bad-boss
iStock

Bash

The Bosses from Hell Contest

Posted December 2, 2008

We’ve all had our share of bad bosses – the kind that leave you crying, quaking, quitting, or crawling your way back to your workspace, vowing that you’re going to get as far away from this or that job as soon as it’s humanly possible.

During these dreadful days, it’s harder than ever to flee a foul boss because, of course, nobody is hiring (in fact, practically everybody is firing). That leaves many of us in the depressing position of needing to be thankful for whatever job and manager we can hold onto.

The Whiner feels your pain. After all, a recent Swedish study found that bad bosses can literally kill you, by fueling stress-related ailments, heart attacks, and death. Yes, death.

The solution? (Okay, it’s just a teensy solution.) Enter EconoWhiner’s “Bosses from Hell” Contest (deadline: December 15) to win a $50 Best Buy gift card for telling us in a comment about the worst boss you’ve ever had. Now or in the past. No names please! Just enough gory details to convince us that you’ve suffered enough to win the grand prize.

Just to get things off on the right foot, Whiner-in-Chief will share with you a story about one of our worst bosses ever. (We’ll admit that we’ve also had a few good ones along the way — if you’re reading this, you know who you are.)

This particular bad-boss-phase of our work life dates back to W-i-C’s early days as a struggling journalist. W-i-C worked for someone who was notorious for the usual combination of brilliance, bad temper, and apparently pathological desire to humiliate as many people each and every day as possible, all in the interest of toughening them up. He probably thought he was a great boss. Then again, maybe he just didn’t care. Regardless, however, his particular concoction of horrors was enough to make nearly every day a bad day. But one day does tend to stick in our minds.

Whiner-in-Chief was walking down a flight of stairs. Boss from Hell was walking up that same flight of stairs. W-i-C is rather short. Boss from Hell, well, let’s not go in that direction. Suffice it to say, despite Whiner-in-Chief’s strongest efforts to avoid this, our eyes met.

Boss from Hell barked out one word: “Whiner!” (True, he really barked out W-i-C’s name, but you get the general idea.) Dreading the worst, we whimpered back, “Yes?”

Then, in a gesture that still leaves us somewhat bewildered (why, of all things, did he decide to do this of all things?), Boss from Hell ripped off his tie, stomped on it, did not lose his balance on those stairs (it’s usually only in fantasy-land that bad bosses suffer for their most miserable actions), and said loudly — very loudly — “Whiner, that last article you wrote was the worst piece of shit I have ever read in my life.”

Strange to say, that’s how the event ended. We didn’t get fired. In fact, we never got fired from that job — just tormented again and again and again, which eventually toughened us up. (Since there are other bosses from hell in the world, that might be a minor good thing.)

As time went on, we pretty much stopped caring when we got yelled at about one article or another, or at least stopped letting anyone know that we cared. Looking back on it all, we realize that it’s a bloody miracle we didn’t drop dead on the spot, one of those times when we were being shredded to smithereens. It’s fair to say, though, that when we left that job, we never looked back.

The Whiner wants to know: Which boss would you nominate (remember, no names please) and why?

Reader Comments

  1. Hope

    Radio Nut was my worst boss. He started an FM station in the early 80’s with inherited money. Then the will was contested, and his money supply dried up while the case ground through the courts. In the interim, interest payments rose over 20%, and he was borrowing to meet payroll.

    I worked part-time doing news, bookkeeping, and weekend DJ duties. Aside from the screaming fights Radio Nut and his wife staged in the office (she was office manager), he also liked to blow up when the money ran out. Bill collectors called daily, and I as charged with taking their calls and explaining that he was going to pay them…eventually. And begging them to be patient. Each week he designated a few bills to pay that would keep the services alive. The others were sent to me. Not fun.

    As well, RN kept the radio on 24/7 in his car or home. (Rumor was they played it next to their bed all night.) If anything happened on air that he didn’t like, the phone would ring and you would get an earful.

    When I finally gave my notice, he asked why I was leaving for a lower paying job (aerobic dance teacher…remember, this is the 80’s). His final rant: I will NEVER again hire anyone who doesn’t need this job to EAT. That way they won’t be ABLE to quit! Now GET OUT OF MY OFFICE.

