9 to 5
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Worst Boss/Coworker Stories Please
I am feeling sorry for myself because of my recent work relationships. In my line of work I travel and work under different people for every job. The past few have been very challenging.
Please share your horror stories.
Thanks for sharing.
Re: Worst Boss/Coworker Stories Please
I had a boss once that would make up things that one of our team members supposedly said about another. She would flat out lie to try to turn us against each other. For a short while it worked until we started communicating and figuring out what was going on.
For someone who was supposed to lead us as a team, I guess she didn't get that teams who got along were more effective. It was crazy, so illogical, and has made me that much more grateful for my subsequent managers good qualities.
I had a boss who I called a seagull. She would fly above staff and then, without notice, dip down and strike one of us. My favorite story of what she did to me was pretty epic:
It was August of 2008. I was in charge of planning one of the largest women's conferences in the country and our keynote speaker canceled for November, and I set out to find a new speaker. My boss woke me up with a call at 6am on my home phone and said this, "Marcy! I know who we have to get! Get Michelle Obama. Make it happen or you're fired."
Michelle Obama. For a conference three days after the general election. Yup, that's definitely not going to happen. Luckily I was able to calmly address the situation and avoid getting fired, but it's requests like those that made me absolutely fantastic at the skill of "managing up."
One of my co-workers was so lazy/stupid that he would e-mail me, asking ME to e-mail someone else a question. If he'd just e-mailed that person in the first place, I wouldn't have had to get involved. He also didn't have a button on the scanner to send things to his e-mail address, so he'd scan things to me and ask me to forward them. I had to be the one to put in a help desk request to get his address added. WTF?
Also, my second boss was a few months younger than I, and really unusual, socially. She was against hiring me in the first place, because she said I was "too nice." When she was promoted, I inherited all of her accounts, while maintaining all of my own. I was working from home in the mornings from 6 to 7:45, then at work from 8 to 5 (with a longish lunch, which was typical for that company), and then at night from home, sometimes until midnight or later. She started talking to a few people at the company, and it got back to me, that I wasn't spending enough time at my desk. She was timing me, and keeping a log of it. So if I spent 7:45 at my desk instead of 8 hours, she'd get pissy and tell OTHER people, even though I was putting in 6+ hours a day at home, and even though the adult thing to do would be to TELL ME.
I've had nightmares about her since leaving that job, no joke.
My Lunch Blog
I like reading other people's horror stories.
A previous boss I swear is the definition of BSC. Just yesterday, she forced a coworker (who took my old position) to walk through a neighborhood of 375 homes and photograph each home. The heat index yesterday was 102. My CW had to practically beg to bring water with them.
She has temper tantrums up and down the hallway if someone calls and says something she doesn't agree. She's in her late 50's.
Oh I could go on and on about this woman!
I had a boss who was just out of touch with reality. They had one big general manual that was typed really formally in legalese. It also was the same manual from the 90s and they just kept adding to it so there was a lot of misinformation. There also wasn't any colloquial information that was good to know.
I had notes I typed up from my training and also just from what I had learned. Well some days there were literally only a couple hours of work to do. And instead of wasting time on the internet I always tried to find at least something productive to do. One day I decided to reorganize my training notes and put them in a binder with dividers, etc.
Well my boss saw it and flipped out claiming that I was deliberately trying to create my own office procedure and essentially desecrating their office bible. ::blank stare:: So obviously I took it a part and got rid of it. But after that everything was "against office procedure" even though I would show him it was clearly in their office bible. So ridiculous.
Needless to say that didn't last long. When I left about a couple weeks later I got a formal letter in the mail asking where the office procedure manual I was working on was implying I had stolen it. Insane man.
Here's my thinking - when your reality no longer matches the reality of everyone else around you - it's probably time to retire.
My old boss was a total loony. She totally resented the fact that I was well-liked and she was detested. She also rarely showed up, took long lunches, and rarely did work. I covered her rear end regularly.
One day, she was out and something needed to be done right away. So I did it, and I did it perfectly. When she came in the next week, she flipped. She sent an email to her boss' boss saying that from now on anyone who needed to talk to me had to go through her. Then she told me that I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone in the office without her permission. Seriously. I told her no. That turned into a whole clusterfcuk with meetings, etc.
After that, she stopped speaking to me and would only communicate with me through Post-it notes. Honest to God. I would get up, go to the bathroom, and come back to find a series of yellow stickers on my chair with instructions. When I complained to my director, I was told she was "intimidated" by me.
She was also lazy as hell. She would email me a one page document and tell me to print it and give it to her. It was too far for her to walk to the printer. I was never so happy as the day she got fired.
I was told by a VP of our company to research the money that my PM spent on one of our jobs. The job had a Lump Sum pay and the PM kept billing to different phases that we weren't actually working on. The worst part was he spent 2/3rds of the construction phase including our subs money and we hadn't even started construction.
Needless to say when my PM found out that I was researching his spending things did not go well. The good news is I now have a new PM!