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).

Re the posts about running personal errands, from 1976 to 1977 I was at a very posh private secretarial college in South Kensington. Most of the other young women were debs and landed gentry and were just killing time before they got married. In our last week of the final term the teacher of shorthand and typing ( we also learned book-keeping and flower arranging!) gave us a little pep talk and told us two things we must never do, if asked to by our boss - feed his parking meter and shop for presents for his wife.

Oh just remembered another one. Nowhere near the scale of some of the loony bosses on here BUT. An old boss, nice man but a useless manager and just couldn’t follow protocols or management rules at all. Thought it would be appropriate to ring me the night my daughter was born. She’d been born at 4pm and he rang at 10pm that night to “get all the details”. Management are only allowed contact our personal phones with prior agreement or in a HR directed emergency and tbh even my own mother wouldn’t have rang me at 10pm the night I had just given birth.

And in case anyone is wondering how he even knew, OH works in the same job and had rang his manager that evening to let him know I had given birth and he would be starting his paternity leave so obviously found out from him

Back when I was an office junior the boss decided to put pubes in the sandwich of one of the salesmen

Many years ago I worked the Ministry of Defence in a very junior admin role. We used to get a lot of foreign officials visiting our site due to the nature of the work we carried out.

One of the senior managers on my team asked me and another girl in our office if we would be happy to accompany a delegation of visiting foreign officials for an evening out. This would apparently involve a meal, some drinks and some 'conversation'.

When we both said that we were absolutely not interested and had absolutely no intention of taking part, as we were both in long term relationships, we were told that we were 'Not team players' and that we should reconsider as if we did 'there would probably be an expensive watch in it for us as the men from X country were incredibly generous'

We told him to stick his 'expensive' watches up his arse. We were Civil Servants, not prostitutes. We knew exactly what he expected of us. We both made a formal complaint but it went nowhere.

'Not a team player' seems to have come up a few times.

It sounds like crap manager speak for 'has boundaries and will refuse to perform illegal/immoral/humiliating tasks but I can't put that in an appraisal'.

Had to go to a sales conference in the Algarve (the company had booked it for a paid event and failed to cancel it in time so it was cheaper to fly us out there and use it). We had decided to go for a walk on the beach before dinner when the narcissistic boss announced that she wanted to come too. She made us wait for her for 40 minutes while she got changed. We went down to the beach in a glass elevator down the cliff face with us all ooo-ing and Aah-ing about how lovely it was. Got to the bottom. She stepped out and said "oh God - it's sand! I'm wearing Vivienne Westwood shoes which will be ruined!" She made us all go back up immediately...

OMG! 😱

When I was about 16 my male boss asked me to tippex the slopped food stains off his tie. He actually thought it made things disappear!