Share your stories of being disrespected/abused/shat upon by your employers

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

There was the job in the Finance company where the boss was a drunken thieving ass. He’d repossess cars and then steal everything taken out of them. If he saw something really good that was permanently attached, he’d arrange to have that car broken into at night have the items ripped out.

(I found out later that he was barred by law from working in the finance industry w/i the state of PA, which is why he was in NJ :smack: )

He had a bad habit of using repossessed cars as his personal cars, putting thousands & thousands of miles on them before they were sold at auction (or redeemed). He also liked to drive drunk and total these repossessed cars.

One night, the whole team was out at a bar (a required company function) he drank himself even sillier than usual. I suggested that maybe he not drive that night. His answer was to demand loudly that not only would he drive (a repo), but if I didn’t get into the car with him, I was fired. I was young & foolish…so I got into the car with him. He only managed to get a 1/2 mile from the bar before he ran over a highway sign. (Oh, it wasn’t easy. He had to go off the highway and up a curb for a good 20 feet to bag it). I wasn’t hurt, but he had trashed the front end of the repossessed car. He got back in the car and he drove back to the office on 2 flats (I walked).

(I found another job shortly afterwards.)

22

In a job performance review, all I get is positive comments, I’d been getting more and more responsibility, talk of me going towards management (long terms, since I’m still quite young) and everyone loves me and everything is good. They give me a promotion, one I was expecting anyways but was definitely necessary for me to follow the path they were talking about… then they show me the money for the raise:

200$
A year.

I quit not long after (along with a decision to change provinces). Since around that time, this company has been hemorraging employees, and recently announced plans to sell 3 (out of 7) North American sites… not good news.

If that’s how they want to keep employees they LOVE, what the fuck do they offer the ones they hate???

23

Based on what my dad (another former Sears employee) has told me, I believe every word of your story. (Dad was fired after nine years on the job because he (GASP) refused to work overtime unless he was paid for it. Also because the franchise’s fundamentalist owner decided he only wanted to work with people who attended his church, but that’s a rant for another time.)

A former manager at my company was notorious for treating employees like crap. I had the misfortune of working under him for a few days. He would call me into his office every five minutes to “discuss” one of the many projects he’d assigned. As soon as I returned to my desk, the phone would ring. It was the manager, demanding to know why the work wasn’t finished yet. It was brutal. He wouldn’t allow me time to work, then he’d berate me for being lazy and incompetent.

Upper management learned of the problem when I handed in my resignation. I was promptly transferred to another position, and the manager was reprimanded. Unfortunately, the manager’s wife was my new boss. :smack: I got the silent treatment for two months while she glared at me and slammed papers on my desk. Not a fun time.

24

I’ve had several bosses I couldn’t stand over the years, but ironically it was one of the ones I liked the most who I couldn’t work for as she sexually harassed me to the point I thought I was going to have to report it.

It is said that I give really good back rubs. I’m very firm (I can’t stand a weak handed back rub) but not enough to hurt (unless requested). I had a boss I’ll call Debbie (not her real name) who I thought was a great person- bad marriage, three kids, sometimes really down, and her boss [my grandboss] was a self-exonerating buck-passing-to-subordinates prick of the type that ex-high ranking military officers can often be so well [he was a retired USAF Colonel- in fairness I’ve had good ex-military bosses as well]). Once when she was in a really frustrated and verge-of-tears mood I was saying something to her and started massaging her shoulders- completely platonically, others were present, and she started moaning “Oh…God…that… feels…so…good…”. I was glad to be of service.

Unfortunately she wasn’t being polite. She started asking me for backrubs all the time. Then she’d call me off of a very busy front desk where the other employees were not (imo) sufficiently skilled to deal with everything (I was a supervisor and they were newish) to come into her office where she shut the door (!) and asked me to rub her back. Not her shoulders- her back- she was fully clothed but actually lay face down on her desk! I did, but I felt very odd about it.

Then she started asking for this more often and finally asking me to come over to her house. “I’ll cook you dinner, we’ll have some drinks, and you can just really give me a good going over…”. Well… i didn’t like the sound of that, so I politely declined (and was especially glad I did when I learned that she and her husband had separated). She was attractive (looked a lot like Mary Ann from GILLIGAN’S ISLAND) but this was before I was out at work as gay and was still a wage slave ($6.75/hour mid 1990s). She asked again, I declined again, still politely but also fairly firmly with a politely phrased “I don’t feel comfortable” subtext.

