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Employees Share Their Worst Boss Horror Stories

Employees Share Their Worst Boss Horror Stories
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Photo by Pablo Varela on Unsplash

Let's face it--in one way or another, we all work for The Man. As a great man once said, "all work and no play make Jack a dull boy". And we all know what happened to that guy. Don't let a crappy boss get you down, there's always better out there.

Redditor ColossusXTasked:

Employees of Reddit, how did you first find out your boss was actually just an idiot that makes more money than you?

Serious balls.

"When he told me instead of taking my new higher paying job I should just work more hours at my current one for him."

Lauer99

"Had something similar happen to me. I did my substitution service and after 6 months like a week before it was over my boss approached me about extending the service for another 3 to 6 months. "You can make some serious money before you start university".


"I just plainly looked at her ran the numbers in my head and told her "2,78€/hour is not serious money. I can do literally 4 times this much with working in a f*cking factory or something. But since I now know the routines around here and we are supposed to be 2 full time employees here plus me and any interns instead of one full time and me I am willing to think about it if you match the 12,50€/hr salary".

"She literally exploded in the room in front of the other employee and several patients calling me ungrateful, arrogant and what not. I just smiled at her turned around and continued to do my work. The full time employee approached me when the boss had left and just said "I am gonna quit here at the end of the month too. Wish I had your balls to tell her off like this though".

maverick1191

PLEASE vote, people.

Giphy

"I had a boss once who refused to register to vote because she didn't want jury duty and then got jury duty because that's not the only way they pick. She ended up serving for a week."

adeiner

"I'm ok with that person not voting."

Brideshead

Uhhhhhh

"Dropped a ton of cash renting art from a museum's art bank for our (decrepit Chinatown) office. Then didn't have money to pay salaries."

Peregrine2976

"I worked for one where the CEO spent $200k+ on building out a new office for our full-time telecommuting tech startup."

"Several employees lived outside of the city, and almost all of those in the city found it a pain in the a** to get to the office, which was in a semi-industrial area."

"It was, however, a quick drive to the CEO's house."

"I'm not sure what happened to the company, but I left when I found out they were debating whether to fold or replace the CEO."

dexx4d

Fourth trimester?

"My manager (woman who's in nursing school) thought that women were pregnant for 12 months."

birb_in_disguise

"Everyone knows the fourth trimester is the roughest."

Cantsaythatoutloud

Why would you think that?

Giphy

"The time he got really b*tchy/passive aggressive a few months after he hired me which finally boiled over when he got mad and said "I HIRED YOU BECAUSE I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO RUN THIS COMPANY FOR ME!"

"I'm a graphic designer by the way."

Axl_Bundy

Wow indeed.

"I write ": )" on papers I grade for a professor. He accused me of writing slurs in my native language even though it's just a f*cking smiley face."

aRationalShill

"In high school I had a math teacher who said equilateral triangles looked like an Asian person."

"The whole room got quiet and one of the bad a** kids even said " ......wow."

Zenkikid

LMAO

"My manager told me to mop the breakroom floor. I did. She freaked out that it was slippery (two seconds after I was done)."

necrocripple

"Shoulda gotten it dry cleaned."

Discount_Timelord

I mean, it's not like it's your job or anything.

Giphy

"He couldn't do basic math while pretending to have a masters. Couldn't use Excel either..."

abad84

"The former CFO asked me who was in charge of the Finance department. I still don't know if it was a joke."

TheHealadin

Seems legit.

"I did business with company A while working at company B. Company A offered me a job because they liked how I operated. I went through an extensive interview process, they said I was great, they had my resume, knew my experience and specialties, what I was capable of, etc."

"After a few weeks they kept telling me "you need a degree in electrical engineering to understand this" when they knew I had no understanding of electrical engineering and left that part of the job description out when they hired me. I was pissed so I spent the next few months interviewing at other companies while getting paid a nice salary. I had another job before they fired me. No regrets."

donutshopsss

:0

"I used to do computer repair. New boss was hired, and it started to become obvious she knew nothing about computers. Every morning she'd ask me what I was going to do for the day, then repeat back what I said as an order."

"I told the receptionist about this, and she told me I was probably just overreacting."

"Then one morning the receptionist was in the repair room and witnessed this exchange:"

"Boss: Fievelm, what are you working on?"