  2. CMP

    The worst boss I ever had was a temperamental chef. Bad enough to have someone who liked to scream and throw things, but doing this in a kitchen meant that he had both sharp and hot things to hand for grabbing and flinging. It could get pretty lethal–and it’s probably a miracle that no one was ever hurt, that I know of. We all put up with him because he was a partner and ultra-charming to our customers and I suspect that since he was well-off he was the restaurant’s cash-flow savior in the lean times. Thanks heavens he finally left to stoke his childish ego somewhere else.

  3. Gina

    When I was in college, I waited tables in a Greek restaurant/bar. The owner was a gray-haired lecher and was constantly harrassing the young girls, including me: pinching, leering, making rude comments. I finally asked one of his custimers for the Greek word for “grandfather” and we all started calling him that. It was amazing: all harrassment stopped immediately.

  4. Karenza

    Hmmm. . . I unfortunately have enjoyed several bosses with poor manners and supervisory skills, so it is difficult to choose. The one who would leave quarters on my desk so that I would walk to the vending machine and retrieve a soda for him every afternoon since he was too lazy to go himself? Or, the woman who made infused vinegar for me as a Christmas gift and left the dripping mason jar sealed with foil and a rubberband on my desk? No, I think I will submit the story about the one who actually fired me.

    I worked at a law firm and was hired by new HR people to work for an attorney who left the firm before I started! So, since I was already hired, they assigned me to a former Saul Ewing tort attorney. From Day One, Bad Boss believed nothing I did was right. By week 4, she requested a sit-down with me and the HR person who had made me the offer. There Bad Boss said she was unhappy with my work (no specifics) then asked, “Did I even interview you?” Since she had not, it was at that moment I knew things were not going to go my way. That question said it all. Bad Boss did not interview me so she had to make a point to HR and everyone else at the firm that she would not have people on her “team” whom she had not interviewed, no matter the circumstances. Before my 3 month probationary period was over, I was called into the HR office and while Bad Boss was engrossed in signing a stack of documents, I was fired and given two weeks severence.

  5. libby

    The man I will call Bertha was the publisher of the gay and lesbian magazine – I was hired as the Editor-In-Chief (after turning down his first offer which was to hire the two top candidates and then make one of us the boss in a few months when he decided who was better).

    The constant struggle to get him to stop selling editorial space with advertising — an article about a gay realtor, a gay bakery owner, etc… was just the beginning. As the only woman in the office, I was known as “girl.” The one non-white (and straight man) was “Miss Mexico.” I was often referred to as the a c**t during arguments and staff meetings and our health insurance would mysteriously disappear when Bertha felt we “hadn’t earned it.”

    During the summer when we couldn’t pay the a/c bill, there wasn’t any. When we didn’t pay for the internet access, there wasn’t any. When we asked to be allowed to work from home we were told that we couldn’t be trusted to do that, so we sat in a hot office doing nothing.

    Add to this his disgusting tales of lunchtime trips to the bath house …

    When I quit (after less than a year), Bertha said, “F**k you, girl, you’re a bitch.”

  6. Shea

    My first post-undergrad job was at a start-up that sold continuing medical education textbooks. The company founder and his wife made a big deal about honor, integrity and business ethics. Two weeks after I was hired, I found out he had been convicted in the past for tax evasion!!!! Business ethics, my ass! I sent out a million resumes and bailed as quickly as I could!

  7. Loren

    For years I worked in a male dominated, high stress, high paced financial arena, and I never felt like a victim of sexism (although it was not for lack of trying on the guys’ part) until I worked with (we’ll call him) HY. He was glad of a breakup I was going through calling him a “distraction from my career focus”, he would call passive, quiet brokers “Marys” and then be sure to say “I meant no offense”, and while being supportive to my face he would consistantly badmouth me behind my back (luckily to supervisors who knew how he operated) and gave me my worst performance review in 8 years. When I questioned how to further my career, his response was, “We all work to get where we are, we’re never handed anything on a platter.” This came from the guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and given his first opportunity through his dad’s successful firm, and was spoken to a girl whose middle class parents grew up in tenements. And when I finally left the firm after 10 years, he did not even have the decency to shake my hand.

