Every psychotic institution is psychotic in its own way, I guess. Brown-nosing got you nowhere in my old workplace. It was this surreal psychological landscape that held many outsized risks and rewards but the distribution of those was so disconnected from any sort of discernible reality that job performance and workplace behavior ceased to matter in any meaningful way. And the owner/boss, in addition to being a spineless raving lunatic, was also what we charitably referred to as “a vague communicator”. Which once lead to this situation.
The boss interviews some guy, a friend of a friend or something- for a barely defined job of some sort. They don’t use job titles and descriptions at this place, as it increases the odds that someone might know what they are supposed to be doing.
The guy and the boss are the only two people at the interview. No one else knows what was said in that room. Boss doesn’t say anything to anyone about the guy or the interview. This is on a Friday.
On Monday the guy shows up bright and early and somehow manages to find an empty desk. But no one knows what’s going on or why he’s there. The boss says they talked about things and maybe he thought mumble mumble change the subject… Its always been completely impossible to get a straight up answer out of the boss, even if the the question is “Did you hire the guy that just showed up for work?
So the boss just starts pretending that the guy doesn’t exist, because the boss is a spineless whimp. And the office manager is sort of freaking out because she doesn’t know if she should give the guy paperwork and how much does he think he’s making, anyway? And what’s he supposed to do? And the “new guy” is settling in, getting office supplies, putting stuff on his desk. Everyone’s scared to actually give him anything to do, although fobbing off work on someone else is a favorite company pastime (and really easy when there are no job descriptions). But he finds a few little things to do and putters around a bit while everyone avoids him like he has the plague because they don’t know what to do.
And he comes back the next day and does the same thing. All day. The boss has a lot going on that day and he’s in and out of the office. But when he’s in he ignores the new guy. The office manager is waiting it out just for fun.
I think it was day three when boss expressed surprise that the guy was still there. He then yelled at a couple of employees for just letting some guy walk in off the street and take a desk and those employees remind him that he hires people all the time without telling anyone and they get yelled at some more. Then office manager tries to tell boss that he needs to talk to the guy, because it’s obvious he thinks you hired him at that interview. Boss refuses and grouses about how he’s always expected to fix everyone else’s funk-ups and yells some more. No one wants to admit to the fuckedupness, because at point it sounds so freaking stupid, but the guy is still there at his desk and someone has to do something.
So the office manager “fired” him. She told him that “something they’d been counting on” had fallen though and they wouldn’t be needing his services and she couldn’t say more. They kept him for the rest of the week and paid him.
I gotta be honest. It was an insane place to work but I chose it. The money was really good - frankly I always suspected that was because the boss thought he knew the going rate but was never clear on the difference between a base salary and a draw against commission, which resulted in commissioned employees being paid really well.
