Share your "My boss is an idiot" stories

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’ve generally had good bosses, but one of them was something else.

He wasn’t actually my boss; he was the head of the entire (public) corporation. Got the job through political influence, and was not above a little old-fashioned favoritism (when one political friend of his lost a reelection campaign, he hired him the next day for the position – also created that day – of organizational security head).

He was a notorious cheapskate. 50 weeks of the year, he’d praise you for the job you were doing. The other two weeks (coincidentally, :rolleyes: when raises were being considered), he’d be over your ass for the slightest mistake – sometimes even running downstairs two flights to complain about a minor error. His idea of being good to his workers was to brag about how this year, they were now getting paid for Christmas Day (something – literally – out of Mad Magazine*).

When they raised the minimum wage, he argued that the raise didn’t apply to the company’s workers because they had contracts that set a lower rate.

In the meantime, he was setting up sweetheart contracts. A local car dealer got free advertising space in one of our publications indefinitely and he got a free car. He hired an incompetent ad agency that sold nothing. But if anyone else sold an ad, the agency got a cut. They also put out a sign to attract customers. But they held the only key to change the letters on the sign, and only updated it sporadically, so the information on it was vastly out of date (in a business where the accurate information would have drawn in customers).

After I left the job, I ran into him once. I was managing a Spencer Gifts and he and his son came in. The son wanted this $25 fiber optic lamp. He pointed out a $5 plastic lamp that changed colors and pushed him to get that. I could see by the son’s face that he was used to that sort of conversation.

Eventually, it caught up with him. An audit showed that he hired a no-show employee and tried to bribe a grand jury witness. He was fined and sent to jail.

*In a parody of a company’s annual report. The report said that, as employee benefits, they company had agreed to half-pay on Christmas day, even though the workers didn’t have to work if Christmas fell on a weekend.

22

The last time I was in the Private Sector, I had the World’s Most Incompetent Boss, bar none. Total retard. He could never get the payroll out on time, no matter how many people worked on it. “Martinet” doesn’t even begin to touch his managerial style. “Work weekends, no overtime, do it right this time.” He would never lighten up. I hated the bastard so much that I vowed to never again work in the private sector, no matter what.

The problem was, of course, that I was self-employed. :smiley:

23

This isn’t about any of my boss’s (past or present–actually my boss now is really cool), but about my mom’s current boss.

He’s the owner of an import car parts business, and she takes care of the accounts and paperwork stuff (except for payroll). Its March 18, and she STILL hasn’t recieved her W-2 forms to do her 2003 taxes. A few months ago, she got notice from the state, that they were putting lein against her house, because her state taxes hadn’t been paid in TWO YEARS. Seems like her employer had been taking out state taxes from her check every two weeks, but wasn’t turning them into the state. He keeps telling her that he’s paid the taxes, but she still keeps calling the state every time she gets a letter from them saying they’re going to come and get her house. He gives her a paycheck, but won’t give her a paystub (showing her taxes, vacation, deductions, etc.).

Yet, he frequently takes company checks to pay for things like his wife’s tennis lessons (no, she’s not an employee, and the tennis lessons are not related to the business), groceries for his family, etc.

I keep trying to get her to call the IRS, and whomever else, but will she do it? Nooooo. Too afraid of loosing her job, I suppose.

24

Hey, you’re money ahead for getting the apology. Just ask the legions on the board with bosses who think that job titles eliminate the need for apologies. Technical illiteracy is here to stay, so as much as I can gripe about it, it’s not going to change. Having the decency to apologize is a character issue, though.

25

I worked in a college bookstore (not the one I work in now) for a few months as a temporary rush relief textbook stocker.

The owner was a little ‘off’.

His son died on his college graduation night in a car accident. This made his father lose it a little. He sought help from a therapist who decided he was schizophrenic :confused: and put him on a cocktail of powerful medicines. Boss man got his prescriptions, opened all the bottles and dumped them in a drawer in his office. Every few hours or so he’d go to his desk, take a handful of pills and swallow them down. Then he would rampage.

He had very specific things we had to do. If I was entering invoices or returns into a computer (slow work that involved sitting down and concentrating quietly) he would start screaming at me that I wasn’t doing anything and he wasn’t paying me to sit around (yeah, $6.00/hour, whoo). He would then tell me to go clean the bathrooms… because that was ‘real’ work.