  8. cemdigital

    Gee, Whiner in Chief, your story takes me back! The only boss I had worse than the Short Man you describe was a Hefty Preppy who also enjoyed screaming and humiliating his staff and testing new recruits with arcane literary trivia to put them off-guard. The difference that make HP worse than SM is that he was infantile and unregulated in the company he worked for. Internally, there was the myth that his ways made the organization better, when really all it did was make coming to work totally uncomfortable for the people who had to deal with him.

    As I remember it, Short Man didn’t really tolerate bad behavior by the managers under him, either, whereas Hefty Preppy condones his tactics for his line managers.

    Plus, he looks totally stupid in those bow ties…

  9. Gina

    ANd while we’re at it, don’t forget to watch the movie, “Office Space.” Not only one of the smarmiest bosses ever, but joyful revenge is wreaked and there are lots of laughs along the way. Ver funny movie.

  10. abo gato

    Well, my story may not win any awards, but the top of my worst boss list was when I got my first real job after college….bear in mind, this was the late 70’s, so parts of this story could set HR’s hair on fire these days.

    There I was, about 23 or 24 or so, single, and at that stage in my life a rather pretty but eccentric dresser, applying for a job as a claim adjuster at an insurance company. Male dominated, completely, at that time.

    The head guy was probably in his mid to late 50’s then….during the interview, he asked me at various times if I: smoked dope, had a boyfriend, had sex with him, was going to get pregnant, was going to get married, did I smoke dope? Was I going to get pregnant? Did I have sex with my boyfriend? He really liked those questions….got asked those several times.

    Well, I answered them all, and went home to wait for the results of the LSAT test I had taken a few weeks before.

    They called me to offer the job before I got my results back. In the meantime, I had called my mother to ask her if they were interested in paying anymore for me to go back to college, to law school, and her answer was, “well, your dad and I never really liked lawyers.” So I accepted the job offer.

    Once I was there, I found out a few years later that the interviewer, head boss guy, had variously put his hands down the pants of several of the women there and had touched their breasts and other activities that would get him fired these days. None of the women ever felt they could turn him in.

    Fortunately, despite his interview questions to me, he never came close to me.

    I did get screwed though, when they hired a guy a year older than me a few months later, he got a company car….when I questioned that, they told me he was married and he “deserved” it more than I did….of course, he also made about $3000 more a year than I did at the time too.

    Oh well, it’s certainly a good thing that the times, they have changed. At least for the most part.

  11. Elaine Shepard

    I once had a boss who pronounced the word success SUSSESS. She told me I was a racist because I described someone who was stingy as “niggardly”. She claimed she was Hispanic on our EEO forms because she was married to an Hispanic man. She herself was German. She wore a beret all day when she had a bad hair day. She was that wonderful combination of stupid and mean.

  12. Chose to remain anonymous

    Crazy Control Lady was the owner of a small agency I worked for as a designer. She regularly came in at 11, and often left at 5 to go to non-profit boards, as well as had monthly all day meetings. She also had to sign off on any purchase over $20, sign off on every deliverable, usually requesting numerous changes, and NEVER EVER reviewed anything until the night before it was due. This was everyone’s fault, because we waited til too late to hand things in.

    Crazy lady occurrences:

    - Daily email barrages at 5am to do a long list of stuff by 9:30 because she suddenly thought of it, or a client called two weeks ago and was getting pissed. Except this was the first time you heard of it.

    - When I told her that my husband needed major surgery under our health plan, her first question was ‘wow, I wonder if that will drive our premiums up?’

    - She never looked at calendar, ever, because ‘calendar is for other people to look at’. I was frequently double booked for meetings, but also yelled at for not having time management skills.

    - When I left at 4pm for a doctor’s appointment, the day before a deliverable was due, I was yelled at because I didn’t tell her. I did, and it was on calendar, but she hadn’t looked at it.

    - Refused to fire people who screwed up, were documented by their peers, by their manager and whose screw ups ate 40+ hours a month in bug fixes, because they were ‘loyal employees’

    - Called me stupid in an all staff meeting.