"Me: I'm installing Windows on this machine, cleaning spyware off of that one, and transferring data between those laptops."

"Boss: OK. I need you to install Windows on that machine, clean the spyware off of that one, and transfer the data on those laptops. Can you get all that done?"

"I look over at the receptionist and her mouth was agape."

"Thankfully that boss did not last long, and I moved on to greener pastures."

fievelm

'Fresh frozen Brine'

"When he went on a tirade about how 'Fresh Frozen Brine Shrimp' was the same as 'Fresh Brine Shrimp.' They had recently died (they don't live very long in the shop) so in order to save money he collected the little dead bodies of the shrimp and froze them."

"When I had to explain the reason people feed LIVE MOVING brine shrimp to their fish to entice them to eat other foods that are more nutritious or in most cases to get them to eat at all... I knew he was a fish store owner in name only."

"He still went on to sell the dead little bodies as 'Fresh frozen Brine'... which is dumb."

Anom8675309

Done

The Office Boss GIFGiphy

"Once I told my boss I was 1/3 done with the work I had to do He said 'well you better hurry the others said they has finishes 1/6 of the work'. He walked away and I just stared at him for a few seconds."

Queen_lucya

"I had a boss like this. He would recognize that I could finish things faster so he would give me more work, and just expect everything to go much faster..."

"Not understanding that I wrote tools to do parts of my job faster, but other parts still went the same speed. The big thing is they would go, Jim is not a hard worker, he arrives at his desk at 8:15. Bob is a hard worker because he gets at his desk at 7:45. Completely ignoring when people leave of course."

MrDude_1

3X

"After the third time he drove a powerdrill through his hand."

Unweededgarden

"And I thought I was an idiot for nicking myself with a screw once. THREE TIMES? Some people need to live in a padded cell. Not because they're crazy, but because they're too stupid to survive any other way."

tashkiira

Logic

"My boss thinks he is a programmer. (SQL) He told me he did not like that I have one table that contains both active and inactive computers with a field that indicates active/inactive and told me (demanded) that I should create 2 tables one for each computer state."

LeftChoux

"Clearly doesn't understand the first thing about relational database logic. Lemme guess, he also prefers hard coding things into stored procedures instead of adding a table to have things dynamic in case they need to vary in the future."

_CattleRustler_

"If they asked me this, I would have made a view for on and off computers. It might not be worth my time explaining."

Levelup94

Look Man

"Asks me to do stuff that helps no one or makes nothing better. He has us doing stuff that he literally can't explain why."

Lufernaal

"Even as a middle manager, you need to understand why you need something done. If you can't explain to someone why they need to do what they're doing, either they shouldn't be doing it or someone who does understand the big picture needs to be in charge."

"If you don't understand how the people on your team fit into the bigger plan, how can you effectively lead and manage that team? There are some times where you might need to say 'look man, my boss wants it done so we just have to give it to them' but that should definitely be the exception rather than the rule."

TheRealKidkudi

'dirty'

"When he keeps asking me why the inventory looks 'dirty' (physically dirty) and doesn't care about the accuracy of it. My job doesn't even have anything to do with the warehouse. I'm an ops analyst. Yes, I am sure. Reason being I work for a business to business, 3rd party logistics company."

"We don't have our own production/manufacturing lines. The product we store is not perishable. It moves as per instruction of our client. Also, I'm sure the clown doesn't know what fifo and lifo are."

kingslayer_07

Engineers

"I told my boss since he wouldn’t listen to me we needed an industrial engineer to make our dept/machine more efficient. He said, 'no way in hell are we bringing in an engineer.' 3 weeks later my company hired an engineer and when they came to our Dept the engineer asked him what he wanted to do differently he froze turned and said, 'well let’s go talk to Themonkeymen he’s worked here a long time he knows what needs to be done...' This boss makes at least double my salary if not more."

TheMonkeyMen

Functions

GIF by Stella 52Giphy

"When I created functions for similar procedures instead of copying and pasting the exact same code and modifying it in various spots throughout the program."

"'What if we hire a developer that doesn't know how to use functions?'"

"Then we shouldn't have freaking hired them."

FoleyX90

Okay, some of these feel like an absolute hostile work environment.

Do you have boss horror stories to share? Let us know in the comments below.

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