I was sent to the warehouse (across town) many times and told to ‘stay there’ until it was time to go home by my supervisor who understood how crazy Boss Man was and tried to keep his employees out of the line of fire as often as possible. We’d have a few dozen books to alphabetize and straighten. Then we’d go across the street to a greasy spoon called “Bucky’s” or sit around reading. If Mr. Boss Man showed up at the warehouse, we’d pretend to be working. My favorite time was when I was taking books from one set of shelves (they were brought over and put in letter catagories by other workers and my job was to put them in strict alphabetical order on another set of shelves) by hand as the carts were rusty and squeaked and had a tendency to dump their contents at the slightest provocation (also, lifting books is good exercise). He came over to me, knocked the books out of my hands and started saying that I should alphabetize the books onto the cart, then RE-alphabetize them onto the shelves. This is twice as much work.

I quit because

a. my supervisor turned out to be a horrible racist. An Asian kid (I think he was Korean) was looking for a book that we didn’t have and I knew we had a shipment coming so I asked if it was in the shipment. He started raving about how Asians killed his relatives in WWII and how all Asians are idiots except when it comes to mathmatics, etc.

and

b. I was taping up boxes to be sent out for shipment. Mr Crazy Boss Man came up to me, tore the box out of my hand, ripped all the tape off and started yelling that I hadn’t taken all the old tape off the box. Then he threw the tape gun and the box at me and stormed off. I quit right then. I guess I’d had enough. :rolleyes:

26

My last boss was the most incompetent person I’ve ever worked for. But I’m already getting ahead of myself…

I was working in a local diner, as a cook. This was my second “tour of duty” in this diner. The first time, the diner had just opened. The way I got the job was this: I had stopped into the diner to have lunch. I didn’t recognize the lady behind the counter until she came over and asked me, “Didn’t I used to work with you at [insert another local restaurant here]?” I turned out that she remembered working with me a few years earlier - she as a waitress, me as a cook. When I replied affirmatively, her next question was, “You want a job?”

So I worked for her for about six months, and watched as the diner’s business increased steadily. A few years later, she died of a sudden massive heart-attack. Shortly after that, I ended up working in the same diner, now with her husband as my boss. By this time, the diner was extremely successful. It had a huge base of regular customers, and was always busy.

But, the former boss’s widower wasn’t a restaurant guy - he was a fireman, and was in line to become the new fire chief in my city. So after several months he decided to sell. He had also found a new girlfriend only six months after his wife’s death. And so, contrary to his late wife’s wishes (she had planned to sell the business to an employee), the guy sold the diner to his new girlfriend’s cousin.

So, we got a new boss. We were all a bit apprehensive, fearing that she was going to start making changes. The crew was like a big family, and we didn’t really like having a new boss to begin with. But we didn’t have a clue as to what we were in for.

We all learned over time that the new boss, who was 44 years old when she bought the place, had dropped out of school at 16 and gotten married. She never worked a job until she was 26. We heard rumors from outside sources that she had been fired from just about every job she’d had from the time she entered the work force until she bought the diner (most of those claims have since been confirmed). On top of that, the vast majority of her work experience was as a bartender and cocktail waitress, with only a couple short stints as a restaurant waitress. So, our new boss had a very poor employment history, and almost no real restaurant experience.

She was also one of those bosses who believes that, simply by virtue of being the boss, she automatically knows more than her employees.

The other cooks and I quickly learned that she knew absolutely nothing about restaurant kitchens (in fact, she really didn’t even know how to cook). Our troubles began when she started making arbitrary changes in the way we did things in the kitchen, while having no understanding of why we had been doing it the other way. We had legitimate reasons for the procedures we used, but she wanted us to change things. She was simply exercising her authority, I believe.

I’ll list a few of the idiot things she did with the place:

  • Rather than treat everybody who walked in the door as a valued customer, she instead picked out what kind of customer she wanted. Then, those people would get outstanding service from her, while everybody else got the bare minimum.

  • Because sugar-free pancake syrup was a bit more expensive than the regular stuff, she decided it would be a good idea to charge customers extra for sugar-free syrup.

  • Part of the reason for the previous owner’s success was that the diner is located next door to a hairstyling school. The students would come in every day for lunch. However, the new owner didn’t think they were important enough to get good service. Within a few months, we lost 95% of those customers.

  • She walked the borderline between civility and hostility when waiting on Mexican customers and anybody who appeared to be homeless. Apparently, their money wasn’t as good as other peoples :rolleyes:

  • Instructed us cooks to make portions smaller and smaller and smaller

  • The previous owner raised prices by an insignificant amount at the beginning of each year, to cover rising costs. Nobody ever complained. The new owner, fearing a loss of business, decided to not raise prices the first New Year after she bought the diner. Of course, this meant that due to an increased minimum wage and rising cost from suppliers, she was forced to raise prices significantly the following year. Two years worth of price hikes all at once. People complained.