    - Regularly underpriced my bids for new business, then yelled at me because I routinely went over budget. But, we can’t scrimp on client service, either.

    - Yelled at me for ‘being stressed’, ‘holding my stomach’, and ‘creating tension’ (wonder why I was tense)

    - Almost made me miss a flight onto vacation, because she wanted a last minute meeting. My vacation had been scheduled two months in advance, and involved an international flight and a hour drive in rush hour to the airport. She didn’t think I needed time to go through security – I could just ‘push my way to the front’ because she ‘needed me’

    - Questioned my salary, which was well below market, despite my bringing in 5% of gross profits single-handedly.

    - Brought me into a closed-door meeting 1 week before my departure, where I was accused of ’spreading death and destruction’ in my wake and being ‘negative’ about my experiences at the company (gee, wonder why)

    - There was a tradition of saying goodbye to people when they left, by having cupcakes for half an hour before the end of the day. When it was my turn, the organizer was told ‘PARTIES are only for people WHO ARE STAYING’

    Excellent. Oh, and I got a thank you note on my last day. That made it all better.

  13. Miranda

    I worked at a fairly trendy Chinese restaurant that turned into a club at night and my boss was this very obnoxious party girl who was only a few years older than me. It was very slow during the week and I would often not have a table for an hour at a time. The only way I could stay sane was to sit at the bar and read or talk to the bartender, but if she saw me she would tell me that it wasn’t professional to sit down while I was working. I could understand that if there were actually people in the place to see my unprofessionalism. She would also get completely drunk on the weekends and yell at the staff for absurd things like letting a candle on a table go out. She once got so smashed that she climbed on the bar and danced- and she called me unprofessional!

  14. anita

    My boss poisoned me. The company moved into a cheap building in the most polluted part of the city. He hired cheap contractors who did the remodel without a city permit. The city found out and shut them down. The company had to move on a particular date, but the remodel wasn’t finished. They were still painting, sealing floors etc.

    The hvac system was so shoddy, the temperature varied throughout the office (15,000 sq f). Boss wouldn’t allow a thermostat in his office, but forced hot air in by closing the vent over my desk. A toxic stew of outgassing chemicals (formaldehyde, etc) built up at my desk due to lack of air flow and I became so ill I was nearly hospitalized. This, despite trying to fix the problem myself – that jackass didn’t care, and called me names, and insisted on keeping the vent closed over my desk.

    I had to be off work for 6 weeks while I detoxed. My Dr filed an L&I against them – and despite being told I’d have to be dipped in a vat of poison to win, I actually won.

    Now I have asthma and breathing problems permenantly. I hate that M***** F***** and hope he rots in H***.

  15. Carolyn W.

    I have to collectively nominate a small staff at a college town travel agency that I worked at in the ’70’s. They hired me right before the heavy holiday travel season to book flights (before the internet and expedia and travel velocity days) for clients and I had to bring my own typewriter. The rest of the time I was their personal go-fer, vacuumed, emptied their trash cans, washed their coffee cups,assembled and decorated their dusty aluminum Christmas tree, anything one of them would think of on a whim. They would chatter endlessly at their desks about their upcoming cruises or trips around the world they had already taken. One day there was a big storm and the front plate glass window was rippling and heaving like it was going to blow in. The owner wanted me to tape it with big x’s before it blew and shattered on everyone. I refused. The red-faced, flustered owner taped it while everyone else was hiding behind their desks that faced the window. Anyway, three days before Christmas (after all the bookings had been made) they let me and my typewriter go. They got all kinds of freebies, posters, calendars, trips etc. from travel companies and I never got anything as they grabbed it all up. Even so, I asked for a modest calendar from an airline and they said, “NO”. I should have dug through their trash at night to look for castoffs, ha ha. Anyway, it was like working for Cinderella’s Ugly Stepsisters.

  16. Carole Christensen

    This is a twist on the “I will NEVER again hire anyone who doesn’t need this job to EAT.”

    “I will never again hire anyone who isn’t in a financial position to NOT need money!” said by my boss in response to my objection to her cutting the usual commission of 10% to 5% on a $60,000 sale of high end photography.