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Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

This reminds me of a company I was at when the first anniversary rolled around. My boss wanted to plan our open house on September 11, 2002 - you know, wine, beer, tasty eats - a regular celebration. When I realized the date, I went into his office with a :smack: and said, I can’t believe we didn’t realize this. He just looked at me blankly, told me that he, of course, had realized it and “life goes on.” I made the mistake of arguing and saying that, yes, “life goes on” but didn’t he think it was in bad taste to pick that date to throw a party? No.

Of course, I sent out the initial email internally and about 5 people who were senior to him wrote me back saying that it was in bad taste to do it on that day. I told them that - oh, let’s call him DICKHEAD - DICKHEAD wanted to go ahead with it anyway and DICKHEAD was promptly overruled.

42

My “bad boss” story is pretty simple. Also, often the ultimate:

He said he’d pay.
He never did.

43

A couple of years ago our department was getting reams of printouts. I thought, “Why do we need all of this paper? If we got rid of it, then we’d save money and resources and I could demonstrate that we did not have to be in a central location to do our jobs and maybe they’ll let me telecommute.” So I presented my idea to the boss, and followed through with the Programming department so that our reports would be written to datasets instead of being printed on paper. If we had a direct contract with the people who leased us the printers, we would have saved about $2,000,000 in printing costs per year. As it was, we probably saved about $20,000 in actual printing costs. The company could negotiate a new contract later to save more money. And this is money that would be saved every year. Now, it’s an accepted practice in business to award 10% of the money saved to the employee whose idea it was. Except in my company. I saved the company at least $20,000 that year (and subsequent years), but I didn’t get squat.

We were getting Business relogs from the Consumer division. Many of these records were being dropped instead of being loaded into the database because of “bad addresses”. Turns out that many of those records had secondary addresses that shifted the city and state. So I modified the program. The program also used a more “intelligent” method of getting the a/r number that prevented many records from being dropped as duplicates. I also wrote a “DO-WHILE” loop to look for ZIP codes and to put them in the appropriate place. As long as I was in there, I converted the “ASCII dots” to spaces which made the data look better, and got rid of the foreign addresses. This is for Trade data. I also wrote a similar program “from scratch” that would process the Collection data. More entities on the database = more revenue for the company. “I done good.”

Many records were dropping because they had foreign addresses. This was a problem because if the foreign records exceeded 5% they were written to a report – but the reports had ALL of the rejects, not just foreign ones. We had to look at the data and determine why records were dropping. With the foreign records, we had to “research” them every month – and there were a lot of them.

I wrote a program that would drop the foreign records and thus save us all a lot of work. People really liked it. But then I got to thinking…

Why not keep the foreign records? They want our business to expand; why not expand north of the border? So I collected about 550,000 records in two months. I took my findings to the Vice President and suggested that since we’re getting the data “for free” from U.S. companies that are already sending us data, why not use them? She thought it was a good idea.

After our all hands meeting in October I approached the president of North American operations and told him about my idea to expand our business to include Canadian companies. He said it was a good idea, and that the VP had mentioned it to him. What she didn’t tell him was that it was my idea. He thought it was hers.

All of that is to point out that I was A) focused on the well-being of the company, and B) that I was actively seeking solutions to problems and also taking steps that would expand our operations.

I was laid off; and they kept someone who didn’t know as much as I do and who won’t even talk to internal customers, let alone external ones.

Go figure.

44

Isabelle, your boss sounds a lot like mine. When I was hired, I was told that all employees had flex time. If you needed to come in late or leave early one day, you could make up the hours during the rest of the pay period.

The reality is that only certain employees get to use flex time. Some leave at 3 or 3:30 on a regular basis, while others have to put in their full hours every single day. My boss expressly told me that if I ever leave before 4 p.m. I can consider myself fired (I come in at 7:30 a.m., so I always have to work a full day). One of my coworkers has physical therapy three days a week for a torn disk in her lower back, and the boss regularly bitches at her for leaving at 4:30 on those days (my coworker gets to work at 7 and doesn’t take a lunch break).

However, other employees can come and go as they please, so long as they have enough hours at the end of the two-week pay period. One coworker is gone for three to four hours every day, and no one knows where he is. Others leave to go to baseball games or to pick up relatives at the airport. My boss once left at 3 p.m. because it was a nice day and she felt like going horseback riding!

Don’t even get me started on sick time and personal days. I have to schedule my personal days weeks in advance, and I only get to use them if my boss feels I have a justified reason. And my boss once refused to let me take a half a sick day. She told me that even if I felt like crap, I “didn’t look sick” so I had to stay.

I have my two-year review coming up in a few weeks, and believe me, I’m confronting my boss about this.

45

Well, college campuses don’t usually have bosses that would wander into your classroom or anything while you’re teaching, but…I could do without most of the division deans and administrators at one campus which shall not be named.

  1. Former College President was a true czar, the head of the old boys’ network, a micro-managing tyrant whose primary goal was to make $200 grand a year by the time he retired (which he managed to do). He was/is a beady-eyed bastard with an evil glint, contemptuous of most other people except for few cronies who did his bidding.

  2. The Board of Trustees: Three are not so bad, but they let themselves be led by the Evil Twins even when they could be outvoting these jokers. One of the Twins refuses to give his home address and we’re pretty sure he doesn’t even live in the area he represents (an illegal thing, but we would have to prove it).

  3. Idiot Vice President of Instruction…Oh, man. This guy yaks on the phone, piles up papers in his office, then spends most of the day touring the campus. His secretaries will hand him something he needs to see, he files it away, and when they ask for it back a few months later, he digs it out, signs it (though it never needed to be signed at all) and pretends it was important to him all along.

  4. Moronic guy in charge of Student Discipline and Grievances: Another touring fellow. When he actually works, he acts as if he’s afraid to do his job. What a spineless weenie.

  5. Chief financial officer: Total bitch on wheels who’s really good at hiding money and then claiming the college can’t spare a dime.

  6. Chief of security: Dragon lady with a chip on her shoulder.

  7. Various division deans: most are mavericks, making completely arbitrary decisions about who gets classes and who doesn’t, with no regard for longevity of service or good evaluations.

Your tax dollars at work.

46

My current boss is mainly concerned with finding a problem, and then finding someone on the IT staff whose fault it is, other than him. Some of his finger-pointing has been quite bizzare- especially when it is not IT’s fault.

For example:

  1. I’ve been accused of being at my desk too much, and not enough, during the same conversation.

  2. During an “intern hiring binge” HR would notify us on Thursday or Friday that someone was starting on the next Monday. In order to make my job easier (I set up and deliver the PCs for new users) I asked HR to keep us updated on the hiring status of the interns. HR said they would, and delivered me a list with three people on it, and told me that the list would be changing “on an hourly basis”, so don’t consider it written in stone. I was thrilled that I could know ahead of time, as it made my Thursdays and Fridays much less stressful, because I could have things ready ahead of time, and a new username was not a big deal to change anyhow (because it’s not my job). Within 50-60 minutes the HR guru informs me that one of the people is not starting, and that another person is taking their place, and then the next day, a different person is not starting, and yet another person is taking -their- place. On Thursday, I get an “Official” notice of who is starting, and it lists two people, so I got two PCs ready, arranged for the appropriate usernames, and installed the PCs ready for the Monday interns. It turns out that 3 people -were- starting on Monday, but the HR secretary didn’t put that person on the “Official” list. No prob- I got everything ready for the person by lunchtime, including the appropriate username. The kicker is, my boss told me it was MY fault, because the unoffical notices did list him, but the official one did not. He said that I should have checked with HR to confirm that the person wasn’t starting. When I brought this up to HR, he freely admitted that he did blame me, and held me responsible. HR thought this was their fault and said so. He has also berated my cow-orkers because a person off our team, who reports to a different dept entirely did not do what we wanted them to in regard to a database project of his that is tanking.

  3. He hired a very good chemist (who is a buddy of his from a previous job) to do database work. The guy has no experience, and “tattles” on you to the boss every time he can. It’s always great when a guy tells you how to do somthing with a pc. Sure he has a Phd, and I have an AS, but mine is at least in computers!

  4. During a departmental meeting, I mentioned that I would be in late one day, because of a doctor’s appointment. He asked me very loudly if I was going to see a psychiatrist, in front of the whole department, and laughed. He did apologize later, after HR told him to during a closed door meeting.

  5. Always claims that he will tell me things, but never does. We have an app that is being held up by legal, and he wouldn’t tell me why- He said it was very complicated, and he would tell me later. (He didn’t run the new application past legal, for fear that they would shoot it down, so he negotiated with the vendor, spent a crapload of money, and man-hours, and a week after the premeire, legal shot it down. Turns out it’s a one minute explanation as to the legal issues. He also won’t explain why his name came up in a web-search regarding violations of the 1972 Securities Act. He admits it -is- him, and that it was a scam committed by someone else, but with his name on it, and that he would tell me over lunch some time. He got very nervous that I would run a search on his name on the web, and acted rather oddly, and asked me not to mention it to anyone, and of course, never explained it, even eight months later.

  6. Set me up for a meeting with HR, never told me until about 30 seconds before the meeting, and berated me for my “failings” that he had never mentioned to me previously- even when they happened. Apparently, I should just know what bugs him! I have the neatest desk in our dept, but he complains about how messy it is (his is very neat, but I’m being kept to a higher standard than my cow-orkers)

  7. Tells me I can’t take off a Monday, because I’ll miss out on our departmental meeting, 90% of which is about his database project which is tanking, and has nothing to do with my job in any way :slight_smile: Then he says that he is not telling me what days to take off.

  8. Tells me I’m responsible for inventorying all onsite PCs, then installs PCs, and doesn’t tell me, and on a separate occasion, agrees to getting inventory information on PCs in a restricted area (don’t ask) of the company, and just doesn’t bother to do it when he was there. When called on it, he just says “I didn’t do it”- I would have gotten a rash of shit for doing the same thing.