  • Told the old men who sat at the counter and drank coffee that they could no longer sit there for more than an hour. Old men who had been spending money in the place for decades. They all went elsewhere.

  • Once, when I had a really bad day (hey, we all have them) the boss decided she needed to “counsel” me. When I attempted to explain why I had gotten angry, she responded by telling me, “You shouldn’t get so upset! It’s just a job!” I was incredulous. A business owner telling her employee that what he did was “just a job”? That had to be the single most insulting thing anybody had ever said to me. No wonder she’d been fired so many times, if that was the way she thought.

  • After insulting me, she decided that she should “give me a break” from the stresses of being a breakfast cook. So two days a week, I was switched to the afternoon shift. What a great idea! Take the best breakfast cook you’ve got, and put him on the afternoon shift! That oughtta work!

  • She would hire experienced waitresses, and then, when they proved to be far more skilled than she, would would become jealous and find a way to make them quit. Conversely, she would hire inexperienced waitresses, and then show absolutely no patience with them. She went so far as to point out all of one new girl’s mistakes right in front of the girl’s customer. In three years, we went through about twenty waitresses. The diner usually carried a complement of three waitresses plus the owner, so that was a lot of turnover.

  • Allowed her “special” customers to order things that weren’t on the menu, even after telling other customers “no”, no matter how badly such orders jammed up the kitchen. Her special customers’ orders always had priority over other customers’ orders.

  • She never learned that a restaurant is not run the same way as a bar. In a bar, you want people to sit there and sit there and sit there. In a restaurant, you want people to eat and get the hell out. But she encouraged her favorite customer to sit and sit and sit…

  • She never figured out that “good service” and “ass-kissing” are not the same thing.

Anyway, the other two cooks and I showed remarkable patience. Okay, well, I showed patience. One cook was an older lady who was getting ready to retire, so she didn’t give a flying f*ck what the new boss did. The other cook was a guy who was somehow able to put up with just about anything (he worked 16 years as a janitor for a local hotel/restaurant, and watched that place be mismanaged from 5-star down 0-star.) After about two years of this nonsense, I was commenting to one of the cooks about the ridiculous turnover among the waitresses. I predicted that, if one of us cooks left, the same thing would happen in the kitchen. Turned out I was right. I finally quit, three years after the new owner took over. In the next twelve months, the place went through seven more cooks.

27

You have all made me feel much better about being unemployed.

Shodan, that was priceless.

28

Naked salad-oil massages?
I think I might just like it here.

29

I work in real estate, and we have sales agents who work on commission. There are two standard commission splits, depending on the type of deal. In-house the agent gets 30%, others are 45%.

We had one deal where the in-house or other was under debate. The Big Boss said in-house, agent said not in house. Everyone agreed with the agent, and the Big Boss ranted on his side for an entire morning. Most everyone had left the office by then, including the agent in question.

Finally, I asked the Big Boss why we could do a 30% split, and then agree to give the agent half of the other 30% for his work on the deal, which we had done on other past deals. The Big Boss said that would be okay. So we basically argued most of the day as to whether the agent was receivng 45% or 30% plus half of 30%.

30

My father had worked for a pharmaceutical company, based in Britain, but with operations all over the world. When the company decided to expand and actually buy land in the US for their US operations, they hired a new director for US operations. This gentleman ended up with the nickname ‘Forrest Gump.’

The biggest flop that this man came up with was, for some reason he decided to fire the in-house legal counsel. Now, because he was firing the legal counsel for the company (at least for US operations) he couldn’t ask HIM for advice or suggestions of which procedures to follow. However, instead of getting a contracted legal counsel, Forrest Gump decided to do it all himself. So, basically the in house legal counsel came back from a trip abroad, was told to report to the president, and was handed a severance check, and a termination agreement. Bad enough that the man had set it up without benefit of legal counsel, but he also let the now former legal counsel walk out of the building without signing the termination agreement, but with the severance check. Before any UK dopers speak up to defend Forrest Gump, let me point out he was a native American, so should have some knowledge of the proper legal procedures for firing someone in the US. The former legal counsel went out, that day, hired a lawyer for himself, and eventually won a large settlement for improper termination.

31

I had a boss who was so full of himself he actually used to make up words when he was dictating stuff to me. I’d say “that’s not an actual word” and he’d say “leave it in, I like the way it sounds.” This was like in business correspondence to potential clients, etc. Yeah, I’m going to hire a guy that invents his own meaningless language.

