The (non-) joke in our office is that my immediate boss is stuck in Japan forever because if he ever went to work back in the US, he’d be fired, sued and possibly arrested by the end of his first week.
He’s recently started backing off with the abuse after my co-worker ended up in the emergency room twice last week with panic-induced asthma attacks.
And how is there a chainsaw handy in what sounds like an office area?!?
The worst I had was the boss who pulled at his crotchal area when nervous or moving around or sitting at a conference table. :rolleyes:
Anyhoo, I am cringing at these stories and if it weren’t completely inappropriate I’d go give my current boss a hug.
There was a Pit thread awhile back from someone who’d been forced to come in to an 8 am meeting on a gorgeous Saturday only to have the boss play hookey so he could play golf. That was pretty incredible.
I don’t really have any good stories of my own. Unless you count the manager (not MY manager) in my office who is always sending his employees over to me to do bizarrely simple tasks. Like, last week he sent someone over to me so I could print a couple pages out for me. I have no idea why this guy couldn’t print out the pages himself. (Of course, it turned out he could print them out himself, because I flat out refused to do it.)
In his book “Ball Four”, Jim Bouton tells the story of a MLB manager who called a meeting on a Friday non-game night in the home city. Players were out with their wives and had to leave dinners and so on to get back to the stadium.
(From memory)
Manager: This is good. I wanted to see if we could do this in a hurry if we ever really needed to.
I had a boss once who would wear the same worn-out, faded pants four days in a row. How could I be so sure it was the same pair? Because they had two holes in them, one almost an inch wide, right over one of his buttocks. :rolleyes:
BTW, by Wednesday he was smelling a tad… well, he had a noticable smell. By Thursday, it was stronger. Even pants need to be laundered once in a while. When I told a friend about this clown, she pointed out that he might’ve been recycling his underwear, too. That possibility hadn’t even occurred to me.
But that was trivial compared to one of the mid-level guys who reported to him. Much of the time this guy was normal (enough), but occasionally he would stop bathing. At all. For days on end. You could tell by the rank smell; I half-expected green wavy stink lines to be emanating from his office.
I had a boss once who would throw a tantrum whenever something happened he didn’t like. Like the day he found a stapler that someone had left on top of the copier; he hurled it across the room, hard enough that if he’d hit one of his employees, it would probably have sent them to the emergency room. Or the day when he got pissed about something, so what did he do? He threw his lunch on the floor. In his office. Wow, that really impressed everybody!
But what took the cake with him? Was the day he chewed me out for being 5 minutes late to work. Now, there were two of us who did the same job; I arrived at work by 8:05, after dropping off two kids and driving nearly an hour. My coworker? Was a single party girl who would come wandering in at 8:45 or so. But apparently she was also sleeping with the boss, because when I pointed out to him that I regularly beat her in by like 45 minutes, he explained to me that he needed me there on time to cover until she finally made it in! I guess it never occurred to him to expect her to show up on time.
One boss who was Office-like odd.
We had a “team building” exercise once. We didn’t know it was a team building exercise (it started as a “we didn’t go out for lunch when ‘John’ joined us two months ago, why don’t we go today?”) until we had ordered and had our food choices criticized.
When our obviously inferior lunch selections arrived, we were hit with the announcement that we were going to do a team building exercise. We all needed to share our answers to the question “In all of your past jobs, what did your managers do at those companies that was worse than how I run the department here?”
At lunch with my new co-workers on my first day on the job, I knew I had made a mistake taking the lab position: the topic of conversation was how to kill the boss and get away with it. It seemed like a risky thing for them to be discussing with someone they just met, but it didn’t take long for me to become sympathetic to their plight.
While his transgressions were many, the boss’ most common offense was to take a good idea you presented to him in the weekly lab meeting, visciously discredit it and demean you for presenting it, and then expressly forbid you from carrying on with the idea. Then, a week, maybe a month later he would privately sidle up to you and snarkily say “you should stop wasting your time with this approach and really try doing it this way…”, with “this way” being the good idea you originally presented, and with no acknowlegement of who thought up the idea originally. Usually these conversations were spiced up with additional discouraging words of how incompetent you were.