As a gag gift for my birthday she gave me a card that had a gorgeous almost nude male stripper on it. She didn’t know I was gay and we often gave gag gifts at that place, but when I mentioned “Hmmmm… likey” and put it in my pocket she acted weird. When somebody there who had bought the (long on sale for $.29) vowel and solved the puzzle clued her in that “I think there’s a reason he’s almost 30 and doesn’t speak of girlfriends and knows every showtune ever written and won’t miss a Johnny Depp opening” [this was when Johnny Depp was still ‘rabidly loyal cult’ as opposed to superstar] “and never seems to make any comment whatever about good looking guys but giggled like a schoolgirl when that hot soap actor was here and came down in his Speedos”, her attitude changed overnight and so noticably that others mentioned it. She started scheduling me for nights I’d requested off, she cut my hours so often that I became ineligible for insurance (I was by far the best person on the desk- her argument was that I “earned the most” and it was a “business decision”, but I only earned $1.75/hour more than a new hire) and promoted the other supervisor to her assistant even though the other supervisor was a backstabbing biatch who EVERYBODY despised including Debbie (when other supervisor was having car trouble she didn’t even pretend to exchange preferred treatment- higher hours, better shifts- to those who would give her rides- I think she was clueless enough she didn’t think this was inethical).

Anyway, I was majorly pissed and started to make official complaint, but then it occurred that I was making $6.75/hour and could easily match that somewhere in town so I took another job instead. Almost as soon as I put in my notice she did also (coincidence- she was hired by another chain) and I ended up extending my tour of duty from 2 weeks notice to a month in exchange for a raise to $7.50 so I could train my boss’s replacement as biatch by that time had alienated everybody.

The real irony: I really truly liked her as a person and she was a fantastic boss, except for the (I don’t think it’s stretching to say) sexual harassment. In retrospect I wish her well and hope all turned out but at the time I could have slapped her. (And one reason I’m not madder at her in retrospect is she was hot enough that it was actually a compliment and I think that it really insulted her I turned her down- she was in her mid to late 30s and while still very attractive was beginning to be sensitive about the changes caused by aging and probably thought that inspired my lack of interest- if I’d been straight or if she’d looked like Davy Jones instead of Mary Ann, I’d probably have totally been over to give those back-rubs ;).)

25

I won’t go into the entire long story of working for 18 months without a day off, but the lack of time off wasn’t the only problem. The owner of this not-for-profit was a retired doctor in his 60’s. I was the only paid employee most of the time I worked there; they did eventually have to hire some help for kennel cleaning as they had managed to run off all the volunteers.

I say “they” - boss had a girlfriend. She was in her early 30’s, worked as a maid, and she thought that since she made the boss’s Viagra prescription worth the money she had the right to give me orders. She would volunteer to keep cats at her house - but that just meant I had to go to her house to clean the cages because she wasn’t about to do it. Then they came up with the charming idea of weekly “staff meetings” where boss and maid/girlfriend would sit and yell at me for half an hour or so.

No overtime pay - I never worked less that a 55 hour week and recently found a paystub where I had turned in 162 hours for two weeks - no benefits, and no days off. I loved the work but it is the only job I have ever quit without notice.

26

At the moment I am bottling up my issues until I finally have my dissertation approved I will compose a pit thread to relieve my distress. Until then…Grrrrrrrrr

27

My father died of a heart attack. I called the radio station where I was working to tell them I wouldn’t be in that night or my next shift, which coincided with my dad’s funeral.

I was told, “If you don’t show up tonight, don’t bother coming back.”

I didn’t.

28

Not quite that bad, but I was working for an employer I’ll identify only as the UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA, a place where employees fell over themselves in a game of competetive compassion with a poor co-worker whose husband died a tragic but scandalous death a few years before, when my mother got sick. I worked more reference hours than anybody else, taught more classes than anybody else, and always bent over backwards to be accomodating to my co-workers even when it was a personal inconvenience. When my mother was diagnosed as terminally ill and I had to start taking time off to take her to doctor’s appointments the co-workers bitched and made snarky comments like “You’re here for a change” when they knew goddamned well where I’d been (yeah, I’ve been having the time of my life in a cancer ward, it’s so hard to come back to work from such a vacation). When I left I gave just under 1 month’s notice- that’s shorter than average for academia BUT this was an extreme circumstance- and there was constant bitching about the inconvenience it would do the schedule (yeah- because I work more fucking hours at the desk and teach more fucking classes than the rest of you do- YOU’RE WELCOME!) When my mother died shortly after I left I got an email from my boss there that I appreciated but the rest of these people- who I’d contributed constantly for flowers and cards to- didn’t send a card, flowers, emails, calls, anything. Fucking bitchtards- other than my boss I have no respect for any of them- I’ve never worked in a less friendly workplace.

29

A few gems:

  • In grad school for a PhD. I already have an accepted paper (in JACS, w00t!); there’s another one in the pipeline for which 2/3 of the work is mine and the rest by another grad student, R. My advisor, J, asks whether I mind letting R be shown as the main author; since I don’t intend to go into “a research university” if I can help it, I’m ok with it.
    When this second article is published, the only names shown are R (PI), J and K (K being R’s advisor). My name isn’t even in the “thank you” list.
    The parts of the article that are mine happen to be the same as my oral exam, passed while the article was being refereed.
    J tells me “you’re a foreigner so you can’t go anywhere without my permission; you’re the best researcher I’ve ever seen; I’ve figured out that between the grants you get from your home country and TAing I can have you for free for 11 years, why would I let you go sooner than that?”
    K, who is the Grad Student advisor, is having one of his depressions. All he can do when I try to talk to him is shrug and say “bah, he’s right, you’re a foreigner, what can you do.”
    The Director of the Department… ah, that’s the guy who’d given As to all his students and flunked all those who weren’t in his group. He’d given me the lowest grade (when I actually knew the subject better than he did) because he was pissed that I hadn’t requested his group (I must be good, apparently every single professor wanted me bad). No help forthcoming there unless I was willing to work 11 years for him - and he was a useless piece of shit who didn’t even know the basis for “his” research (his previous university had given him glowing reviews in order to get rid of him AFAP).
    Going to the Dean or similar would have taken God knows how long, plus even though incidents like those with the director’s grades were easy to prove, it was still a student against a bunch of professors.

Did I mention I had enough credits for a Master’s without Thesis? So long, J!

  • Review time. Previous years, I’ve gotten something like 4/4. The reviews from “coworkers, supervisors and clients” that are being submitted are glowing ones. Somehow the boss who happens to despise women, foreigners and techies (I’m all three) manages to turn five “4/4” submissions into a “0/4”.

  • Last job before this one. The contractor for which I worked had started out selling computers; as their customers asked for more and more services (first it was, “can you set up the computers too?”, then “can you maintain them?”, then…), their scope grew. They had recently been asked to provide personnel for the Help Desk in a big client. The first interview was with a manager at the contractor (N); the second one, with the woman from the client who’d be our boss (L).
    She wanted “ideas people”, experts, people who wanted to do the best possible job. She got them. It was one of the best teams I’ve ever seen; I would have loved a chance to grab those people and let ‘em go.
    She went on vacation when most of us had been in for a few weeks (several people joined while she was out); we limited ourselves to answering those things that were either urgent or evident. She complained to N that we “were making decisions out of our scope” (what, reminding someone of the accounting double entry concept is a decision now?). She didn’t want to hear any ideas. Sugestions were met with insults. She dismissed anything said by people outside our department whose job titles didn’t include “manager” or “director”, including those who’d specifically been hired to funnel users’ questions, needs and suggestions to us.
    When I told N I was leaving, I gave him the actual reason: L. And I warned him that I knew other people were having interviews as well (over the phone, like mine), and others weren’t but simply because they weren’t willing to leave town - if they got an in-town call, they’d interview. N was grumbly, but the last time we spoke he thanked me: he’d been able to prevent several people’s leaving thanks to my warning.

  • My current job as a distressing tendency to pay infinity per hour of actual work, (yawn). Means I need less hours of sleep, since I’m half-asleep for 8-9 hours a day. If I can ever transform it into telecommute, it’ll be perfect!

30

One co-worker was expecting tickets via FedEx to some Sunday sporting event. Something I would not attend in this or any other lifetime. He called the place on Saturday and they assured him that the tickets had been delivered and signed for on Friday. I assured him that I had signed for no FedEx on Friday. He gets very upset and asks “How do I know you didn’t take them. You must have taken them. You signed for them and then took them.” I told him it wasn’t me. “How do I know that?” Cause I’m telling you it: When I sign for anything, I call the person and put it in their mail box, stupidhead.

The package arrived Monday. When I was out at lunch. And the Big Boss signed for it. I don’t know what he told my co-worker, but I never got an apology.

31

For a year I had the World’s Shittiest Librarian Job. I was told that if I wanted office supplies I had better bring my own. A week into the job they stole my computer and gave it to another office, because “they bring in money and you don’t.”

32

I once had a job as executive director of a male-dominated membership organization filled with aging business men who really and truly could not believe that women could ever be their intellectual equals.

Daily, I endured sexist put-downs, such as being told condescendingly on my third day of work – when my predecessor left the books in a garbled mess and I turned to the treasurer to ask for help sorting it out – “I know, math must be hard for you…”

Once I raised at a Board meeting that we were wasting our money printing the crummy membership magazine, since no one read it, and I had some changes to propose that would make it more of a service to members. The president, clearly uneasy with the idea of me taking charge of this, said “well, before you go making any changes, maybe you should take a poll of the membership and find out what they think.”

I HAD polled the membership. The president himself had not bothered to read the magazine or pay attention to any briefing I gave him, or he would have known that.

The conversation then devolved into a discussion of how they should put photos of naked women in the magazine in order to increase the readership.

I loved quitting that job. :slight_smile:

33

I once had this stupid job where I was expected to go into the jungle and shoot people. Oh sure they trained me for it, but still… oh and Everyone was soooo bossy.

Life is too short, when you get shit on, quit. I know, I know it gets complicated but I don’t stay where I’m not appreciated, unless of course I get tons of money for it. or of course I get court martialed for leaving too soon.
Almost posted this and realized it looks too much like a drive by.

I do realize there are many shitty jobs and a lot of bosses from hell and I know people quit even whithout safety nets because of it. But i have lived with the idea that if no one is shooting at me, how bad is it? My bosses get exactly one shot at being an ass, then I’m gone or they are.

No, I don’t shoot them. I report them.

34

I once took a job at a place that had just started a new division. Because the division was new, there were still funding issues with head office, which was overseas. But the company assured me that in spite of not having received approval (and money) to pay me, they would manage somehow. Approval required basically a rubber stamp, and should come through when their budget was presented to head office in a few months.

To their credit, they did actually pay me, and the cheques actually cleared. But that was the last thing they did right during my employment.

Some months after I was hired, I was unceremoniously and suddenly shown the door. It seems one of the secretaries from another division, a woman with whom I had little to no interaction in my daily routine, claimed I had cornered her in a conference room and made a number of rude and offensive come-ons to her. The company wouldn’t press charges if I left now. As in, right now. Forego any pay or severance owed–it’s a small price to pay so we won’t sue you. I had done no such thing, but my protests fell on deaf ears. The secretary had been at the company for a few years; I had been there a few months. Whose word carried more weight? So I left.

But there was paperwork to be done, of course, and a day or two later, I received a call from HR at that company. The call was ostensibly to find out something to do with the paperwork, but a lot more came out of my conversation with the HR woman. It seems that she was not pleased with what had happened, did not want to participate in something that was probably illegal and definitely unethical, and gave me the full story.

The company had not received the rubber stamp from head office for the funding for my position. Indeed, head office gave the division head proper hell for hiring someone (me) without their approval. Not only was head office not going to approve my hiring, but would also likely examine very closely all budget and funding requests from this division in the future. So, in an attempt to mitigate these effects and save some money in the process, the division had to figure out a way to get me out the door as quickly and as cheaply as possible. A concocted story and threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit seemed like it would work, so they tried it. It might have worked too, except for the HR woman who had a sense of ethics.