He also had the cheap-ass “hang on to 15-year-old computer” affliction that has already been discussed here. Whenever we had to call the home office for something it was a nightmare. They’d say “go into blah blah and click on XXX” and I’d have to say “I can’t ‘click’ on anything, because I DON’T HAVE A MOUSE.” Then they’d suggest I go through the website and I’d have to tell them “I can’t go to the website because I don’t have THE INTERNET or for that matter WINDOWS even.” Finally the company said everyone had to be up and running Windows 98 by the end of that year and outlined the specs for the new computers. They had a perfectly fine deal worked out with DELL where you could get exactly what you need, but NOOOOOOOOOOO, since he had to buy THREE whole computers :rolleyes: he had me call around to approximately 95 computer places to see if they had better prices. He made me do this twice a week for around 3 months to see if prices would go down. He ended up saving around $10 a computer or something and thought he was really pulling a fast one.

He was an insurance salesman and used to write off Thanksgiving dinner with his kids as a business expense because they had policies with him.

The lamest: He used to send me across the street to a coffee place (even though the company provided free coffee, which he disliked for whatever reason) and get his specific type and size of coffee. The price went up 10 cents and he was outraged. He started calling all the coffee places within a mile radius to find who had the best deal, and ended up sending me 4 blocks away to get coffee. After two days of this he got out his 35-year-old 17 pound LED calculator and started figuring out how long it took me to walk all this way, wait for the coffee, then walk back with it and realised it was costing him an extra $5 of my time for him to save 10 cents on a cup of coffee. This guy never did any actual work because he was too busy obsessing about stupid crap.

32

OtakuLoki—there are many places in the US where this would be a completely legal firing.

33

I’m assuming that it was a breach of the attorney’s contract with the company, rather than with any specific law.

34

There’s more, but my co-worker and I do try to block the day to day stuff from our minds - this is just the stuff that is so over the top, or happens so often, that it’s stuck with us:

*She once told me that isopropyl alcohol doesn’t kill germs.
*She doesn’t wash her own hair, but goes to a salon once every couple weeks and gets it washed for her.
*Instead of replying directly to an e-mailed question with an answer, she’ll forward the mail to her assistant and instruct her to reply back with an answer (which she will supply to her assistant).
*She has no concept of how to manage employees and thinks nothing of yelling (YELLING!) at someone in front of whomever else happens to be standing there.
*She has absolutely no memory and will yell at you for something she told you to do the day before.
*Told fellow employee, when he’d burned his hands BBQing, to put butter on the burns.
*Brakes on her car have been shot for over two years and there is currently no repair scheduled. Oh, and only her driver’s seat belt works.
*Doesn’t always wear underwear. And how do I know this? Because she also has the habit of putting her feet up on her desk (or other people’s) while wearing skirts/dresses.
*Anytime her assistant is sick or ailing or anything, she mysteriously has the same illness or ailment at the exact time.
*Despite the fact that I had a written doctor’s note stating I had pnuemonia, she refused to believe that I did, indeed, have pnuemonia. Her reasoning was that it was flu season and that since none of the other employees that got the flu developed pnuemonia, then I didn’t have it either. I believe her exact words when I called to tell her was that if I “had pnuemonia, then we all must have had it too”.
*She’s pulling down over $50k a year. She also, like our outside sales people, gets a gas card, expense account, and a $350/month allowance for insurance and cell phone. However, she is not an outside sales person, nor does she travel for her job. In fact, she barely puts in 25 hours/week.

Ok, that last item doesn’t uphold the “idiot” definition - it either proves she, at least, has some good sense or knew which dick to suck. I’m voting for the latter.

35

We’ve got a mini-boss (we’ll call him Chuckles) at my office because apparently, our big boss can’t handle things like scheduling anymore. So, here’s a few of the gems that have happened recently (I work for a local television news station, by the way):

We had a big issue with the daybreak shift where our sole Chyron operator (the person who makes full screens and puts people’s names up for you to enjoy) was sick, called in late, and we had to scramble to call someone in because noone on our shift had any training. We had one guy, C who trained in evenings for about a week a month prior, so we’ve been pushing to have him train on Daybreak Chyron so we have a back up. Their solution? They’re going to send him to evenings for a week to train. Good for the continued training, but bad because the two shifts are VASTLY DIFFERENT, and learning on the evenings won’t help him worth a damn!