I had been warned at that first day lunch meeting that this had been going on, but had dismissed it as too ludicrous to be true. Sure enough, I soon saw it happen to others and then it happended to me several times. We post-docs finally all agreed not to present any new ideas to him and basically left him in the dark as to what we were actually doing. Lab meetings with the boss became an uncomfortable exercise in lying and covering each other’s lies. Needless to say, this did not foster the most productive atmosphere, and soured me so thoroughly on research that I quit in a blaze of glory (calling the guy a goddamn fucking asshole to his face at one point during my last days) and went looking for alternative career paths.
And no, we never did kill the boss. We were afraid that if we came up with a good idea to do so, he’d find some way of taking credit for it. 
I don’t know quite where to start.
My former boss (initials CB) systematically asked every woman in the department when she planned to quit and start a family.
CB liked to give tours of the analytical labs that he managed. This was a large well equipped lab with at least $25M worth of equipment and about 30 employees. CB was fairly clueless about most of the technical details of the equipment, but this didn’t stop him from giving tours and trying to explain what we did. On one particular occasion CB was giving a tour to his boss. When CB’s boss thought they were alone in one of the labs, he was overheard saying “If you don’t know what something is, just say so. You don’t need to feed me a line of BS.”
CB scheduled a one-on-one meeting with one of my coworkers (WF). WF had justed gotten back to work after breaking his ankle (he fell off his son’s skateboard). He had missed serveral days of work, and was using crutches to get around. The meeting was scheduled for a conference room that was about a quarter mile and 4 flights of stairs from where CB and WF had their offices. When WF hobbled into the conference room on his crutches, he was about 5 minutes late for the meeting. CB proceeded to rip him a new asshole for being late.
It took almost 15 years of this sort of behavior, but CB was finally force to quit.
Were you in the same lab I was? That sounds almost exactly like my graduate supervisor, except that our only post-doc was a complete suck-up who acted as his spy in the lab. I managed to stick it out long enough to get my master’s, and I’m still in research, working in industry for a supervisor who actually respects me. I could probably get a couple of good stories out of the exploits of management here, though, I just don’t feel like writing them up right now.
11 years ago, I worked doing temp work around suburban Chicago for a while, and then got hired by a great fortune 500 company.
The lady who hired me was the Director of Marketing, and I reported directly to her. There were probably 20 people in line for that job, but I, the 23 year old temp kid with no experience took it. Heh. She started me near the top of the payscale, which was close to double my age. She also had like 8 managers under her, each of whom had like six “Account Representatives”, plus there were like 12 secretaries for the department. My title was “Marketing Specialist”, and I handled special projects, though I had no previous marketing experience or education. At least three of the Account Reps had been vying for this position as well.
I worked for her for two years, in which I received three “Outstanding” reviews, 10% increases each. No, there was never anything sexually inappropriate, I really was that good, and you’ll never convince me otherwise.
That was the good stuff.
However, this woman DID have some severe mental and medical problems.
When she got angry, she didn’t see red, she saw black.
She would run down the hall, cussing out peons for no reason, kicking the walls, throwing computers, and trying to fire managers who had nothing to do with it. Invariably, they appealed to HR and came back like nothing happened. After each “episode”, I’d have to take over day to day (in conjuction with her exectutive assistant), as she’d be out for a week or two.
I had a buddy downstairs in purchasing (I even did acid with him a few times)… once she called him up demanding something or other in an unrealistic timeframe, and when he explained her request was impossible, she tried to pull rank, “I’m the DIRECTOR OF MARKETING! My budget is over $50 million dollars!”.
He just laughed and said, “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m the Manager of Purchasing, and my budget is over $500 million dollars”.
So anyway I used those reviews as a springboard to land a huge promotion into another department, and maybe six months later (I was then working from home), I came back in to the headquarters building and saw my buddy in the hallway.
“How’s <name>?”, he asked, with a wink.
“She’s dead. Brain tumor.”
Eleusis, are you serious?
In Augusten Burroughs’ book of “true stories,” Magical Thinking, he writes about a woman he worked under at a Chicago advertising agency who behaved almost exactly like this Director of Marketing you describe. In the book, he calls her Charlotte, but of course, that’s probably not her real name. Any chance the two could be the same?
