Worst Person You Ever Worked For

I worked on a team that built bombs for federal defense. I understood the need for giving it all, but they wanted more, and they weren't nice about it. How is it possible to give more than you can give?

I've had far worse co-workers than I have bosses.

There was one guy, though. New job, and the office equipment used 8 inch floppies that you could only write to a limited number of times. My boss would write out his correspondence longhand, then hand it to me to type. I'd type it, save it, and print it out for him. He'd make corrections and have me fix/save/print again. And because every correction was a write-to-disk, thus shortening the life of the floppy and potentially costing the company money, he was palpably disapproving every time we went through an iteration.

Except he'd correct himself. Yeah, I'd make the occasional typo, but 90% of the time he was changing the phrasing of something he'd written. Often he'd correct himself one way, and then on the next copy correct himself right back. Which was his prerogative, of course, except he'd always frame it as my mistake and admonish me for waste.

I had a stack of printed edits I could have showed him. But I was 25 years old and trained to cheerfully do as I was told. I never challenged him. But I did quit the job after 2-1/2 days - only time I've ever done that, although there have been other times I've been tempted.

Ooh ooh, I’ve got one!

The scene: a printing and direct mailing establishment. The boss: an incompetent micromanager. (His tagline: “It’s myyy business.” His MO: Taking pride in long hours that led to sloppy mistakes, ensuring the need for longer hours to put out the fires caused by the mistakes, thus perpetuating the cycle.)

His crime: “Helping” to format a mail-merge letter for a client by ducking into the final file just before printing to “fix” some of the em dashes. He changed them into double-hyphens, because he thought it looked better. Inconsistently.

I could have murdered him and no jury composed of editors and proofreaders would have convicted me.

I temped briefly for a Respected Architect with 50 years experience, his own architectural firm... and the not-so-early stages of dementia. It was sad, but also professionally terrifying, because this guy was building buildings. If he screwed up, people could get hurt. I was there only a couple weeks, and when I left, the other architects in the firm were working with a lawyer to determine how best to handle the situation and force the guy into retirement.

- He'd ask me to proofread a long document. I'd do so and give him the completed version.
The next day? He'd ask me to proofread the same long document, and if I said "oh, I already did that for you yesterday," he'd get upset and angry, so I spent a lot of time doing the same work over and over.

- He didn't know how to use computers and had one on his desk only "because when he visits other offices, everybody else has one."

- He once asked me to print out the internet. (OK, not the ENTIRE internet, but a massive tool and building supply website that sold thousands of products). He thought I could just "print it out" to make a sort of catalogue for him to browse.

- When going through plans for his current project, he referred back to previous projects for reference. OK, that's fine. Except apparently (and this was going on long before I started - I heard the details from his beleaguered assistant) with every pass on the new project, he referred back to older and older projects, which meant every pass had countless changes, some of which didn't even fit the current code requirements. The assistant's theory was that he couldn't remember the newer ones, and that his memory loss was slowly working its way backwards through his life.

They liked me as a temp and offered to take me on full-time. I politely told them "Hell no."

I worked in a pharmacy for 8 years with a terrible boss.

When I first started at this company, I was THRILLED. I loved the place and a lot of the people and the job itself. I took a lot of pride in what I did and eventually worked my way up to a manager status and developed my own little department for automation.

But, over the years, the place just got worse and worse. All of the other good managers eventually quit and the boss offered those positions to people that were in no way qualified to be in those positions, only because those people were fast workers and he didn't want them to quit either. The company grew pretty exponentially from when I started and we constantly struggled to hire enough people. Most of those people would work for a couple of weeks and then quit. A lot of the ones that stuck around did so because they could get away with pretty much anything. Employees called in sick constantly. They were late constantly. Most of them NEVER hit the "company standard" for amount of orders done and instead chose to spend all their time talking to each other or on their cell phones or out on smoke breaks. The new managers of the other departments never did anything about the trouble employees, but even if they had wanted to, the head boss ALWAYS had an excuse as to why he couldn't write someone up or couldn't fire someone. So instead of getting rid of the trouble employees or at least writing them up and trying to encourage them to stop the bad habits, the boss just expected the handful of hard-working employees to pick up everyone else's slack. Over the course of just one year, the amount of work I was responsible for tripled because the boss assigned duties to me that others couldn't handle and he figured I'd just get them done and not complain.

