Worst boss ever, Exhibit J.

This’ll be in flashback format*. First, the exhibit: during exit interview, boss says “I have no feedback at this time,” when I ask for it. Has the nads to tell me he’d be a reference for me, though, as he shook my hand at the elevator door.

*So maybe I should back up a bit in my story. All that time I had for travelling and consulting? Not so much voluntarily. Here’s what happened.

I’m in technology. I run websites and software that support them and their contents (CMS, CRM, online marketing crud, servers. Shiz like that). I did this remotely for three years of the five I worked for my last company. I had a great boss. Really great. I should post a rave about him, in fact. Our company was acquired and out went the whole IT department, my boss included. The other guys got smart and jetted. I felt like a severence package would be fine with me, and inwardly cackled that they’d neeever figure out my system, customized to the hilts.

During my first meet-n-greet with the new IT director and my boss, (incidentally where he first shows his ineptitude for the position.) I let him know how I came to be a remote employee, etc etc. I also tell him that if the distance ever becomes an issue, I’d like for him to ask me to consider locating back. (No, you can’t re-re-locate. They cancel out. It’s math; trust me.) Anyway. He says he will.

Almost two years later, he’s got me in an office with the head of HR and they’re giving me COBRA information. *spin* The story is my position has been “eliminated.” The boss lets it slip that they no longer have a need for a “remote” person in my position. Aha. Any questions? Oh, where to begin. How about “so, when you said you’d let me make a decision on moving back, that was full of crap, right?” How about, “when you hired that consultant who did a job eerily similar to mine and you said she was temporary, you meant she was temporarily a consultant and would soon be a full time employee, or perhaps that any of our right to question her was temporary and would soon be revoked, right?” Or maybe, “exactly when do you not lie straight faced?”

Ok, deal with it, Rhapsody. You got your sev package. You got your UE for 6 months. What more do you want? Well, I wanted to know if I could have done my job any differently. As my most recent boss, does he have any feedback for me? “I have no feedback at this time.”

Blink. That’s it? You worked with me for over two years and you have nothing for me to take away? No shoulda-dones or you-did-this-rights? Nope. Oh, but somehow, without any feedback I’ll be happy to be a reference for you. Blink. Maybe that’s a canned line you say to someone as you shake their hand and confirm they leave the premises. Oh! Maybe he’s a robot! That would explain so much.

Prime directive: decimate department and lower morale. Mission accomplished!
Be compassionate with employees. Does not compute! Does not compute!

Dag. My robots are dumb.

Worst boss ever, Exhibit I

Wow!  Look what I found rotting in the drafts folder! Original date, Sept. 26, 2006.  Oh, little did I know what the future held..

Further to Exhibit H, when asked, my boss promises me that any meeting I should be in, I will be invited to. This after key information was not passed on to me.

1) He tells me I have too much work to do to sit in meetings, so he will go.

2) He does not tell me what happens in these meetings.

3) He swears I was in some of these meetings anyway (see exhibit H).

4) He includes his boss — our boss — to chastize me for asking about these meetings, both swearing I will know what I need to know, yet information still does not get passed down to me.

Crash and burn, boys. If I don’t have this information, we fail. It’s that simple.

Hiatus and the return of ranting

Surprise, surprise, I no longer work for worst boss evar. For the last few months I’ve been chugging along, alternating between traveling and consulting. I’m finally settled now that summer’s over and I went out into the world to get another job. Yep. I have hours and a punch clock and the whole nine yards. It’s interesting coming from corporate America, cube-farm, office-world and going to retail, hourly, smock-rocking. I don’t take it as a “downgrade,” cause a job’s a job. Someone trusts you to do something for them, they pay you. It is a downgrade for lifestyle in terms of sheer dollars, but let me tell you, trying to get your clients to remit your invoices… screw that. I’d rather go back and work for splutter boss again. … Ok, I wouldn’t.

So as it turns out, there are crappy bosses everywhere. Another big, sarcastic surprise. My recent experience, which I shall rant about directly, is in some ways more horrific because of the business impact. I shall explain.

