Real Life "The Office" stories

In My Humble Opinion
1

There’s an article that ran in the Washington Post recently that related real-life stories of absolutely unreal clueless bosses, seemingly drawn out of the pages of an upcoming “The Office” script. One boss returned from vacations and turned staff meetings into a mandatory slide show review of his vacation pics. Another pushed tortilla chips out of reach of a new employee at a group lunch and told her smarmily that she shouldn’t eat them because “…you want to fit in your wedding dress this summer!”

These sound crazy to me. I’ve had bad bosses, but “bad” in the sense of “not good,” not in the sense of “utterly lacking in social or business skills.”

But I assume the Post’s reporter is not making it up.

So… tell me if you’ve had any batshit-crazy type bosses. Not just the “my boss doesn’t know what he’s doing,” but “My boss is without normal human social skills,” or “My boss doesn’t seem to understand that nudity in the workplace is inappropriate,” or… you get the idea.

2

Does writing me up for not opening the blinds in MY office count?

Barrels

3

Only if yelling at me for studying at work (which is allowed by company policy, specially since it’s a job-related course) instead of “working” - even though he knew that my work was all done, I had offered to help my coworkers with anything and all of them had sais they didn’t have anything they could give me at that point.

Apparently reading the SDMB looks more productive than catching up on health and safety legislation, go figure.

4

A couple of years ago, the boss I had was a real winner.
He had a good six million dollars sitting around in his bank account. When Christmas came, lots of goodies would pour into the office from our various subcontractors and vendors. They were supposed to be for the whole staff…

He would let us have ONE box of See’s candy. For the whole staff. I was then directed to make sure that each and every package that arrived was locked up in his office. (Even if it was addressed to the staff.)

The millionaire then proceeded to take everything that came to all of us and regift the shit to his friends and family. What a cheap bastardo.

5

My brother-in-law had a series of stories about the Boss from Hell. I’m not sure if I can do it justice, but there was one story that has always stood out for me.

My BIL’s office was going to be doing a presentation to some investors, and they needed to have an entertainment center built in their conference room. The Boss from Hell (BfH) called in some contractors to build it- it had to fit a large-screen TV, and had to look very professional.

Well, two contractors came out. They built the thing to specifications two days before the presentation. They had to let the glue dry before they could apply the finish to the kiosk, so they arranged to come back in the morning to finish the job.

Just after they left that evening, however, the BfH decided that the entertainment center was “too tall”, so he decided to make the necessary adjustments himself. He told my BIL to “go get the chainsaw from the receptionist”. My brother-in-law, Richard, tried in vain to argue him out of this course of action, but the boss wasn’t to be dissuaded- so Richard trekked over to the the receptionist and asked for the chainsaw.

The receptionist’s response? “Oh god, not again. Hold on, I’ll go get it.”

Richard brought the chainsaw back to his boss, and his boss proceeded to cut three inches off of the legs on the kiosk- with the gas-powered chainsaw. The room quickly filled with smoke, but he managed to get the job done. And then, of course, he realized that it was too short.

When the contractors returned in the morning, they just kinda… stared… at the kiosk they’d built the night before. One of them turned to Richard and asked, “He did this with a chainsaw, didn’t he?”

The other guy said, “Did a pretty good job, though.”

6

I once had a boss that was actually pretty good to me, but nutty on a number of levels.

  • Whenever something went awry (i.e., his stapler jammed), he would say, very loudly, “What the fuck is this? It’s a conspiracy!” and slam his fist on his desk.

  • He had an array of brass dinosaurs decorating the edge of his desk, and he would go absolutely ballistic if the cleaning folks moved them in any way.

  • He used to keep a number of jars (like old-fashioned large vitamin jars, with stopper tops) on one of his bookshelves, in front of some of his reference volumes. I never looked very closely at the jars until one day, I needed a book that was behind a jar. First I noticed that the were all hand-labeled with names like “dust bunnies” and “shower daisies.” Then I realized that the contents of the jars went with the labels, the “shower daisies” being a wad of what looked like soap scum and hairs (insert puking smiley here). I never used his reference volumes again.

As I said though, he was nice enough to me personally once he got to be more comfortable around me (yes, he had some socialization issues), and could actually be an interesting fellow to chat with, but oy, the quirks…

We had some other, um, unusual characters in the office, but not surprisingly none of them were in supervisory positions.

7

Many years ago I was working as a copy editor at a small daily newspaper. It was a particularly busy night, and my coworkers and I were working at full speed to meet our press deadlines. The managing editor, who had left at 3:30 (as usual), called from his house and demanded that I talk to his cat.

8

If you’re keeping track, this was the line that got me.

9

Good Lord, what the hell else did this guy use a chainsaw on?

10

There was a manager from another department who used to come by like clockwork at 10:00am, eating his daily banana, make small-talk for a minute or less as pretext until he finished his fruit, and then deposit the peel in the wastebin under my desk.

Every day.

He liked 'em ripe, too – so unless I fished it out and put it in a wastebin that was farther away, I’d sit there smelling that manky decomposing banana-peel smell (which of course got stronger and stronger) until 5:00. (The bin is for wastepaper, and if it weren’t for Herr Steinfort’s banana peels, it would only need to be emptied about once a week.)