The boss worked for the company for 20+ years and at this point is about a year away from retirement. During all the years he worked there, he only fired a total of about 10 people and most of those were because corporate forced him to due to budget cuts. I have suspicions that he was threatened with a law suit at some point in the past for firing someone unjustly and it completely scared him away from ever trying to fire someone again.

Yesterday was my 1 year anniversary at my NEW job where the management truly cares about their employees and is not afraid to fire someone if they slack off. I still remember the look on my old boss's face when I told him I was quitting

I spent a little under a year working for a real scumbag. The job had been advertised as data management, exactly what I went to school for, with a little analysis. What it was was sending spam emails for payday loans and looking at the response numbers to determine what scams worked best. But that wasn't his only business. He also ran a Cash For Gold business ripping people off, pawn shops ripping people off... Basically, if he could make money off of people's trust and naivety, he wanted his grubby fingers in it, and if he could avoid paying his employees fair wages or benefits for it, even better (ask me about my insurance and vacation days. Oh wait, I didn't get them). I was eventually fired because, quite literally, "you're too nice." I wouldn't yell at someone at another company to fix an issue that lasted a week, so I was let go. Good riddance. Unfortunately he never did anything illegal, so he couldn't be reported, but unethical? Oh boy, he was all in for that.

Maryn said:

New job application:

Reason for Leaving:
I was too nice.

Click to expand...

You should've seen the look on my current boss's face after she asked that "why are you no longer with [Scumbag's company]" question.

I worked, very briefly, for a major director who's name you wouldn't recognize but who's movies you definitely would. He owned a very fancy restaurant and I was hired, almost without an interview, to run the bookstore. Yes, the restaurant had a bookstore.

Almost can't even with the stereotypical HWood abuse cycle. The way everyone communicated was as foul, nasty, and unclear as possible. Take the meanest movie about 'The Industry' you've ever seen, then triple it. And the director-guy was very rich and absurdly abusive, strong vibes of John Huston in Chinatown. I was generally below his notice except to point out I was 'trash' and 'the f-word aka a bundle of sticks'. He was going through some major health issues with his eyes, and used to make his business manager put in his eyedrops while he said things like "f- yeah, do it for daddy, daddy likes that.'

The whole position was unclear and there were constant issues I was being thrown under the bus for without doing anything, also like Chinatown, the point was to do as little as possible. Then I quit when I realized they had no interest in paying me...

ETA- There was also the Celtic online bookstore guy who was bitter because I was a man, and he wanted a young woman employee to cook for him and do his laundry (leading, presumably, to Other Duties). WHy he hired me then, IDK, but it was awful. He also had a heroin addiction and spent all the time we worked together with the news on starting nasty fights about politics. The funny thing was, I don't even think our politics were that different.

There are more. Working at bookstores leads to interesting bosses.

An accounting office in tax season where everyone smoked like chimneys! Horrible!

Over the years I have had some incredibly dreadful bosses, but since this is a thread about Worst Boss Ever then I suppose I’ll limit my hatred to the one who has always been top of my list.

At the time (early 2000’s) I was doing a lot of temp work for different people, so I had a bit of flexibility when it came to my work and a lot of flexibility when it came to telling crap employers what I thought of them (I also had an independent part-time income of my own, so yeah, no need to put up with poor behaviour). Steve (last name withheld for reasons of not contaminating this forum – he knows who he is and he knows what I think of him) was one of those people who had serious personality deficiencies that he was unable to recognise (or later, admit to when I listed them for him the day I quit LOL). He was an abusive bully and some customers refused to come back because of how he spoke to them and pretty well the entire staff was intimidated by him. He would constantly give contradictory instructions to everyone and then complain when the wrong option was taken. I fucking hated that prick and had quite a few discussions about whether or not I needed to stay (he said I was being overly sensitive, the others all told me to get out while I could, even though they were tied to the job for financial reasons). He also tried to coerce me into buying his motorcycle because he didn’t want it anymore and had decided that “it would suit my requirements” (NB: no such ‘requirements’ existed) and he was generous enough to offer it to me for a paltry $15K. Two words: dick.head.

