Some people are meant for leadership positions. Unfortunately, we’ve either seen or experienced these same people as bosses. Yikes! These employees share the most unacceptable thing their boss has ever done to them. Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
A Broken Deal
“I joined my current employer 15 years ago. When negotiating the salary we made a deal that after one year I would get a raise if I performed according to the mandatory annual appraisal.
I did.
My then manager told me he had talked to the upper management and there was no room for a raise in pay right now. He also demanded I didn’t report my endless hours of overtime in my weekly work report, which we had to submit every Friday, as we were working on customer projects and they were billable hours. He said this was because of ‘cost-transparency.’
Basically, he wanted to shine by completing his projects at a lower cost while working us like dogs.
I finished the project with him and then applied to a different department within the company. Since engineers were highly sought after by everyone that didn’t pose any problem.
My new manager was (and is) a marvel. He is a true, inspiring leader. I told him about the deal with the pay raise. It took him less than half a day to make sure I did indeed get my promised raise in salary.
Many years later, our huge project was running into some difficulties. There was talk about replacing my manager with the one that had lied to me. I was asked about my view on this subject by the upper management.
What I told them was I would stay on for exactly three months, training my replacement. I would not work again for any length of time for the lying guy. I was told to think about this overnight. The next morning, I went right back into the manager’s office and told him that my decision was still the same.
He looked at me and said softly, ‘Well, that is what your co-workers said, too.’
My hero manager was replaced by another guy after all, who made a mess of it. I was lucky that the good guy simply took me with him to yet another department, where I am happily toiling away to this day.”
The Talk With The Dean
“I worked for a university. I originally took the position because I was told it was funded. It was for a few months, a ‘minor’ fact that everyone failed to mention during the interview or afterward. I had to scrounge for the money for my own salary. I got bridge funding, and my grant application was successful, but it only covered about 65 percent of my salary. As such, I only got 65 percent of benefits, including 65 percent of vacation time and 65 percent of sick leave. However, I was expected to work 100 percent of the time. I did for a while, but I got tired of the nonsense and outright lies from my supervisor.
He stopped in for all of about two hours every day to be sure we were there and had a Quisling in the lab who reported to him about any ‘lapses.’ He arrived in time for lunch with the higher-ups and then checked the lab.
He actually reported me to university officials for not working 100 percent of the time, and I had to meet with the dean to discuss it.
The dean said, ‘You ‘should’ be working full time.’
I told him flat out, ‘No.’ Then I further explained I had already met with the staff in Personnel and learned that 65 percent legally did mean 65 percent.
He said, ‘I don’t care what Personnel says. I’m going to ruin my career.’
I asked him if he would work 100 percent of the time for only 65 percent of his salary and benefits. There was stony silence. Obviously, there was one set of rules for the elite and another set of rules for the serfs.
I went on to have an independent position and my own lab elsewhere, but I never forgot this.”
“I Was One Of Four Women Who Worked With 400 Men”
“Many, many years ago, I worked for an oilfield company. I was going out with one of the guys who worked in a different area than I did. He stopped being discreet about it, which was a lot of ways ticked me off because my boss started treating me differently.
So differently, in fact, he approached me one afternoon when I was taking inventory and told me he wanted to guess my weight.
I just looked at him with the look that said, ‘Back off Jack.’
He ignored it. I held up my hand and told him I wasn’t interested. To him, he sweetened the pot. If he couldn’t guess my weight, I could have his pants. I could not quite believe what I was hearing. I told him, ‘No’, and walked away.
As far as I was concerned, it was a done deal, he wasn’t going to bring it up again. I was one of only four women who worked with 400 men, and I had to be very very careful.
The next day, he sat at his desk, turning to me (we shared an office), and said, ‘120 pounds.’
I just sat there looking at him for a moment, and said in the nicest tone I could use, ‘I am not interested in your petty game. Leave me alone, please.’
He asked me if he was right, I just shook my head and left the office.
