Craziest things a boss has done

[GerbilsForever24]

Inspired by the "craziest reasons to sulk" thread, I thought it might be entertaining (and cathartic?) to do similar with bosses? The weird/crazy/irrational things a boss has done?

I'll start with a male boss with a team of 7 women. He would regularly send his PA or the most junior member of the team into the bathroom to "find" anyone who was in the toilet when he wanted to speak to them.

[no, as a rule, no one was spending hours in the toilet - we were hard working, conscientious, busy people. Also, it was a very busy office so it wasn't unusual to hold the need for a bathroom break to unacceptable levels.] He did this on more than one occasion to almost everyone in the office except me (most likely because he knew I'd have taken it straight to HR).

OMG. I'm so shocked by the callousness of this manager. Good response, though!

Oh my gosh. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at these.

The secretary at work filled in a questionnaire for a stationery company or something and there was a free draw to win a holiday.

She won the holiday! Hurrah.

Our boss said thank you very much and took the holiday.

Git.

Ooo remembered another one. When the nasty director of our division forced our lovely manager out he brought in a sidekick who was a useless and lazy as he was. His office was opposite mine. Heard him one day answer his phone, could hear the person on the other end shouting so loud I could hear every word. Heard my manager say he had given the particular thing to me to handle. Phone was put down. Footsteps went all the way down the hall to the general office were the secretaries were. Footsteps came back and his office door was closed after him. Seconds later, more footsteps and his secretary came in to tell me that 'Boss has asked you to take care of this'. I kept my office door open, called the client in question and told him I had just been handed his file and would work on it right away. He bellowed 'thank fuck someone who knows what they are doing is now involved'. Not sure if boss could hear the conversation through his door, but like to think he could.

BigDahliaFan · Today 15:56

Our boss said thank you very much and took the holiday.

God, what a sack of piss! I hope he got incurable boils on his arse.

We had an odd set up office floor - around the outside the very senior managers all had their own offices. We all sat in a small circle of 4 desk dotted around. Our backs to the managers office - but are screens could be monitored easily. We weren’t really sat next to anyone due to the design so if you needed to talk to a colleague about work you would have to move and again being monitored- with a email reminding us that we had an hour lunch for conversations.

we once had a meeting - big boss on the office floor talking through updates - hour later i really needed the toilet. Popped to the toilet quickly gone less than a few minutes. I got pulled up and given a warning. Only if I was pregnant or a medical need could I leave for a bathroom break apparently.

i was 6 weeks pregnant but wasn’t about to tell them so early - I didn’t go back after maternity. Awful place and management.

In the mid 90s, I worked for a small family company.

The owners wife, who had no dealings with the business or did any other work at all for that matter, was the one who came into the office every Friday, to pay all the office staff by manually writing a cheque. Depending on whether or not she was busy or what she was doing that day, would depend on whether we got paid on time.

When she did come in, she used to sit in the spare office glammed up to the 9s and one at a time we had to go and see her to get our cheques. She would tut and sigh whenever she wrote out a cheque saying things like "this is costing us a fortune" Sometimes she would playfully wave the cheque around our faces and snatch it away when we would go to take it.

I was leaving one Friday afternoon to go on holiday for two weeks and really wanted to be paid before I went on holiday, so i asked the boss whether his wife would be coming in to pay everyone? He picked up the phone to speak to his wife and then after speaking to her said that we wouldn't be paid today because his wife was in the hairdressers!

I ended up having to borrow money for my holiday from my parents but I look back now at this and think wtf!!

A woman who became my senior director after a reshuffle in the company because she wanted to come and work in London.

She was an extremely jealous person towards anyone with a private and/or social life.

She used to call me on a Saturday and Sunday to try and make me go into the office, even though I worked from 7am to 8pm most days during the week. If I had plans and told her, she'd sulk all day Monday and barely speak to me.

Once I had a male friend staying and he answered the phone one early Sunday morning while I was in the shower. She told him I had to call her back immediately, when I did, she berated me for having a man in my house that she didn't know about, and questioned my goings on and morals.

She wouldn't sign off my holiday request I made six months in advance, because she wanted to be invited on my holiday to Vegas with friends. Three months before my holiday I had to ask if she was going to sign it off, because otherwise I was going to hand in my three months notice. She did it grudgingly.

She admitted once on a drunken night out that she used to set up others to fail in huge group video conferences by sending her equally nasty VP in the US a list of questions for certain people to answer that they wouldn't know, to make them look stupid.

When I returned from my Vegas holiday, I went back into work and found out she'd set up a review meeting that day to do the same to me. It was my punishment for going on holiday without her.