One time I had a day off and the phone rang. He said he wanted to touch base with me. I told him that he could do that in the smoko room on my next rostered day, but right now I wasn’t getting paid to talk to him and that though he rented my time he didn’t own me. I never told him to fuck off but I felt like it. Another time I had told him that I wasn’t able to work that weekend, but when the area manager visited our store on the Friday Steve thought he’d demonstrate what a benevolent ruler he was by informing me in front of John that I could have the day off tomorrow because I had put in so many hours that I had earned a rest. I wasn’t about to let it slide, I just straight out said to his face that I’d already informed him that I wasn’t coming in. The best time, though, was when we were doing a stocktake and he crept up on me to see if I was actually working. I had some allergies and turned to sneeze and he got covered in snot. That made my day but I had enough humanity to feel a bit bad about it.

Man, I truly loved the day I quit. I had already told my workmates that I was pulling the pin, so when I walked into the office on my day off they found every reason to be in the room to listen to me list all of the reasons. That was in November 2004 (the business in question has since closed) and I still see those fellows sometimes and they still laugh about what I said to Steve. That bastard was so offensive to my life that I wrote down everything that he did and have it on file. Sometimes I read it to see how bad a work environment can be.

What made it worse was that I was simultaneously employed in another job by my Best Boss Ever, so the gulf in difference between the two was pretty stark. And FYI, if I was ever double-booked then sure as shit I knew which one I was saying no to.

Only last week I ran into my Best Boss Ever (I don’t work for him very often anymore but I still go to his house and visit him sometimes because Best Boss Ever isn’t something to take lightly) and he told me that one of our other workmates had a new girlfriend and she happened to be Steve’s daughter. I couldn’t believe that the world was so small a place (different industry), or that Clint’s luck in potential future in-laws could be so appalling. LOL, not my problem.

I've had bad bosses and have been in the situation of not being able to speak up. But now I've retired, and I want to share this time to be happy with others who are still at the old grind. And who have had jobs worse than mine.
I call it Virtual Retirement....
Hang in there, guys. There's a light at the end of the tunnel

This is a true story. I had a boss once (director of nursing, small hospital) who made stuff up she accused me of. And the nurses were all expected to wear white nurse's hats. When I told her I didn't have one (our whole class actually voted not to have them) her response was, "Don't you want your status?"

Two different worlds in more than one way.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being homicidal, I guess my worst was maybe only a 7.

He'd erupt in loud, angry profanity during meetings.

Once threw stuff across his office when I told him I'd just spoken to another employee in a remote site about an issue we needed solved. (The remote guy didn't work for my boss, and had stopped returning my boss' calls -- gee, wonder why?)

There was a senior guy on my team who would join with the boss during meetings, to pick on / make fun of what others were saying. (The first time it happened, I interrupted to say I couldn't sit to listen to them tearing down a team member, it was unprofessional and rude. After that, they would titter together in a corner during meetings. Yeah, not at all obvious why.)

I was a pretty senior guy myself, so I tried to take the adult approach with this guy. Twice asked for meetings with him, and used my "I" words -- "When I hear you do this, this is how it makes me feel." He'd hang his head and go oh, man, you're right, I'll work on it. Next day, BOOM! screaming in meetings.

This was at a big Fortune 100 company in the U.S., so we had a human resources department. I went to our HR person, explained what I saw happening, and how poisonous it was. (This guy was called "The Vein" by most people in my department, as in, you could watch the veins in his forehead start throbbing before he'd erupt.) . HR was useless, told me to do all the things I'd already done (which I said I'd done), and could offer nothing. (That was when I was younger and more naive, and thought HR existed to help employees, not protect the employer.)

Went to our department head, and said much the same stuff. Was told there's always "two sides to every relationship". I observed that farking right there is, and only one side of this relationship is trying to make it work. Got no satisfaction.

So, I quit. The company was already showing every sign of wanting to close down our location, and I was realizing I wanted to move on. The Vein was just the last straw. Fortunately the job market was strong, and I went to a smaller place to work with an ex-co-worker I knew well.