  9. On the day of the big virus hit, he leaves work early because “the baby broke my wife’s nose, and I have to go to the emergency room with her”. I was there until 10pm, and he gave me a rash of shit about how I forgot to scan/clean a pc that was “vulnerable” to the virus. The PC in question was unplugged, dis-assembled, and shoved together in a disused corner of the lab. I told him that I didn’t think it was vulnerable to a network-propagated virus, because:

    a. it was not connected to the network
    b. it was not in use
    c. it was off
    d. it was not actually plugged in or assebled

His response after he spent ALL DAY installing the patches(a twenty minute task per machine) on every machine (7) in the two labs? “Well, I did do it, didn’t I?”

  1. This week, after an item went missing, he told me that I should have started asking around as to where it went. The two remaining people to ask were an offsite trainer, and a director of the company, who I am -not- going to interrupt.

Ahh. That feels better.

Currently I have an ongoing dialog with my new friends in the HR department, and they take a lot of notes about my stories regarding my wonderful boss.

47

My ex-boss was such a nightmare, even though he appreciated me. I think he appreciated me too much because he treated me like a personal assistant. I’ve done my best to forget all the things he did to me, because they had me really stressed. I eventually escaped by going back to study, I couldn’t face quitting outright because he sees my family regularly.

I remember one time, he had 3 karaoke DVDs, about 80 songs. He asked me to sit there and watch all the videos and type up the lyrics as they appeared on screen. Yes, type up the lyrics of 80 songs just because.

I also had to work 11 hours, standing, without any break of any sort, for less than mcdonalds pay! Oh the fun I had there!

48

A former boss comes to mind. I’m not going to name him (he died a couple of years ago), but he was legendary in the oil business of the '50s-'90s.

I can’t begin to paint a picture - his psychology was far too complex for most of us to really understand. Suffice to say that he was easily the wealthiest person, by a very long shot, that I expect I’ll ever know, in working for him for 9 years, I saw him laugh (kinda) once and in working for him for 9 years I was somewhat anomalous, as there were only 4 people in what was usually an ~100 person company who’d been there when I started.

A few examples of Big Bill’s take on human resources:

  • He wanted to cut his overhead, and just make some of those periodic changes he liked to make. So he told the Exploration manager to go fire a couple of guys, a geologist and a geophysicist. Exploration manager does as instructed and returns to his office where the COO is waiting to fire him. Then Bill let the COO go. By the time I left to start my own company, I already knew hundreds of people in the business.

  • His personal secretary had worked her way up over many years to what was a lucrative position. One day he demanded to know whose car had been parked outside her house that weekend. To her lasting credit, she quit on the spot (and by that time had enough contacts with Big Money to start her own career as a financier).

  • It was a common enough sight to find a locksmith changing the locks, meaning somebody had gone down. Generally, if you quit before he fired you, you were beneath contempt, and uttering your name was beyond dangerous. So when I resigned, the V.P. (who knew otherwise and planned on using my new company) told him I was going into the music business. That was marginally true, as I had a little music production company on the side, but I was leaving to form a geophysical company. Bill actually came down to wish me luck. Heh.

  • The very last guy he hired was a geologist (in his sixties) who worked for another private independent oil company downtown. After initial interviews with the V.P., Bill interviewed him during the lunch hour. As the guy walked back to his job, Bill called his employer and said that he’d been interviewing him and wanted to know if he was any good. Needless to say, when the guy got back to his office, he was fired. He pretty much had no choice but to take Bill’s offer. Six weeks later Bill announced he was shutting the company down and fired the guy.

  • I’d quit about six months before he announced the shutdown (I could see it coming). They handled it poorly enough that the technical staff had all boogied before they’d sold their properties. His corporate counsel called me one day to ask me to work on a consulting basis to help them get the assets sold. I told him my fee (which was on the bottom end of consulting fees) and he wanted me to do it at half of that. I told him I couldn’t and he said, “When friends don’t help friends out in a time of need, it can reflect poorly on them within the industry. Do you understand me?” Of course I understood him, but I said, “No, David, I don’t know what you mean.” A not-so-veiled threat to blackball me. Ha! With Bill’s reputation, if they’d tried, it would’ve been free promo.

And he was a neighborly guy to boot:

  • When he bought the largest undeveloped tract of land in River Oaks (land of the Very Rich in Houston), his first contact with his new next door neighbor was when he sent his Guy Friday over to the neighbor’s with a demolition contractor to get an estimate on demolishing the place.

There’s more, but I’m done for now.

49

Oh yes, I had a boss like this. Our business wasn’t huge, like yours apparently is, but I’d think up new promotions and such and suggest them to our store manager. Then I’d see in the store newsletter that my manager was getting the credit for MY ideas. I got to where I’d fire off a letter to the Big Boss first, telling her my idea, and then telling my manager. Oddly enough, my manager was fired a few months after I quit that job. :smiley: I guess she didn’t have another sucker carrying her.