Armed with this knowledge–and the fact that I probably had a great claim to a wrongful dismissal suit–I went back to the division head and spoke with him. I wish I could say his grim stoicism finally cracked under hours of intense grilling, but in truth, he collapsed like a house of cards in the first five minutes. He had simply approved the plan that an underling had formulated; he didn’t like it, but he approved it anyway. In the end, and in exchange for me not taking it to my lawyer, he agreed to scrounge up two weeks of severance and pay for the two or three days of vacation I had accumulated. In addition, I would receive a good reference–he admitted I was good at my job and they really could have used me, but head office’s lack of budgetary approval nixed it.

A year or two later, I heard that that division had been closed down, and everybody was now out of work. I just smiled.

35

I used to work at a call center back in the mid 90’s. While I was there, management implemented a policy that people were not allowed to take their 2 weeks vacation during a period of time where any other 2 people on your team had the same time off. This made it so that scheduling vacation had to be done a whole year in advance. This was the official policy of the call center, but unofficially, many managers there were denying previously approved vacations to people who had scheduled well over a year in advance. The excuse by management was, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you had vacation scheduled for this next week. Cancel your vacation, I need you to come in anyways.”

Fortunately this never happened to me because I used some psychology on them. Every year I had a week in August I would take off to go to Abbott’s Magic Get-Together. To insure that I would be able to take this time off, I would keep a countdown on my whiteboard that would say, “137 days to Abbott’s Magic Get-Together”. As it got closer to my vacation, the message would get larger and larger until it took up my entire whiteboard. They may decide to decline my scheduled vacation, but there was no way in hell they were going to use the excuse of “I didn’t know you had vacation that week” because I made darn sure they did.

I managed to leave on pretty good terms, but I was extremely ecstatic the day I left.

36

Wow, Spoons. They trumped up sexual harassment charges against you to save a little money? And how many people were in on this?

37

Sometimes this board has such problems! (Double post removed)

38

I was once (late 80’s) sent to a company that shall be identified only as Policy Management Services in Columbia SC. I had written the specs for the product that they were developing for my company and I was there to help out and make sure it worked.

My first day on the job there, getting introduced to the Director of the unit: There is one black guy in the entire department. Five minutes into our meeting the Director abruptly says “Yeah, we’re going to fire that nigger”. :eek:

One day I arrive to find that my chair, phone and several other small items including my coat hanger have been removed from my small cubicle. Senior Programmer next to me had done it. She declared “Those items are for Employees. You aren’t an employee”. An hour of scrounging and talking to her bosses and I have them back. She does it again the next day.

Before getting that cube, I had to sit in an area with three large noisy printers and ONE chair. Every time I walked away, I’d come back to find someone else sitting at my “desk” working the printer console.

One day in a meeting I asked how something was going to be done. They’d said that it would be done and I just was curious as to the specifics. By the reaction, you’d have thought I’d suggested that their mothers had mated with dark skinned satanist foreigners or something. From that day forward, every meeting they had excluded me. They were “staff only”. But they denied excluding me and told my company that I was lying about being snubbed.

Great way to treat a client. The company, their “product” and their people all sucked donkey balls.

To quote one of Samuel L Jackson’s characters; “Yes they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in hell!”

39

Are you sure that you don’t have an extra letter in your user name? Or maybe you’d have seen that most of the complaintants didn’t have someone above the person they were having problems with to report them to. Or that they did complain/report the person, but nothing was done.

Life ain’t that simple. Reporting someone usually means jack.

40

I should have quit my last job a lot sooner, but the company was basically the only game in town, and they paid well. Some of the things they did, to me and others:

  1. Transfer people to the warehouse, which is technically a different company. Not a problem, until it comes time to start your pension. Because you don’t have the required five years at each place, you aren’t vested at either.

  2. Reconfigure offices and make everyone move and set up their own partitions, furniture, and equipment, and then come in on the weekend to clean things up.

  3. Send salaried staff to a striking sister plant 300 miles away to work on an assembly line.

  4. Cancel vacation when the vacation is a honeymoon.

  5. Schedule Saturday work for someone who is getting married on Sunday.

  6. Change the closest parking lot from first-come first-parked to reserved for management, and even though management only used half the spaces, they are still reserved for management and anyone else is towed.

  7. Tie raises to product innovation, even for people whose jobs are administrative and clerical. Oh yeah, the payroll clerk should design the new timers.

  8. Move people willy-nilly with no regard for their skills. So what if you’re trained and hired as a drafter, you’ll like shipping.