Karma: A month later, The Vein's resume crossed my desk. The new place was expanding, and wanted to hire a new manager. Potentially, I could be working for The Vein again. I walked down to the department head's office and said, "I know you don't know me, but I need to say that if you hire this guy, I'm quitting. This isn't a threat, just a fact." I explained what I thought were The Vein's good qualities (he had some), but also the many observed bad qualities. Said I could put him in touch with others who could vouch for my observations if he wanted. He smiled, said, "No, I've heard enough. We don't need that kind of trouble here." Always loved that guy for that response.

Mostly, I've had fair to excellent bosses. In education, they've been about half male and female, and my part was to do the job as much their way as I could and still be a good teacher.

MaeZe's story was a reminder of my worse.

MaeZe said:

I had a boss once (director of nursing, small hospital) who made stuff up . . .

Click to expand...

At a small hospital across from campus where I taught English, I signed on to procure continuing education for physicians, nursing staff, and other health care professionals. Eventually, this included mandatory safety updates, and I instructed AHA basic life support and ARC first-aid.

Naturally, I reported to a hospital boss, and mine was the inhuman director of human resources--a two-year nurse who rose to her HR post on the Peter principle of elevation to levels at which a person is no longer competent.

The job was great as were the people I helped stay current by bringing in updates in all fields in person and by satellite. Most all agreed the HR head made life miserable for everyone she could. Exactly like MaeZe's DON (director of nursing), my part-time boss made up stuff against everyone. Just a nasty person.

I worked as a draftsman way back in the '80s and had a boss that wouldn't let us run the air conditioner in the summer. I'd sweat all over the drawings! Of course, he worked in a separate building that was air conditioned.

That was one of the things that motivated me to go back to school for a Bachelor's degree. I didn't want to be a peon all my life, so some good came out of it.

The worst was probably the married food service manager who asked me to fix him up with the very attractive sister of a friend of mine. I balked at the idea, then saw my hours drop drastically for some odd reason. I quit as soon as I could.

I had a summer internship for a local tech start up that showed a lot of promise. The CEO was a prominent member of the community and had a long list of companies he had started and sold for several million each. There were no signs that this would be any different, and being one of a team of four, including the CEO, if the venture took off as planned I felt as though I would be set for life. Well, as much as one could be set pocketing their quarter share of a few million, the best offer while I was there for the company was ($115million) and I realistically had about a 10% stake in the company.

Anyways, the CEO was never around, he only showed up once a month or so to take us 3 employees out to lunch and talk business. He was great, but totally absent. His son was my direct boss, he was 20, with two kids and had been a troubled youth. His resume consisted of sandwich maker and vape shop clerk before his father started this tech company to "give him" so he could be all set to raise his kids comfortably.

My job was to run their social media campaigns, write aviation articles, and meet with potential clients to give them sales demos of our software. We had a programmer who diligently wrote out program over in some far off corner because he wanted to hyper-focus, kudos. Since I was an intern I didn't have my own office and was kind of under the wing of this no-experience trust fund degenerate who wouldn't listen to a single word of marketing advice that I gave him. Sandwich guy wouldn't listen to me, the guy with an MBA and a concentration in digital marketing.

So anyways, he shows up every day drunk, but isn't allowed to drink. When his fiance comes to drop off the babies he pushes all the cans over to my side of the table to make it look like I'm drinking to "cover him bro." All well, every day for 4 hours his babies cried and ran around the office, interrupted client meetings, and were a general distraction because his unemployed fiance wanted some "her time" to go home 4 houses down from the office and play a few hours of videogames while we worked.

That was always beyond me, I'm all for stay at home mums, totally- but we are working on a potentially multi-million dollar product...please just watch the kids.

I digress. the son was kind of a racist entitled dude, and I'm mixed and tend to rock an afro when able. He told me time and time again to cut my hair or I would be gone, and as an intern I simply objected stating that my hair wasn't out of line at all, was well kept and I could always slick it back. But to him I looked like a "monkey."

I had a meeting out of state one day so the CEO and myself took one of his private planes and flew out, which was AWESOME by the way, I got to fly a plane! And mind you, I got along with the CEO swimmingly. Halfway through the flight he looks at me and says, "So, I hear you think I'm racist." We are 3,000 feet in the air in a 4 person plane, on coms, and I'm being asked if I think my CEO is racist. What do.

