “policy” will change.
lol if guys want to have some fun with your boss you should put positivefeedback@careerbuilder.com in the BBC line everytime you email your boss. It will send back e-mails to you both with a positive, non-related e-mail. One of the responses was “This thing you’ve done with the numbers and the chart, is unbelievable. I am sincerely blown away. You should be proud.”
Your boss will be like WTF and I doubt she/he can find out its any of you.
I like my new boss. She kinda geeky, very intelligent.
And very clueless.
She was line staff elsewhere in our division, has absolutely no experience in the casework that we do.
I, being the long time government worker I am, practice CYA(CMA) rigorously. I enjoy putting notes that state “Per supervisor, am taking this action which is completely outside the norms of what we would usually do, but since she said I could, I am”. Now I am forced (GAH!) to check with topic knowledge persons. Seek attorney opinions. Submit questions to state divisions.
Blech.
However, considering I used to have a supervisor tell us what she and her husband did at night… in detail… or the supervisor who threatened to write me up because I wouldn’t break the law… or the supervisor who went through our desks and would lay our personal out with Post It’s reminding us what was acceptable to have in our office per policies…
Yeah, I’ll take the clueless geek.
My new boss is a navel-gazing academic and that bugs the shit out of me periodically, since I’m more of a problem-solver than a problem-teaser-outer. I figure clients want to know how to fix something, not how it could be worse (in lavish detail) or the history of every time it went wrong in the past (in lavish detail). But I’m coming to understand that navel-gazing is the reason for living for academics and not hold it against her.
My old boss was a particularly nasty combination of giving no guidance on how to approach a problem (“I can’t hold you hand through this”; “You work it out”; “Use your judgment”; etc.) and then throwing you under the bus if anyone took issue with your decision. His idea of management was to take the credit for good outcomes and distance himself from bad, at the clear expense of his employees. I heartily disliked him but several people who worked there hated him. He “left to pursue other opportunities” some time after I and several other fairly key employees left.