I worked with him on a Saturday shortly after that, and the man actually took his pants off and handed them to me. Right in the office. Right in front of me. I left and walked out. I didn’t come back until the big boss called and asked why. I told him the truth.
He told me, ‘Come back. It won’t happen again.’
Remember, this was long before there was such a complaint as harassment. This was the late 1980s, and guys got away with stuff all the time.”
Work From Home Request: Declined
“I had a debilitating lower back problem and the pain was acute. I was off work for two weeks and then was able to work from home. I did this for three weeks while my manager pressured me to come into the office. Not only did I have a doctor’s note recommending I work from home but, as I told her, I was unable to bend over to put my socks on so I couldn’t even get myself ready to come into the office.
First, she tried to get the credentials of my chiropractor dismissed. Labour Relations told her she had the discretion to not accept the doctor’s note and that it needed to be an MD. So she said I needed to start coming into the office or get a note from an MD. I went over her head. She reluctantly did agree to accept the note from the chiropractor.
It gets better. So after several weeks, I was working in the office again and requested a work from home day by email to accommodate a medical appointment. She hauled me off into a private room, where she informed me that she was denying my request because I had 34 work-from-home days this year. I was shocked but managed to tell her those days were under a doctor’s note and this was a one-off request. She told me she didn’t have to accept that doctor’s note, that it was the manager’s discretion as was her decision to deny this work from home request.
I said, ‘Fine,’ and I walked out of the room.
I walked to my desk, put on my coat, and walked out. Outside I thought about why she was being so hardline. I realized she didn’t like me because I knew more about the work than she did. I made the decision to once again go over her head. I was glad I did as she was told to approve my work from home day.
Other issues with this manager continued to surface. Eventually, she made the decision to retire. I am now the manager and would never treat a member of my team the way she treated me.”
Safety Issue Part One
“The first incident had to do with getting us to work in an atmosphere of asbestos, a very dangerous long-term hazard. Our boss was insisting we do the work without proper training and to make us responsible for the cleanup.
In the scenario, our job was to remove old telephone wiring from the space between the ceilings and the false ceiling. In doing so, we would have disturbed the asbestos and contaminated the whole building. First of all, the asbestos was not our problem and until the asbestos was removed, we could not safely do our job which was the removal of all the old wiring.
We held our position and this all went to the wayside as professionals had to be used not at our cost but at the cost to the customer. We knew what the hazard was and was willing to do our job when the first condition of rectified. We didn’t refuse to work but refused to jeopardize our health.
The second issue came in when I received a report that a certain job was refused due to again—a safety concern. This ‘right of refusal’ was an integral part of our industry.
I was asked to go and investigate the refusal. That’s when I found another man doing the job.
I asked him, ‘Did you know this job was refused because of a safety concern?’
His answer was, ‘No, I did not know.’
Where the problem was resting was on the shoulders of a supervisor who thought he could get someone else to do the work without telling them of the safety concerns of another worker. Not a good thing to do for anyone.
Though there were other ways the job could have been done, it was not but by the time I got there, the work had already been done and no one was hurt, thankfully. All that was needed was for me to make my report and take my concerns to the committee so this type of incident was recorded.
The last became a real concern for me, my own safety, and the safety of others in my field.”
Safety Issue Part Two
“I received a report of voltage on a certain pole and was told the pole was flagged with a ‘Do Not Work’ tag. There was a red band placed around the pole as a warning of some hazard.
When I got to the pole in question, I found there was no band; nothing to indicate a hazard. So I phoned the person who reported and tagged the pole. All he said was that he had tagged and reported ‘feeling energized, a tingling sensation’ when he was climbing up the pole and came right back down.
I was puzzled at this and made a phone call to the district supervisor. I found out that they, two of them, went out and didn’t see any problems with the pole itself and took it upon themselves to remove the tag. Thus my life and others were put in jeopardy by their action.
As I was trained in finding electrical faults on our pole lines, I methodically set up and started to measure the voltage potential on the pole in question. At about six to seven feet from the bottom of the pole, I found 7000 volts. And at 10 feet, my measure tools were off the scale and beyond any safe levels to even work.
