As many of my friends know full well, my boss drives me CRAZY. He manages like his job is constantly on the line (it very well may be, for all I know), which results in bouts of micromanaging, last-minute decisions that make our deadlines tighter, and inducing feelings in me that waver between pity for him and wanting to scratch his eyeballs out. I think he may be the worst manager I’ve ever had, and that even includes my first boss, who used to curse people out with her office door open and make coworkers cry. (Okay, maybe they are tied. But because my current boss is passive-aggressive, he comes out slightly ahead. I’d prefer overtly aggressive over passive-aggressive. I think. Well, maybe not. I guess the grass is always greener.)
However, I didn’t feel so bad when I got my Monster e-mail and saw that they were having a “Who’s the Most Toxic Boss of All?” contest. The examples are almost too comedic/unbelievable to be true. They range from a boss who Lysol-ed a worker’s office to the point of saturation after she saw her cough into a tissue, to a boss who demanded a worker FedEx her mother’s dentures. Are these people for real?? They seem utterly and certifiably insane. I personally voted for the boss who stopped her employee from going on vacation because she said a lot of work was coming his way.
What the F??? That is so freaking messed up it’s not even funny. C’mon people, just for principle’s sake, wouldn’t you tell your boss to blow it up her ass if she pulled that shit? Do you even want to save a job like that? A friend of mine once told me that his boss asked him to come back early from a vacation because the boss couldn’t handle the workload by himself. That is total and utter bullshit, and the sad part is my friend (who is a very nice and agreeable guy) did it. GRRRRRR!!!!!!!
It really just seems like as people go higher up the corporate ladder, the more emotionally unintelligent they become. They become power-trippy assholes who forget how to interact with people below them, or simply don’t care to learn.
Am I going to start losing IQ points when I get to a level in my career where I’m managing people? I once heard that Eskimos, or some type of aboriginal people, used to send their old people off on an iceberg because they were no longer useful to society. It sounds ultra-cruel, but maybe there’s a way we can translate that to the corporate world. Once a manager is deemed incompetent, he or she should be sent off to exile to a cube at the other end of the floor where he is thrown “projects in the pipeline”—i.e, those projects that are basically the equivalent of pork barrel, which seem important but are really just meant to keep people looking busy without actually making any progress (like most of the projects the Pointy-Haired Boss assigns Dilbert).
Right now the only thing keeping me going is my trip to Hawaii. Six weeks and counting….
Who’s the most toxic boss you’ve ever had?
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2 comments:
When I was waitressing in college one of the dish washers made a really degrading comment about my butt and when I took it to my boss he told me he'd try to say something but I had to understand it was "cultural". Right.
what an ass!
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