to think that my boss is being willfully stupid

[runningonwillpower]

When I forward an email, hitting reply does not send your response to the original author - it sends it to ME.

Beating your printer with your fists will rarely 'fix' it. Try switching it on and/or replenishing paper - that sometimes works.

When you want to up-date an existing document, 'save as' at the beginning does not save subsequent changes. Ideally, one should save as one goes along but at the very least you should 'save' at the end. And, it's best not to have 20 documents with almost identical names - numbering or dating works pretty well.

Your computer hasn't necessarily 'frozen'. It's just coping with having 271 documents open at the same time.

Oh, and asking 5 people to do the same job won't get it done more quickly. It just wastes the time of 4 people and makes 5 people angry.

I could go on but I'm just off to google the telephone number for which you've texted me at home. Because I don't carry a telephone directory in head - I google them like you could do.

This made me shiver and thank the heavens above for the 174th time today that I'm self-employed just a shame that self-employment comes complete with stupid boss replacements in the convenient form of stupid clients

I'm prepared to hear that he's the boss and I should know my place/suck it up.

But I'm really hoping for 'stupid boss bingo' and see how many boxes I can tick.

Memo to my boss: Just because all our customers are your 'mates' doesn't mean you should sell them our products for less than it costs us to make them. This is why we are on the verge of going bust.

Also, they are not your 'mates', they are laughing at you.

My boss is perfectly lovely, so I can't join in.

Your boss is stupid though OP!!

I once had a boss who used to leave piles of paperwork on my desk for actioning/filing/recycling as required. More than once she walked past the recycling bin by the door to leave a pile of recycling on my desk.

My boss used to do meeting picnics. If there was a meeting on which had lunch provided, he would join it and start eating the food. (Before everyone else). Then the receptionist would ring him 15 minutes later and he would dash out for an "important phone call"

My boss used to email me asking him to remind him to do something later (like 5 mins later). Why not just put a reminder in the calendar. Idiot.

My boss, on a Friday afternoon, asked me to remind him that he had a dentist appointment before coming to work on Monday.

Me: Are you asking me to call you, from home, on Sunday evening?
Boss: No, just text me.

I didn't. Pratt.

My boss is a family member. Our exchanges often go like this:

Boss: Can you draft a letter for X and send it for approval please?
Me:
Boss: Sounds good. How about adding this? And this? And changing this? And putting this but here?

DO IT YOURSELF IN THE FIRST PLACE!

I had a computer phobic boss like this, and would rant that he "hated clever women like me" just because I could fix his bloody stupid problem

So far, I'm scoring 3 on 'stupid boss bingo'.

X Boss - putting the letter "e" in front of words doesn't make you sound technically savvy, it makes you look stupid.

Nor does adding the words "digital", "electronic" or "cyber"

Your a tool

*you're

Dear boss, going 'oh I'm not sure how that happened, I'm positive I told them/sent it/saved it/bought it/phoned them' (delete as appropriate) whilst slightly tilting your head and making a cringe worthy attempt at a confused face, does not make me think there is some inexplicable black hole wether everything you should do disappears into.

It confirms to me that you are useless, disorganised, chaotic and operate like a fart in a trance. If you were just able to admit that I'd have an iota or respect for you.

Instead I spend my days fantasisng about shitting on your desk.

Dear Boss,

Don't say you are going to take on the introduction of a new computer system yourself, when you don't understand it.

Don't tell everyone that you are doing this because "LtEve is too busy" and then roll your eyes.

Don't start deleting items from shared workspaces before you have checked these items have been backed up ready for the new workspaces.

Don't blow a gasket when you are told that thanks to the above we have lost an inordinate amount of work that cannot now be replicated.

Don't instruct a department to get X completed by Y date, then go on holiday before giving the department access to do X.

Don't tut and humph when LtEve, finally at the end of her tether with people complaining about what you have done, phones you at home for your access passwords, so she can do what you were supposed to have done a month ago.

Oh and don't, seriously DON'T, lie and complain about LtEve and the new computer system....WHEN SHE CAN HEAR YOU. Because, guess what? She'll call you on it, make you look like a dick in front of your boss and tell you to complete the fucking work yourself.

Arse.

I had to read this thread in case it was about me.
I don't think it is....

In 1999 I worked in a callcentre doing business stuff (handling accounts for Cable and Wireless, for example). The boss was a madwoman who frequently had meltdowns during which she would gnash her teeth and tear at her own hair. She was worse than useless: She was actively counterproductive, and the whole show was kept going by the supervisors, all of whom were nervous wrecks due to her capricious and aggressive behaviour.

Then the business got internet access (so we could email clients) and she had to eat humble pie because it turned out that she was the most IT unsavvy person I have ever known.

She couldn't handle using a mouse so did everything using keyboard commands, which meant everything she did took twice as long as it should have. She had to ask the supervisors for help turning her computer on (one of them set the Twilight Zone theme to play during bootup, which made us all snigger every time we heard it coming from her office).

My favourite memory of her IT humiliation was when we were having a conversation about email and (after a little confusion) it became apparent that she thought that if you unplugged the modem when you sent an email, you would hear the computer reading your email out in a sort of dalek voice, like a regular phone conversation between two machines.

She also thought that if you sent an email, there was only one copy of it, which travelled back and forth. So she could not grasp the concept of resending an email (because it had left her computer already) and would have to retype from scratch. This was her undoing when she fucked up one day and tried to cover her tracks by deleting a crucial email exposing her fuck-up, thinking she had thereby erased every trace of its existence. When the person who had sent the original incriminating email simply retrieved it from his sent items folder and sent it to her again, the blood visibly drained from her face. She must have thought it was witchcraft or something.

Oh man, I'm so doing the Twilight Zone thing.

Last week's time waster was frequent complaints that his username and password had stopped working. I ignored him for a while but when I did get up to have a look, it turned out he was trying to access, remotely, someone else's email account. I mean? How? It's all set up and everything.