I know this sounds like a petty thing, but it became a real battle over the course of a couple of months. It was so obvious that the only reason he walked over to my department was because it had the closest trash can and he didn’t want the peel stinking up his office. For a while, I just kept moving it to a can away from where everyone worked, and shrugging it off as a weird quirk.

Then I stepped it up to giving him as much stinkeye as I felt I could get away with, what with him being management with 20+ years of seniority. (Which wasn’t much, probably.)

Still, the stinky banana peels kept coming at the same time every day.

Eventually, I started waiting until he was at lunch and putting the peel in the wastebin under his desk. That lasted about a week, and then he stopped bringing them over. I imagine he started stopping by for 10:00 small-talk in the department on the other side of his office.

At no point was a word ever uttered about it, but it was a quiet source of contention for a couple of months.

The Office always reminds me of this kind of utterly trivial (yet strangely consuming) personal drama that unfolds in veal-fattening pens everywhere. :smiley:

Then there was the time I was working in the shipping department, and a sales manager asked for a roll of pallet wrap to play a birthday prank on his top salesman. The joke was that he was going to wrap up his car in the parking lot. I refused to give him the pallet wrap, because a) that comes out of our department’s budget and I’d already been getting grief for going through too much of it, and b) you don’t mess with a guy’s ride.

The guy waited until I was working with a customer and reached over the counter and took a roll, running away laughing. :rolleyes:

Did I mention that the salesman’s birthday was in July?

The moron manager wrapped his car up as tight as possible, using an entire roll of pallet wrap. Haw! haw! haw! The afternoon sun did its work, and by the time the salesman discovered the hilarious gag, the plastic wrap had bonded completely with the pristine paint on his late model, image-conscious top-salesman style luxury vehicle. Huge patches of paint came off the top and south-facing side of the car.

Of course, the company paid to have it repainted. Of course. :smack:

11

Did the sales manager get fired for that stunt?

12

Brand new boss sits down in his first meeting with the professional staff, all of them female, btw.

He starts the meeting with, “I make it a policy to sleep with one of my managers. That person is my spy for what the rest of you say about me. So…who’s it going to be?”

There was a loooong moment of paralytic silence, except for a few of us who laughed in disbelief. He wasnt joking, as we found out when he chewed out those who laughed.

Oddly enough, no one volunteered. The HR Dept. got a lot of visits that day, though.

Veb

13

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I guess his numbers were good, because he came through it smelling of roses.

TVeblen, that one’s pretty astonishing. Holy crap.

14

My principal criticized the level to which my room’s blinds were open. A supervisor from the university argued with me that shouldn’t call 4th graders “people”, but I must use “boys and girls” instead.

A boss at a small mortgage bank had the nerve to tear up about his religious feelings around Christmas time at a mandatory company meeting. The rest of the time, when he was stressed / off his meds, he could launch into the most controlling, vile, curse-laden rants I think I’ve ever heard, and everyone knew it.

15

I used to work in retail establishment where the boss was VERY nutty. She hired her daughter to do very little for 3 times the salary as the rest of us. She was also very anal about the energy consumption. One day she applied stickers to each of the thermostats with a strict maximum temperature which would have been punishable by death if exceeded. We worked our asses off so we never needed to boost the temperature. The daughter, however, did absolutely nothing and would be cold all the time. After a brief conversation with her Mother, new stickers were secretly made with a 5 degree increase in temperature. There stickers were placed over the old stickers for just one day so daughter would be comfortable.
This entire façade was so transparent; she must have thought we were idiots.

16

Yesterday I saw a post-it stuck to my boss’s computer that said “Get gun permit.”

And the other day he kept referring to his new chair as a sonofabitch. As in, “I could sleep in this sonofabitch!!”

I think he tries to act “manly” so we know who is in charge. He’s a dick.

17

I had a boss a few years ago who decided that, as a “team-building” sort of exercise, the entire department would go on a golf outing. It didn’t matter that half the department didn’t like golf or had never played golf – HE wanted to play golf, so golf it was. Not only that, but the golf outing was not optional - it was mandatory. The kicker – he made everyone in the department use their vacation time for the afternoon of golf, rather than charging the time to general overhead on his budget.

18

The beauty of The Office is that it isn’t completely farcical. A lot of the things the boss does are petty, and genuinely occur. One that I’ve seen on the program and in real life is making people wait pointlessly - presumably to inflate one’s sense of importance. I had a coworker who would play computer games for 15 minutes while on-time interview candidates were waiting for him in reception. I was pissed on their behalf.

However, true life is in fact occasionally stranger than fiction. In the “you couldn’t make it up” category is the editor I once worked for at a newspaper who libelled a politician, saying he was “illiterate” and had “several mistresses”, and when the eventual writ arrived, printed a retraction that included the libel. He thus got sued (successfully) twice and nearly went out of business.

This same bozo tasked me to follow up a bullshit conspiracy theory he’d heard at the golf club, which was clearly completely untrue. When I failed to uncover the ‘scoop’, he called me into his office and screamed at me, calling me “an utter failure”.

But the kicker is that he also once called me into his office to tell me - in all seriousness - that he was “amongst the greatest writers who ever lived. But Dickens is dead.”

19

I worked in a lab for a semi-known scientist. One of my co-workers asked our boss what his son, then an undergrad at MIT, would be doing for the summer. He said that if he couldn’t get a “real job” he would just work in the lab with us

20

:eek:

Please tell me this guy got fired.