She was very jealous of another director in the business, who was a very kind and sweet woman, also breathtakingly gorgeous. She plotted to have her removed from the business using her US connections again. One day she came into my office and wrote party time on a date on my wall calendar. She'd managed to persuade the US management team that this director had to go, and the date on the calendar was the day this person would be expelled from the company.

I asked for a Friday off because I'd started to see someone on a relationship and they were returning from a tour in Iraq. She denied my leave because she needed the time for an important appointment at home so I had to be at work. Turned out she was getting Sky installed, so she stayed home.

She was batshit and vicious.

I've never worked in an industry that has Personal Assistants, but I thought that was exactly the sort of things they were there for? To assist however needed to allow the boss to concentrate on their job? Have been putting too much stock in what I see in films?!

Had my manager tell me I 'lacked commitment'.

At the time he gave me this useful feedback it was a Saturday evening. I was working the weekend running a stockcount (not my normal hours) and I wasn't going to get home until late the following day. Still not sure what commitment I was lacking! I think 'lacks commitment' is crap manager speak for 'you haven't done anything wrong but I don't like you'.

Different manager, got told I was being made redundant. I was away working on a project in the States. He made me get up at 4am to pass on this news at a time convenient to him. He could easily have waited until I was back in the UK the following week. He had instigated my redundancy and couldn't wait to tell me.

Got my revenge on that one. Huge corporation with generous redundancy terms. I had been with the company for over 20 years. My payout blew the departmental payroll budget out of the water. Bigger chief was furious.

A few of my worst boss experiences:

• The one who insisted that I call a colleague in another country, on his mobile, to ask for some non-urgent work to be done that day on a big national holiday (the equivalent of calling someone in the UK on Xmas day and expecting them to do some work that could have waited until another day). Then when he didn't answer insisted that I kept calling everyone in his team until someone answered. Then blamed me when the boss of that team got annoyed and refused to do the work until the following week.
• The one who had not sent any paperwork to filing for months and told me to create a project file as the client had requested a copy. I was expected to trawl through the piles of letters, printed e-mails etc in her office to find everything relating to this project and create a file. Then went mad at me because some e-mails were not in the file, even though they had never been printed and there was no way I could have known they ever existed.
• The one who left me behind in the office to finish an urgent piece of work whilst he took the rest of the team (all male) out for Xmas drinks, then told me I was not a team player because I went home when I finished it at 11.30pm, rather than going looking for them in a club.
• The one who refused to listen when I tried to tell him that something he had written in a report as an industry fact could not be true, even though it was something relevant to a subject in which I was qualified but he was not . To the extent that he pulled rank, told me that I must not 'waste time' finding evidence for my view (I suggested I look it up and show him), and insisted that I send the report as it stood or he would make it a disciplinary matter. This fact was pretty fundamental to the rest of the report so when inevitably someone else told him it could not be true he blamed me and said I should have been more persuasive.

My batshit boss refused to give me any time off when my DMIL died. I had been married for 35 years and DH was an only child who was already signed off work with depression before she died. The reason she gave was "Your father has dementia and you'll want more time off when he dies." I explained that I wouldn't ask for time off then as I had a mother and sister who could deal with all the arrangements but she wouldn't budge. I asked for annual leave which she refused because "You're only allowed to use that for nice things."

I went over her head and the director gave me three days compassionate leave and as much holiday as I needed.

Unfortunately for her my poor uncle was in much the same situation as my Dad, so I could have let her know two weeks before he died that it was imminent but given the way she behaved over my DMIL I wasn't going to give her the chance for a repeat performance. He died on a Monday and I told her that afternoon that I would be attending a funeral in Ireland on the Wednesday, so I'd see her on Thursday.

My DF considerately held on until the New Year.

That's definitely not what a PA is supposed to do (in the UK anyway), They are employed to assist with any business related tasks but not to run personal errands for the boss

"So het up, he actually bit the side of the door and chewed down on it" 😆 🤣

I was about 25 and working for a much older man, we went to an industry dinner (pretty much the whole company came other than the administration team and some of the support teams), so it wasn't weird that I was there and it was a networking dinner in a male dominated industry.
He introduced me to our whole table (some people I knew, some I didn't, some worked with us, some were from other organisations) by saying "this is My Name and I've invited her to bring some sparkle and a bit of eye candy to the table"
He was normally really respectful and valued my work, but after that I felt very awkward.

