Random thoughts in Muddling Through As Best I Can
- June 16, 2022, 1:20 a.m.
- |
- Public
I was just reading on a certain social media site with way to many fluff articles about the world’s worst bosses, and I had to drop in and tell about my wicked witch of the work place.
In the 80’s, I became a litigation support specialist. Essentially, our company contracted with attorneys to obtain discovery (evidence, usually documentary in nature) in civil suits.
My boss taught me a lot about the business, enough that I eventually became the general office manager for another firm making a lot more money, but it was experience earned with heaping helpings of abuse.
My boss was a very driven woman, very elegant in appearance, and could be extremely kind, until she was not, and it was always without warning.
One day she called me into her glass-walled office and the following dress-down ensued.
“John, you know I have a very sensitive sense of smell. I don’t know what the problem is, but you have to do something about it. I mean, I don’t know if you need a better deoderant, if you’re unable to bathe properly, but you have GOT to do something about it.”
Her words were accompanied by endless eye rolls and dramatic hand gestures, and by the time I left the office I was extremely embarrassed. I remember trying to avoid all my coworkers for the rest of the day for fear of being offensive to them.
A few days later, the conversation was repeated as a final warning. At this point, I was ready to quit and find another job purely out of embarrassment. I had done everything humanely possible to correct the problem, and it wasn’t enough.
Then I noticed her calling Allison into the office, and then Judy, and then......well, you get the picture. Allison was at her desk in near tears, so I asked if she would like to get out and get lunch. That’s when I found out that she was giving every single person in our office the same speech over and over.
It should go without saying that we compared notes with everyone else in the office, and she had done it to every single person more than once, with the threat termination if they didn’t take care of the non-existent body odor.
I didn’t stay much longer after that. I’ve thought about her often, but I haven’t seen or spoken to her in over twenty years, obviously.
My personal opinion was her hateful behavior was the result of insecurity in her ability to lead. Anyway, that’s by far the worst boss I ever had.
Deleted user ⋅ June 16, 2022
She sounds so nasty and obnoxious! Could she have been jealous of her co-workers for some reason? I'm 57 now and in my 30s I was the assistant manager of a shop. I'd done various jobs over the years, starting as a shop assistant at 16 and was made manager of same shop at 18, various other jobs I've done but I always went back to shop work/management. This particular female manager over me was the witch from hell! Most staff were terrified of her...not me...she was only a shop manager... her mother was from England and her father from Afghanistan, with a massive self-obsessed ego, always shouting at staff, being nasty, she was like it with customers too. There was a whole load of issues with her over time. She'd go to a flower shop and instead of asking for what she wanted, she SHOUTED and BARKED at them. Her sister and mother, who I never actually met, only over the phone were as bad as her. I'd answer the phone quite politely and before I even had the chance to put the phone to my ear I got blasted with ''put her on'', so I'd ask ''may I ask whose calling?'' NO, YOU CAN'T, JUST PUT HER ON''. One day I'd had enough of being treated like the lowest of the filth by her and her family so I slammed the phone down! Twenty minutes later she calls me into the shop...I was in the staff area at the time... ''how DARE you be offensive to my mother! How DARE you slam the phone down on her!'' I told her outright, in front of customers, that I'm sick to death of being treated like gutter rubbish by her and her equally stupid awful gobby mother and sister and I WON'T put up with it. Then I went into the staff area, grabbed my bag etc. went back into the shop, still packed with customers, literally threw my staff keys at her and walked out! Various customers, I was told, backed me up and said she'd lost a decent good hard working staff member!