Where conflict came in was when I was told by those managers they had the authority to remove those tags if they thought it was safe. This is against the bylaws of the electrical code and can be punishable with firing but as this was not about being right but about doing the right thing.
A lesson learned is more valuable than an injury suffered.”
New Reservation Policy
“I had a boss, who I’ll call ‘Frisco’. He was the General Manager of a boutique hotel, while I was one of the managers. At this time, Frisco was enforcing the rule of no walk-in guests after 10 pm. His logic was ’98 percent of fraud happens after 10 pm.’
He said, ‘If a person really wants a room that late, direct them to the website to make a same-day reservation.’
I didn’t have much say so in the policy since I didn’t actually own the hotel. So I accepted it, however, I did feel kind of insulted that I wasn’t trusted to sell a room after 10 pm. Mainly because it’s only the criminals who will try and argue about the 10 pm policy rather than actual travelers.
They would just say, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’ and then leave.
And at this point, I’ve had my fair share of encounters with illegal activity on the job. I could’ve easily taken care of myself and the business. At this job, I had witnessed two murders, shut down countless parties, evicted a handful of guests, and learned to spot hustlers and streetwalkers, fake IDs, and stolen credit cards.
I could smell a rubbish storyline about as well as I could find which room was smoking crack on a floor without knocking on everyone’s door. I could interrogate a lock, open a ‘broken’ safe, operate a fire alarm/sprinkler system, and use the huge generator in the basement to power the building.
So you can understand why I was a bit taken back when I couldn’t be trusted to sell a room after 10 pm.
Fast forward to one night when an older lady called in and asked if we had any available rooms. Her daughter was in the city with her two children (babies) and needed a place to stay. At that time it was 11 pm, way past the 10 pm rule.
The mother continued to explain how her daughter had an emergency earlier that night and was now checking out of the hospital. The daughter suffered some mental health issues, so she usually didn’t travel alone with the kids. And since the mother helped with the daughter’s finances, she was calling in to see if we could make a reservation over the phone.
I replied, ‘Yes, we have rooms available, but you will need to reserve them online on our website. It’s going to charge you a room tax and an extra 200 dollars to hold the room. Oh and because I won’t have the physical card, we’re going to have to do some email signature faxing to authorize these charges through a third system.’
Unfortunately, the mother and the father, who later joined the call to ‘help’, weren’t tech-savvy people. Two hours on the phone later, I finally got a signed email and a working card submitted via the website reservation system.
Even if I didn’t, I would have just bought the room myself. The lady had been walking to the hotel for two and a half hours with a baby and a two-year-old in the cold. The lady was a little awkward when she first approached the desk, but maybe because she was tired. She was thankful that I was able to help her parents book her reservation and then she left for her room.
The next day, she checked out before Frisco came in. However, nothing got past him. He noticed how her reservation was a ‘late online’ reservation and didn’t like how strange everything was. So he marched straight to the room and discovered blood on the sheets. Then this gave him the opportunity to lecture me about how I followed the rules but somehow still was to be blamed for the blood incident.
And to top it off, the prick told me the 200 dollar deposit wasn’t enough for the 400 dollar sheets.
He said, ‘Look, see! See the card won’t charge for the difference.’
He continued to tell me I was responsible for calling and collecting the money since it was my fault. So I followed as instructed and called back the parents.
Mr. And Mrs. Lady’s parents answered, and apologized for the tiny amount of blood on the pillowcase. She had gone to the hospital because she had had some surgery and the stitches had come out. They manage the money pretty closely so they just needed to move the funds over. This time, it only took them five minutes to send over the money. And the whole, I felt like a horrible person.
They spent over 1K for this single mom with mental health issues to walk three miles after some ER surgery and only sleep a few hours. Just because Frisco wanted to make a point.
So he had instructed me to follow up with him personally in the morning.
And I started with, ‘Oh yeah I called. And don’t worry, the lady with two children who stayed is fine. The blood wasn’t from an injury. She had just had surgery.’
The prick didn’t even blink an eye. He said, ‘That’s not why I wanted you to call. Did you collect a working card?’
To me, that was out of line. Especially once I talked with the Housekeeping Manager, who confirmed that about twice a month, period blood stain sheets get tossed without any charges. And how it was part of the budget.”
Bereavement Leave
“The last job I worked as a runner. I was hired in September 2013. My job was to know everything about everyone’s position and know how to do it. Well prior to my last job, I was working for the school district and I met a lady at a mutual friend’s house. She heard about my work experience and asked me to come work with her. She offered much better pay. I gave my notice to my job at the school district and I moved on to the new job. After a week, I was trained.
For some reason after about a month and a half, my boss, Theresa started acting a little strange towards me. She cut my hours and really started to become unprofessional. Our truck would come and everyone was responsible for unloading the merchandise. She would grab four of the employees and sit while leaving myself and one other employee was expected to unload in a timely manner (30 minutes). Impossible!
She wrote me up for having my cellphone in my work area, while everyone else had their phones out. I refused to sign it. I’d had enough of her nonsense, so I balled it up and threw it in her office trash can.
Long story short, on January 14th, 2014, my cousin died. I asked for three days off, so I could attend her funeral. My family lived eight hours away that’s why I requested three days. Right after the funeral, I was filling my car up to head home when I turned my phone back on. I had a notification of a voicemail.
As I listened to it, it was my boss’s supervisor firing me for not filling out the proper paperwork to take the three days off. However, I did fill out paperwork that my boss gave me to take off. Well, she used that to fire me. The bottom line was she fired me in the middle of my cousin’s funeral, through my voicemail.
Two weeks later, I was admitted into the hospital and stayed there for three weeks. Doctors had no clue what was wrong with me. I was released only to get worse. My whole body hurt. I could barely walk, let alone lift up a cup. After tons of trips to the hospital and seeing different specialists, I was finally diagnosed with my disability. It was triggered by stress. That woman (boss) stressed me to the point of breaking. And I let her.
Now I’m very passionate about learning the law and my rights. I learned to stand up for myself finally in a legal way.”
Constant Drama
“Many years ago, at the first club I worked at, the General Manager was this giant beast of a man. He was close to seven feet tall and ugly as sin. He had a pock-marked face, a cone-shaped head, and bird legs. I absolutely hated this man.
He once threatened to have me arrested on false charges. Then while I was waiting to prove my innocence, he hired the two biggest guys he could find to scare me. Why did he threaten this? Because I played a song he claimed to hate, even though he’d told me it was a pretty good song the day before.
There were many similar threats from him over the years. We were not to start fights in the club. It was bad for business. However, if he was still in the building after seven pm, then there was a strong chance that he would survey the crowd. Basically, he would find someone he just didn’t like, and start messing with them until a fight broke out. Often it was with a group of guys. Once all the security, managers, and even DJs were involved in the brawl, you could bet everything you owned that the GM was getting in his Hummer and leaving the property for the night. Every single time.
I learned just before the shutdown, he’d passed away. He was the worst person I’ve ever even heard of, and this world is a much better place without him.
Rest in Agony.”
The Manager’s Revenge
“Once our team had a long-time important customer, some of the staff would refer to them with a nickname when they weren’t around. The customer somehow got wind of it and demanded a head on a silver platter. My manager at the time decided it would not be the head of anyone who actually used that nickname, but mine.
I had just been transferred to that team a month earlier and was just sent home without pay until further notice. Supposedly because my performance had not been up to snuff.
I was an hourly employee at the time and would take home significant performance bonuses every month. I had been offered a middle management position which I had declined prior to being transferred to that team.
After four weeks without hearing back from them, I received a notice in the mail telling me I was fired for failing to appear to work.
Now, I don’t know it for a fact, but I’m pretty sure my manager had transferred me to that team as punishment for declining the promotion (more work, no bonus). Then used the client’s frustration to kill two birds with one stone.”
