My old bosses’ ( husband and wife duo of humorous proportions) spawned three children. Two of which worked for our agency ( one full time…sorta and the other only worked 5 hours a week to make $40k. She was a disaster in her forties.)
I’ll only do the fun stuff. For now.
Our Travel Agency had a delivery boy that we sent hither and yon. One day, annoyed with the bosses in general, after our delivery guy was off at one of the farthest reaches of our empire, we had two tickets that needed to be delivered quickly at opposite ends of the empire. Telling our 70 year old Jimmy Stewartish boss that he had to go out to X by 2pm to get this ticket to this company, wasn’t a problem. He took his orders merrily and took off with purpose. We knew by the drive and everything he would not be back until well after 4pm.
Getting rid of his wife was a bigger challenge. She was German. We told her she had to deliver this ticket ( which, btw, was not far from her own house) and it had to be there by X time.
Both were out of the office for hours. After that, we planned for days like that by running up dummy tickets to companies to be delivered and have the secretary say, " Oh the trip has been cancelled."
Good.Times.
I have my share of complaints about this one boss, but here’s what really made me wonder what thought processes that were going on: within about six months’ time, three junior employees were promoted by this boss because those folks had really proven themselves as real assets to the organization.
However, within days of each promotion, the boss must have been doing some serious thinking, because he stripped the three workers of the majority of their new responsibilities because they were too junior to be trusted to do that work. Then, in a miraculous twist of logic, he started blaming the workers’ manager (in quite a mean and personal manner) for failing to train them to do the work that the boss promoted them not to do.
This Female Boss was from Taiwan came to the U.S. in her mid-20’s & was here about 15 years at the time I (a male) worked for her-- I loved her & she was great to me & she was VERY competent to do everything but supervise female employees – and I always thought maybe this was largely cultural but:
She thought nothing of, like a Mother or Aunt might, (Privately) offering unsolicted the most inappropriate and personal advice and mentoring you could imagine - short of sex talk:
Like that they were too fat and would never find a husband unless they buckled down and lost weight and supplied dieting tips and clucks of the tongue if they had anything but salad and a TAB on their desk and making the occasdional remark.
Like commenting that certain Ladies that the clothes, business attire always, were the type men wouldn’t find very attractive
Like the Temp girl who lost her Dad in her teens and , after 3-4 days of this woman’s motherly advice and discussion of it - even though everything about the temp SCREAMED “I don’t want to talk about it” quit in tears.
Like making more mundane sexist remarks :“I would NEVER go to a male Doctor for OBGYN the cannot be as good a a female Doctor - but for a HEART surgeon you should ONLY go to a male” or stuff about How all women want to be married, or only women should be secretaries becuase men aren’t able to do that work without resenting it etc.
The woman wasn’t evil and thought she was helping these women find the things they needed to be happy (like Michael on the Office kinda her own ‘issues‘ and blind to how that made her act). She didn’t get it really - but her heart came across always - she wasn’t really a b^tch and AFAIK none of the Ladies dropped a dime on her to HR - though there was plenty O’ muttering under the breath
I really like my boss, but sometimes she does things like this. Yells across the office, “BRING ME THE BIG PILL!” Or ‘ORDER THE SLEDGEHAMMER!’" And our computer systems are areally bad, and I know it, but she makes me cringe…banging on the keyboard is not going to make it better. Once, she kicked her tower!