I went to work on my first day and filled in the usual paperwork and then sat down in a grubby break room to watch 5 videos ranging from child abduction, shop lifting, and cashier training. “Watch this one last,” the manager tells me. “It’s important to what you’ll be doing.” Um, ok. I still don’t have an employee ID, haven’t punched in, and don’t even know where the bathrooms are, but I’ll know how to page someone over the intercom and run credit card slips. The manager would return or I should come and find him. Oh, and there are no lockers, so put your stuff out in your car. Alrighty. (As an aside rant, I have 2 cars and a truck. Both cars broke down in turns, Monday and Tuesday. Then the truck took a year to start up yesterday. Let’s hope all this ranting isn’t bad juju. At least more bad luck means more ranting fodder for you.)

I found the boss just before stashing my stuff in my car. I learned someone named Jennifer … or maybe Sarah… would be training me, and to find her at the front. I’m not a shy person. But finding two people who 1) clearly don’t know they’re training me (or why else would the manager not be sure whom to find?) and 2) are both extremely busy with customers is a bit daunting to me. Luckily I found someone else who had trained another trainee that morning, and she let me follow her to the front to show me who was whom. Jennifer assigned this hapless victim to be my trainer.

Turns out when you do repetitive tasks, you forget how to use words to describe them.

Fine. I’ll watch over your shoulder and soak it in. After 20 minutes or so, I took over. After 15 more minutes, I was on my own. I had no idea what time I was scheduled to complete training and my day. The other trainee had come in from 8:30 and worked until noon, an hour after her scheduled “shift”. Using that math, I should have gone by 1:30 or 2. At 4 o’clock I finally asked wtf. Nicely. “Pardon me. WTF?”

I was released at 4:30 and as I passed by Jennifer, asked when I should come back next. I was not on any schedule. I had not been on that day’s schedule. Jennifer did not know who I was. I had not been scheduled for breaks. She had no information. Can you guess who had gone home early that day? That’s right, the manager! Wheee! Gee, call back tomorrow morning to find out when you are scheduled.

Wow. So I just worked my first day, un-punched in, on no schedule, and I’m not scheduled to ever come back? Oh, shall I take this moment to mention that when I called for an interview (Note: smock and other hourly jobs need to have much callback persistence. I had forgotten this working in “forward your resume via email” world.) they could not find my application. When I interviewed they could not find my application. The manager who hired me (Mr. Left-early and never checked in with me during my cash register imprisonment) therefore had no references for me, and not even a shred of information aside from what I told him during the interview. So.. I am literally non-existant to this company. They have no paperwork but what I filled out on my first day, and they surely called no one for references. I could have been something horrible for them! Yet they blindly trusted me to go it alone with all their money, their customers, all of it.

Wow. It’s a crazy way to run a business.

Did I expect hand-holding? Maybe a smidgen more formal training, but ok, ya learn by doing. Did I expect to be on schedules somewhere, with other staff knowing who I was and when I should be there? Hell, yes! And, did I expect to be not necessarily welcomed with open arms, walked from employee to employee and introduced, coddled and fawned over and smiled at but for surely not just thrown in with no introduction to at least the other managers (what was your name again?) and with a better ratio of training to “real” work? Hell yes again. Hell. Yes.

Seriously, they just took me as a schmuck off the street. As it is, I’m just a whiny mofo with a blog to rant on. Let the venom flow.

Work haiku, II

take this job, oh yes
shove it deep deep down, oh yes
far as it will go

Thanks again to my buddy and budding haiku poet.

Work haiku

Communication
passive aggressive and rude
when not just grunting.

Thanks to my buddy and once-colleague for writing this. 

Worst boss ever, Exhibit H

I can’t believe the exhibits keep coming.

Exhibit H: splutters and raves because he thinks you were in meetings that you were never invited to.

Brouhaha. I simply asked him which meetings these were, but he could give no detail. It got escalated to his boss, who told me that meetings in the past are in the past. Forget them. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to get minutes so I can 1) prove beyond a shadow of a doubt I wasn’t there and 2) find out WTF I missed, since clearly my boss thinks I hold key information that I do not.

If I get to exhibit, please shoot me.

Blacklisting puffy and fluffy

Look, “puffy” and “fluffy” are not terms appropriate to a scientific discovery.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060914/ap_on_sc/puffy_planet_1

Astronomers find distant, fluffy planet

Sorry. That doesn’t fly. Neither does the line “along with a second, smaller distant world that’s also puffier than theories would have predicted.”  Puffier than theories predicted?  Never the twain shall meet!
Are verbal standards really so low now that we have to say “puffy” and “fluffy” instead of “less dense” or perhaps even “lighter weight”. Of course, maybe then we’d have to talk about mass versus weight, and that just won’t do.

Is this choice of words so that people who ordinarily would have ignored the discovery of a new planet would take note, perhaps thinking some new fad in planets has made Jupiter the new Earth?  It’s totally orange and pink.  And have you checked out that storm?  So dramatic.  I wouldn’t wear that storm during the day, but it’s ok because planets only come out at night… like, right?

Come on, guys. Planets don’t resemble pink fuzzy accessories. They are not named “Fifi”. They are not puffy and fluffy. Ever.

Release a virus to kill pesty fish?

Bad idea jeans.  Scientists in Australia are thinking of killing pest koi in their rivers by releasing a virus. Haven’t they learned by seeing how introduced species — like the rabbit, the cane toad, and now the carp — is a BAD idea with serious repercussions?  Have they not watched ANY sci-fi movies??  Jurassic Park, Terminator(s), Resident Evil.  Dudes, science goes wrong.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060910/sc_space/scientistsponderreleasingvirustokillcarp

Bad, bad, bad.

Don’t do it, Aussies!  Just let it be open season for the koi, and let hundreds if not thousands of people harvest and sell these koi, which are currently experiencing some sort of fashion with the lawn and garden crowd.  And for the love of Mike, go watch a sci-fi movie or two.  They’ll tell you all you need to know about science gone bad and taking over the world, killing all humanity and ushering in End Times.  Let Bush take care of that part.  He’s da debbil anyway.

Karr not guilty? Stop the presses. Please.

Come on, the guy just needed a free ride home from Thailand.  He was there, taught school like a day, realized what horrible trolls most children are, and figured out a way to get a first class ticket home.  15 minutes of fame while he was at it, too.  Talk about VIP treatment.

I think from the first 5 minutes of news coverage, some time before Hezbollah and Israel agreed to monumental peace, some time while we’re still fighting in Iraq and that place we never hear about called Afghanistan, some time when there are about a million more newsworthy things going on, he had a pretty airtight alibi, being in a completely different state with JonBenet was killed.

Maybe he is delusional, but I think the guy just wanted a get-out-of-Asia-and-out-of-teaching-free card.  I know lots of teachers who only work a few miles away from home and they’d take the Karr option just to never have to see a chalkboard again.  Maybe he got a cash enticement from the Ramseys to boot.  Pay off his student loans or something.  In the end, no harm, no foul, and the press got like two weeks STRAIGHT of an orgy.  Shoot, maybe the media moguls paid him, not the Ramsey family.

Worst boss ever, Exhibit G

I’ve been really really good (or at least, trying to get better) at proactivity and constructive conversation. Really. I rant here, but in the real world I’m professional. Hence the ranting incognito.

But my boss, not so much. Since we’ve had some conversations about his emotion (yelling at me when there’s a problem) and our communication “challenges” (every avenue we’ve mutually agreed upon he soon abandons without word, and then says “well, if you’d only done X”, X being a wholly new communication strategy that must be clairvoyantly understood on my part), he’s taken this tactic: 1) asks for my help/advice on some project I tangentially know about, 2) hears my answer and does not agree with it but 3) says only “ok, thanks” and leaves.

That’s it. No questions about why his knowledge of the problem is different than mine, no suggestions of another solution. Just hears what he thinks is wrong and takes off. Suffice to say that I think I’m right. A lot. But I’m willing to ask why an answer isn’t what I expected and learn from it. Amazing.

Talk about communication dynamos. Sheesh. If I get halfway through the alphabet before the year ends, … I’ll make some ultimatum. Oh yeah. Strong words from rhapsody. I’m prepared to write more words! Worrrrrrds!!