I had a jerk for a boss. His stories are many, but mainly in just generally jerkish behavior. I just flat didn’t like him.
So we were in a meeting, waiting for everybody to get there. Jerk Boss had a Coke from the machine, and the bottom was pushed out like maybe it had been frozen. This irritated him, but it wasn’t so bad it would spill (he had already opened it).
Being the brilliant engineer that he was, he decided that all he needed to do was grab the can and pop the bottom back in. He wasn’t quite brilliant enough to estimate the crush strength of the sides of the can. He sqeezed the can shut, hard, and shot Coke right into his own face. I laughed my ass off.
He wrote me up for laughing at him in the meeting.
The only Office-like behavior I can relate isn’t nearly as bad as others in this thread. I used to work with a project manager who, when you were sitting across the desk from him in his office, would use the opportunity to clean out his teeth, ears, and nose with his finger. The foodstuffs he managed to clear out of his molars would be swallowed, and the ear and nose nuggets would be flicked toward the side wall of his office. And whenever he had to flick, he’d actually turn his chair and look to the wall, which made you instinctively look in the same direction the first few times.
Always the first finger of his right hand, and liked to close each such meeting with a friendly handshake.
I had a boss that once advised me that I should divorce my husband. I had not complained about him or said I didn’t love him, it was just that she didn’t agree with the way our marriage is structured.
Another blew up at me in front of my coworkers and said I was “too picky” because I corrected her for the umpteenth time for calling me by a nickname I do not care for.
Wow! Its nice to know that misbehaving researchers are very common.
In my last job I was the lab “grunt.” I did things that the fellows and post-docs did not want to do. Mainly the animal work and (oddly) finances.
The project involved transgenic mice that got cancer. One of my duties was to necropsy the mice. I disected the poor things and took pictures of the tumors. Its a messy, nasty process.
Once I got chewed out by the Principle Investigator because his 6-year-old daughter saw me doing one of these mouse autopsies. Having her in the lab was against many rules and regulations, but it was my fault she saw research in progress.
The supervisor at the job I had during most of my college years very much reminded me of Grizzly Adams. Huge guy, deeeeep voice, beard, the whole bit. He would frequently let these absolutely horrid stinky rank farts in his office. Problem was, I was constantly having to go in there and bring him things… :eek: Sometimes they were bad enough that he’d come out and hang in the office with me while they dissipated.
I did get to get a good laugh in one time though… New computers for everyone to use, he’d never used one before. He starts cussing and hollering, slamming things, etc… I go ask what the problem is, he says “This damn mouse won’t work!!! How am I supposed to use this!!!”… It was a trackball mouse, he was waving it in the air in front of the monitor. :wally
Yeah, I’m serious.
I haven’t read that book, but I doubt they’re the same, as this was just the marketing department for a large company, not an advertising agency.
Don’t get me wrong, she was great most of the time. It was just her blowups that went over the top, and they got more frequent toward the end.
The company had an after hours (I don’t know what to call it… like a wake/rememberence type thing) event to remember her and pay respects, which probably thirty of us attended.
Ms Macphisto, It’s unlikely that we were in the same lab, for as Mouse-Maven points out, the scientific research world is chock-full of egotistical jerks. I was spoiled by the world’s best graduate advisor and to come to a wreck of a PI like I had as a post-doc was truly demoralizing.
One more anecdote: one post-doc had a baby and was pressed by the PI to return to the lab just three weeks later. She wanted to pump breast milk in a lab supply room, as the only other private place that one could plug in a breast pump was in a locker room in the basement of another building on the campus. Well, everyone had no problem with her using the room except for the PI, and he really had no explanation for his objection. It took calls to HR and a threat of legal action (it turns out the institute was out of compliance for a state law mandating adequate facilities for breastfeeding mothers) in order to get him to grudgingly relent. My proposed solution was that she just whip 'em out and do it right there at the lab bench, and maybe give the old guy a heart attack and thus solve many problems…she almost took me up on it!
When I worked at a large international aerospace company I had the opportunity to hear about an “interesting” job interview technique of one of my co-workers (and the reason he got sent out of HR).
While interviewing an interested female candidate he blurted out, “You aren’t going to go and get pregnant or anything, right?”
:eek: