What a shitty boss

Dear New Boss,

Now, you seem like a nice enough guy, but WHAT THE FUCK? How do you manage to run a profitable business? Seriously, you’ve got your head so far up your ass you can do your own colonoscopy.

You hired me this weekend, to urgently fill a soon-to-be-vacated position that, come to find out, the ill employee’s been trying to leave since October. The woman training me did a very good job explaining everything, like how I might have to fax something 3 times because you’ll ignore it- not that it didn’t go through -but that you’re so disorganized you can’t keep track of shit.

So, here I am, wondering when I’m going to work again. I called Monday, the day after my first day, to see if you’d managed to work out the schedule yet. You said you’d get back to me. I called this afternoon, to see if you’d managed to work out the schedule yet. You said you’d call back in a couple of hours. I still haven’t heard from you.

IT’S A SCHEDULE, IT’S NOT THAT FUCKING HARD. You have a finite number of shifts left vacant by the employee that left. You have a finite number of employees to fill said shifts. There are very few possibilities here, do you need several hours to deliberate on the merits of each one?

And on top of this bullshit, now you’re asking me if I can work nights too? You advertised a daytime position. I’m sure as hell not going to work till 11PM then drag my ass in at 7AM for a sorry-ass boss who can’t even let me know what’s going on. You better not call in the next half hour expecting me to work tomorrow morning.

I can’t work here if this is the way it’s going to be. Your asshattery lost a very good employee, but you don’t even know that BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T EVEN PUT ME ON THE SCHEDULE YET!

So, thanks, it’s been fun, I’m going to look on Monster now.

Sincerely,

Your pissed off new employee

…"m’ yeah, I’m gonna need you to, ‘m’ come in tomorrow night , oh and go ahead and come in Saturday. That’d be great.

Oh yes, I’d be brushing off the resume. I don’t mind doing my job, but I do mind doing my job over three times because my boss is incompetent. Sure, you could argue that that IS the job, but I won’t be doing it. Life’s too short to work for someone who can’t find his ass with both hands and a flashlight.

I’m imagining the blissful paradise that is “I only have to give my boss information 3 times for him to get it through his stupid fat head” land. I bet the weather’s warm, too.

I was going to tell you to run away from that job as fast as you can, but it looks like you’ve already worked that out. I worked for a boss like that a few years ago, and lasted longer than anyone as his administrative assistant. I had 18 months of nagging him constantly, seldom getting a lunch hour, and getting chewed out when he made a mistake, usually because nagging him half a dozen times wasn’t enough. The sad thing is, I bet he wonders why he can’t get good help.

RedRosesForMe, at least you found out early while you can still escape. Good luck!

A related hijack, why is it that bad managers alwasy seem to be flummoxed by what would seem to me to be the routine task of scheduling workers hours?

It’s not that I don’t see how scheduling work can get complex, when the number of people we’re talking about is some large number, and the qualifications and positions to be filled are all interdependant. That’s a chore I can easily see would get difficult, and even a single person’s day off request could affect many other people.

No, I’m talking about those people who can’t schedule an eight person workforce, with two positions to be filled for a total of 60 hours a week. Or, IOW, dividing up 120 man hours between eight people. And these same managers always balk at the idea of setting up standard hours for people, even though they routinely cannot get the new schedule posted in a timely manner. (Hell, sometimes one manager I had called me in, saying he needed me to work while he finished setting up that week’s schedule!)

And why do these incompetents oppose setting up a routine schedule? I know only of my co-workers was opposed to the idea of taking whatever shift we might be assigned as a regular (note: not permanent, just routine) matter of course. The rest of us would have welcomed a chance to be able to plan our lives more than three days in advance of the next work week.

Another mildly related hijack: I was once assigned to the staff of a senior government executive (not that senior – just a bureaucrat with lots of seniority and authority). The first thing I did once I got in my cube was visit the administrative assistant and ask her what to expect; she said “Oh, I’m just temping – the last girl quit and they’re looking for a new one.”

Huh. Unusual, but not impossible.

In the week it took them to find a new one, I began to suspect this guy was an asshole. A week after that I was fairly certain. In the three total months I worked for him, he had four different administrative assistants. These are government employees who are virtually impossible to fire, and who can take weeks or months to hire for new positions, but each of them managed to get out of there in about a month. As a private-sector employee, you can be a distant memory in less than a day… so don’t waste a moment.

Yeah, that’s the thing. He had 4 employees covering 2 8-hour shifts a day. 2 of the women worked 5 shifts, the other 2 covered those employees’ days off. One of the full time employees had some health problems, and gave him a heads-up in October that he needed to start looking for someone. He put an ad in the paper last week, held 3 interviews the day it ran, and hired me that night.

It turns out that he hired me and someone else, according to the woman who trained me. So I’m already unhappy that what was supposed to be full-time isn’t, and now I’m still waiting to hear from him.

Argh. It just sucks I haven’t been having any luck with Monster or any of those job websites (does anyone know if it takes forever to get a response from them, or do they just hate my resume?) so I was happy to find something. Oh well, it was shit pay anyway, I was contemplating getting a part-time job on top of it so I could save up some money. Maybe now I can find a job with a semi-competant boss that pays halfway decent.

Make this your mantra. I think you should really count your lucky stars and then run, even if it’s a bit hard to find another job. There’s going to be something out there. And it *will *be better than this. I recall you mentioning your stress in other threads, and a place like this has the potential to make it worse. Look out for number one, here. :slight_smile:

In my experience (not that I have a ton, mind you, but between my friends and I, we’ve got some stories) things like inability to deal with routine situations, other employees warning you about “quirks,” and a general feeling of unease add up to one thing: This is a hellhole where lives are destroyed. (Ok, maybe not that dramatic. Maybe. But places like that always suck and employees flee like rats from a ship for good reason.)

So the fuckwit calls me at 8PM today, with still no clear schedule in mind, wanting to know if I can come in tomorrow at 7AM. I didn’t tell him to stuff it, though I wanted to, because I need whatever shitty income I can get until I find something better, so I just said I couldn’t be in tomorow morning. So I get to work till 11PM tomorrow night, then come in at 7AM Friday morning. And Saturday morning.

After that, who knows, because he’s an idiot.

My concern with someone this incompetent is how good is he at getting paycheques out on time, that don’t bounce?

So what kind of a job is this, with such shitty hours?

It’s the Hilton. Ooh fancy. :rolleyes: