When he’s doing something inoffensive, like telling me a new procedure, he acts like I’m going to be offended. “Now, nobody’s blaming you that you haven’t been doing this, and I know it wasn’t your job until today, but starting today…”
And, when he IS blaming me for something that’s not my fault, he gets huffy when I point to the people who ACTUALLY broke the chain.
Maddening.
My boss is a good guy most of the time but he has his freakout moments. To be fair, he has five daughters ages ranging from 8-19. He also speaks in monotone and I don’t think I have ever seen him smile, which kind of creeps me out.
Lessee, for my current boss there would be:
The ‘management’ style that consists of solely of saying ‘do this’ without any hint of what the priority is, without any consideration of how long it might take to accomplish, and without any allocation of resources to do it
The predictable flying off of the handle when the unprioritised job, with no resources allocated, does not get done in the undefined time frame that he apparently thought (without ever communicating this to anyone else) it should have been done in
The endless, brow-beating lectures on how we’re not doing one thing or another to his satisfaction, whereas if he’d just shut up and listen for a minute, he’d realize we actually were doing these things exactly the way he originally specified they must be done, and that we knew it wouldn’t work that way in the first place
Putting in place procedures, such as a mandatory weekly operations meeting, that usually requires two hours to get through, because, in his view, no one was communicating issues to him adequately, but then routinely leaving the meeting early or blowing it off altogether.
That’s not all, but I’m tired and need to go to bed. The guy’s wearing me out, I tells ya.
I have a rotating series of bosses. One of them drives me insane. She’s the sort of person who will write you up if you’re a minute late back from lunch because she has nothing else to do. She thinks the word mentor is a synonym for bitch.
The higher ups annoy because they are cheap, incompetent bastards. I had one project with the company for a few days each month starting this one. You had to self schedule your own hours. When did they up open up the scheduler? The day I had minor surgery. I may or may not be working those two days.
Oh and they don’t do direct deposit. They also hired a temp to do payroll a few weeks ago. Said temp managed to screw quite a few of us out of four days pay because he did it wrongly.
I like my boss and I get along well with her but the one pet peeve I have is she does not seem to take boss to employee conversations about non-work related topics in any type of confidence.
She has not done it with me so far because I am a private person and I don’t discuss much of my private happenings with anyone but I have heard from her about other employee private matters that I felt she had no business repeating.
In one incident we had a co-worker leaving early. I went out for a smoke and I seen her in the parking lot with a one of the mail room guys. Her battery had died and he was attempting to jump it with the company van. When I went back in I mentioned to my boss how she was still in the parking lot and has a dead battery. My boss went into a panic mode about the co-workers reason for leaving early was to go downtown and pay a court fine that her daughter had neglected to pay and she had to be there by 4:30, which by this time there was no way in hell she was going to make it.
She not only said this to me but in front of another co-worker that happened to be in her office at the time. I thought it was in poor taste to reveal that to us. I am sure she did not want anyone else to know about her child having any sort of legal issues.
We also have another co-worker that is dealing with a sister who is deathly ill. She has hung on much longer than any one expected and could die at any minute. Last Friday she was out as she expected her sister to die. I went into her office late in the afternoon to see if there had been any updates and I got to hear at length about the co-workers feelings, what her sister has said on her death bed etc.
I mean it is one thing to say co-worker X will be out of the office today because of doctor appointment and another to say that co-worker X will be out of the office for a doctors appointment to remove a golf ball size boil on their ass.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when, I had a job where I sat near the water cooler. My boss used to come out roughly 15 times a day to grab a glass of water, which he would chug directly behind me while watching over my shoulder whatever I happened to be doing at the time. When finished, he would smack his lips and release a giant “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
He’s dead now.
Oh, god, I get this all the time! I work for a small chain of about 50 gas stations. Each individual station must communicate with headquarters for various issues - pricing problems, maintenance, etc. I am very specific in my emails - I title them “Two Invoice issues,” and start by writing “The first issue is with X vendor… The second issue is with Y vendor.” And still I get responses that only address the first problem. It drives me completely bonkers.
Joe
Because of the lip-smacking, the over-the-shoulder looking, or are your hands completely clean? 
Why not just send two emails from now on?
“He was alive when I left, Your Honor.”
But I can’t say for sure if the poor guy who replaced me is innocent of any wrong doing. He seemed a little twitchy to me…
I really like my boss. Ninety nine percent of the time, he’s hands off and doesn’t micromanage. Every once in a while though something comes up and he’s wants to make ABSOLUTELY sure that it gets done.
Boss: Pithy I want to you to restart the database service on ServerXYZ about midmorning for the next two weeks. It’s been having some weird issues that we don’t have our arms around yet and that will keep it from showing up again until we can figure it out.
Me: Yeah, I’ve been doing that since two days ago when I suggested it as a temporary work-around and you agreed.
Boss: Oh? Ok, great!
Two hours later…
Boss: Hey, did you restart those database services today?
Me: Yes, did the problem happen again?
Boss: No, just checking to make sure.
Arggggh! I’m so glad that he’s not like this most of the time.