The rest of the flight was a painful telling of the sheer lack of work his son does, the limitations his drunkenness brings to the company, the issues of us effectively being a daycare causes, problems with budget deficits and where the money is going (beer), and that fact that we spend our morning SCRUM meeting playing Magic the Gathering (I love MTG!) instead of planning is whats slowing the company down.

We get back, and I get called to the CEO's house for dinner. His son is there and I have to re-tell literally everything that happened in the plane, and hey! It seems as though they are on my side, the son is sorry, blah blah blah.

I got in the next day and was fired by the son, the CEO didn't know for 3 weeks until he came in for lunch and realized I was gone. He called me asking me to come back and he needed me on the team.

I obviously refused.


edit: I keep in touch with our old programmer who still works there, not a single article has been written, new client has been obtained, and hardly any work has been done. The multi-million dollar offers have been withdrawn and hes looking for other employment. Lesson; no matter how much money you have, if your son has never even shown enough responsibility to clean a damned dishwasher, don't put him in charge of a company and expect results.

The long and short of the worst boss I ever had: NPD to the max., as abusive as he could legally get away with, an entitled bully with a physically violent side, a yeller/screamer, a liar to the max, and a con. He once accused me of sleeping with other exhibitors to get their business. I left his office and slammed the door hard enough to make it shake (not hard enough to break the glass unfortunately). I went home for the rest of the day. The next day, I walked in and quit. He tried to get me to stay. When I refused, he said he'd make sure I'd never find another job in that industry or anywhere in this city ever again.

I found a job I liked (and still like) not long after this fiasco. Started said new job and six months later, ex-boss's PA called me asking me to return. I said, "Why? I'm about to fly out for a holiday; what possible interest could I have in returning?" AKA "Eff off."

A note about the PA: The PA was always supportive of that ex-boss. Basically the "peacemaker" between the boss and the rest of the employees, but the latter were smart enough to figure out that the ex-boss was only interested in the PA for looks and the profit-generating projects the PA could bring. But the PA got yelled at, too.

Since that phone call, I've found out through the grapevine that the PA was apparently fired. And no one in the industry wants to know the ex-boss or do business with the ex-boss.

Hmmm...

It might be a tie between the boss that was 10+ years older than I was (I was 18) who was very touchy and liked to pop my bra strap or the bank operations manager who couldn't balance her own drawer, making me stay over an hour and a half late regularly (since she couldn't close alone). She also regularly yelled at me for staying too late and getting overtime.

Pretty much my first job out of college. I'd transferred from the phone bank to secretary for the editors.
A) my boss evaluated me as an editor instead of as a secretary so of course I didn't get a good eval.
B) my Dad called one day. My Dad *never* calls me at work. He told me my grandmother was dying and it would be any day now. I went in to tell my boss I would probably need bereavement leave any day. He said "Gosh, I hope she doesn't die the first week in December. We're really busy the first week in December."

One of my first bosses out of college was effectively Donald Trump, if Trump were a tech startup CEO instead of a failed real estate heir. He was narcissistic beyond imagination. Sexist as hell. Regularly not-so-subtly racist. He drilled job applicants about their political beliefs, their social media, and such inappropriate topics as their sexual orientation. He would stride through the office disrupting projects, insulting or harassing employees, and declaring emergency meetings on the basis of his own misunderstandings. He had absurd expectations and would fire people for telling him his braindead ideas were impossible or prohibitively expensive. He bullied a brilliant engineer into becoming his personal secretary because she was the only other woman besides the office manager working there at the time. Delivery deadlines were missed and clients lost because of his tendency to storm into the building from the golf course and declare a corporate reorganization 3/4 of the way through a grueling project.

Above all else, he was an idiot, and drove a series of companies into the ground until allegedly he was ousted by his own investors. Working for him was one of the most formative and educational experiences of my adult life. It taught me how to deal with the worst people in positions of power, and the many ways of effectively handling a narcissist in order to survive under his attention. I hope I never have to use those lessons again.

(Don’t quote this post, please. It feels good to rant, but I’m not sure how long I’ll leave it up.)