Usually my coworkers have been fine. There was that one guy who did no work at all, and managed to complete three utterly incompetent and unreadable novels in two years, but largely they’ve been a nice bung.
However, I’ve worked for a number of varyingly insane bosses.
There was the dispatch company guy who was utterly hairy, but only shaved halfway down his neck, so he had a sharp demarkation zone between normal neck and about three inches thick of gorilla-style jungle protruding from his collar. His core business was sending bikes and vans around the UK delivering stuff to people, yet he was utterly unable to cope with the vaguely tense nature of the business, and used to go bright red in the face, veins bulging huge and blue from his forehead and aforementioned hairy neck, and SCREAM!!! Once or twice an hour, every single working day. “AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGHHHHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS EVERYONE DOING AAAAARRRRGHHHHH!!!”
He also once got into a fist-fight with the VP, and ended up literally kicking him out of his own office - he lost it, and threw the veep against the door, which burst open, and then when he was sprawling on the floor in front of all of us, kicked him as hard as he could in the ass, and left him lying crumpled at our feet. It was hilarious. If this dude hasn’t sold the business yet and gone to join a yoga retreat for his sanity, I’d imagine it’s because he had an aneurysm and died.
Then there was the advertising company kung fu master who studied with Jackie Chan (this was no lie - he really did, and I once met Mr Chan through him), whose entire creative direction was to say, in every meeting, “can you make it somehow… more… better?”, who was fucking all of the female senior management, two of whom ended up finding out and having a full-on slappy hair-pulling fight that culminated in one of them having a heart attack on the office floor. This bastard hid a fucking quarter ounce of hash in a bunch of TV camera equipment he then got me to transport to Manila. The motherfucker. I discovered that he’d used me to smuggle his drugs only because I overheard a conversation between him and his Philippines business partner. I cannot imagine what kind of jail/death sentence I would have got had my unknown cargo been discovered.
But the maddest boss, the most disturbing, the weirdest - and therefore best of all - was the newspaper editor I worked for as a reporter.
I’ll say one thing kind of in his favor: he was imposing. And as intimidating as hell. He was always supremely composed, physically, and spoke and moved with puma-like purpose (those of you who have seen the tycoon Alan Sugar in the UK’s The Apprentice - he moved, and now I think of it, looked, pretty much exactly like that).
I was genuinely terrified of this fucker. We would have daily morning editorial briefings, and he always made sure he arrived five minutes late for maximum effect (I’m sure every morning he was listening outside the door, waiting for us all to be in the boardroom and getting agitated). He would sweep magisterially into the room and harangue us for a long time about our inadequacies, then rant for ten minutes or so about whatever was on his mind. This was followed by the setting of hopeless tasks for the reporting team.
He had the most astonishing ego I’ve ever encountered. He called me into his office one day to tell me that I wrote well - followed by the revelation that “there have been good writers, and there have been great writers. And there hasn’t been a writer as great as me since Dickens.” I looked in his face for the irony, but there was none: he meant it.
Sadly disproving his literary self-image, he had written a book of poetry. He had it self-published, and I heard on the grapevine that he’d sold precisely eleven copies, mainly to himself, friends and family. Thus there were boxes and boxes of his poetry book lying around the office. Naturally I stole one. It was bad. Not just “not very good” bad, but toe-curlingly, knuckle-gnawingly, hide-your-face-under-a-cushion bad. It had no merit at all: it was badly written, without grace, with no technique, no joy in the language - it was just turgid prose divided up randomly into asymmetric lines, with the occasional rhyme thrown in. The subject matter concerned his insecurities. His snobbery. His racial prejudices. His materialism. His misogyny. His sex life for God’s sake. It was printed in handy “flush down the toilet” size, but sadly it was hardback, so I still have it somewhere.
Added to this was that he was an ambassador for Hutt River Province, and would regularly appear in court (as he was occasioned to constantly due to dodgy business deals, and libel) in full regalia, including velvet robes and ermine trim and hat, and claim diplomatic immunity. It never, ever worked.
My career with this doofus ended when he set me yet another impossible task, based on a rumor he’d heard at the golf club, which I failed to prove, and he expounded on this by calling me into his office and screaming at me "You have FAILED! You’re a fucking FAILURE!
He paid me, incidentally, $10,000 per year. I resigned.