I once had a boss directly threaten my pay based on upwards feedback which she requested, which was meant to be shielded re. the name of the person submitting it. The feedback was 99% hugely positive and had one development item "to demonstrate healthy work life balance to the team as a tone from the top", and feedback in my opinion should always have development items, it's how we improve. She didn't agree. I ended up telling her boss what she said, who pulled us into a meeting where she cried and told me she "hates working with women as they are all awful". Her boss resigned a short period later (unrelated), and for a solid 6 months she attempted to bully me in the workplace as I had not filed a complaint about the prior treatment with HR, so there was no record. I left and now hold a significantly higher up position than her, and her line of work means she services companies like mine and bids for our business. I am incredibly glad to never see her again, but lessons were learned re. HR. If you have any doubts, record it. Write your own recollections, date it, file it, send it to HR. The 6 months of toxic bullying could have been fully avoided with one phonecall when the issues arose, but instead I believed that her direct manager would solve the issue, and that was incredibly naive.

I once worked for a sales company and during a Christmas "night out" in a hired marquee things got bonkers. The night ended with a fist fight between the boss and top sales person that descended into lots of people wrestling/fighting on the dance floor whilst everyone else was ushered out into freezing December weather.

The next day loads of 'top sales' people were missing as they'd been fired for getting involved in the brawl/were dobbed in for doing coke in the office bathrooms before the event! The boss somehow survived the cull...🙄

My worst line manager in my entire career eventually made me so sick I was off work for months. She was a narcissist and sociopath. Some examples:

She would shout and rant in the office and in meetings and lie.

She would insist on being copied into the emails I sent (about 50 a day) and then complain that there were too many. If I sent something for her to clear that would be wrong. If I sent them directly to the requester that would be wrong. No matter how much I delivered it was never enough.

She didn't like some of the words I used (just ordinary words) and I was told to stop using them. She then started using them.

She hunted down exact copies of my clothing and wore them into work.

She kept saying how similar we were. We were not.

She would deliberately hide things and then blame me for not knowing about them.

If I had leave I'd come back to work to an email berating me on things I hadn't done (that I told her I hadn't done) or things I hadn't done because I was on leave.

She tried to break my working relationships to make me even more vulnerable.

I felt like I was going mad and it took me years to recover. I still don't understand why she did it. Unless she enjoyed it.

@costahotchocolatesaremyweakness - I found out that most people in the business were naive or thought I was over sensitive. Until it happened to them. I agree record everything and engage with Her about it all.

I should have also left the job before I became sick instead of trying to manage her. As my new line manager after her said "you cannot reason with the unreasonable".

My head just about fell off reading that. You poor thing!! I'd die if that happened to me now and I'm pushing 40 with a tiny bit of worldly wisdom, never mind of it happened to me at 23. Wow. What a total dick move. You win this thread.

@Conniebygaslight

My boss's boss who had been told about the situation said that I should deal with it and take one for the team! I didn't and I was very quickly made redundant.

How utterly scuzzy. I wonder if this boss would have said the same to a man with this same client? I hope you're on to bigger and better things. 🌹

Boss promoted the 'sexy' cleaner to design director

Had affair with this woman

Took her to orgies with prostitutes and uploaded the photos to the company shared hard drive

When he was seeing her he would write 'fluff' in his diary

Called me into his office and asked me what knickers I was wearing

Screamed at me on my second week
At work and said 'carnivalrain gets paid more that all of you in here and she's failing'

I could go on....

I googled "is a pa expected to run personal errands uk" I opened the top 4 results - all UK based sites, all said running personal errands was expected and 2 specifically mentioned buying gifts.

I honestly now think the "crazy thing" the boss asked for was for the person to do their job 😂

Part of my role means I need to drive out and about. During (early covid) I was worried about where I would be able to go to the toilet (I usually go to supermarkets if I need to go and we are talking I travel MILES). I was really worried about this and my boss told me I could have a wee in a carrier bag!!!

I have shared this story on MN before (possibly under another name).

In my late 20s I was being sexually harassed by my manager. I put in a complaint to HR (b ecause I was young and naive) and there was to be an investigation. My manager rang my landlady who he knew through a sporting club and asked her to write down details of any male visitors I had to my apartment. She rang me to tell me. I added this to my complaint (because WTAF) and the internal investigation decided that my 'behaviour' (unspecified, and no male visitors at all to my private living accommodation) meant my evidence as to his behaviour was unreliable. My manager was promoted and I was managed out sideways to another part of the organisation (and then sacked about 6 months later) and i was told if I kicked up a fuss my career in the very niche field would be ruined.

I did not kick up a fuss and my career in that field was still ruined. I was 27 and I had no fucking idea what the fuck had happened. Because I always thought that if you behaved honourably you would get on and if you spoke truth to power that power would back you.

I'm 50 now and feel only sadness and grief at how I was sucked in.