Then, to make things even more fun…this week in Austin is a HUGE music/movie festival, so we’re having an insane amount of bands come in for the daybreak shift. We need experienced Audio operators to handle this so it doesn’t sound like shit. Chuckle’s solution? Send me to evenings for “training” this week; take our daily audio op who hasn’t been in the studio for nearly two years OUT of the audio booth and in charge of running the studio; and put an inexperienced evening audio op into the seat to run the show. Then on Wednesday, our big boss decides to let another department take two of our studio crew members out to help shoot some commercial bit so he can run prompter, have a person from a different department run camera, and leave our most inexperienced guy to run around and man all three cameras for an hour long news broadcast. Needless to say, things got very sloppy this week.

I have a feeling all that was done so that he can come back from vacation and prance around saying “See how horrible things fall apart when I’m not here?” I really wish I had a mallet with “DIPUTS” written on it so I could beat him in the forehead really hard (therefore leaving STUPID imprinted on it for everyone to see).

36

Years ago, I had a horrible job at a horrible company, working for horrible people. My boss was a woman who meant well but who was way over her head and allowed her fears and insecurities to manifest as condescension and denial. (As a data point, she got the job because she was the assistant to the previous person who had the job. This previous person was intelligent and competent. However, she was fired because she revealed to the chairman a fraudulent expense claim perpetrated by the CEO, and the chairman didn’t tell her that she was giving him the information via speakerphone while the CEO sat silently listening. Lovely place.)

Anyway, the job was in HR. I’m a little sensitive about people who have anti-HR biases, because I’ve worked in good HR departments since then, but this was exactly the sort of horror-story HR department that creates such a bad rep for the rest of them. We actively defrauded the employment security agencies by dishonestly defending managers accused of sexual harassment, for example.

Over the couple of years I was there (I was young and had no resume yet), I performed a series of analyses demonstrating the company’s horrible management of people. Annual staff turnover was ninety percent. Yes, you read that right. And this wasn’t a fast-food joint or retail outfit, where you expect some churn. This was, supposedly, a high-end telecommunications company. Anyway, the point is, I produced report after report showing that the company’s hiring model was flawed, that the personality and aptitude tests so beloved by the CEO had absolutely no correlation with job success, that the high turnover was an eight-figure drain on the company’s bottom line, and so forth.

But that’s about the company. That’s not my boss.

The part of the story relevant to this thread is that, when I finally managed to score a better position, I told my boss in my exit interview that the company was doomed. I had previously spent some time doing administrative work at a law firm, one that specialized in business and bankruptcy law, so I had a passing familiarity with the characteristics of a spiraling-to-the-drain corporation. And based on that, and on the various analyses I’d done, I told my boss that the company would be bankrupt in eighteen months.

She laughed at me. She thought she was on the gravy train.

My estimate was high by three months. It was a completely inescapable freight train barrelling in straight at the company’s nuts, obvious to anyone with half a clue, but nevertheless she was still completely blindsided by the collapse. In short, she was a fool, and at every place I’ve worked since then, I’ve passed her name to the recruiters to make sure she’s flagged as a “no-hire” in case she shows up in the resume database.

No, I’m not bitter.

37

First off, all naked salad oil massages are done using proper draping, and only the area actually being massaged with salad oil is uncovered.

Now, my story.

I was working in the shipping room of a music store warehouse. The owner, for reasons still unknown, decided to hire a new warehouse manager while the old one was recovering from surgery. OK, he’d had a face lift, but that’s still surgery.

The new guy was a complete ass. The first thing he did was to rearrange the warehouse. The entire freaking warehoust. Not because of any inefficiency in the arrangement we had, but just for the sake of rearranging the warehouse.

So, he put the violin strings and accessories where the percussion department had been, moved the percussion instruments to where the woodwinds had been, moved the woodwinds to where the brasswinds had been, moved the… I think you get the idea.

Not such a bad thing, you say?

He also changed all the bin location numbers.

He didn’t give the new bin location numbers to the data entry people until after the entire inventory had been moved to other aisles.

So, in addition to having to get used to looking for the violins where drums had previously been, the pickers also dealing with orders that had been printed out with either the old bin numbers or with no bin numbers, so they would be wandering up and down the aisles reading the cards on all of the bins until they found the particular box of reeds they were looking for.

For weeks, this went on. There was the sound of great rejoicing when the new bin location numbers for one of the departments would appear in the computer, so the pickers would know exactly where to look for that package of cello strings.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, depending on where you’re standing, the guy was fired six months later for sexual harassment of a female employee.