Jobs can be stressful enough on their own, so it's never easy when you have to work under somebody who is a complete prick. The following AskReddit thread asked users to share their most ridiculous 'horrible bosses' stories, and these were the standouts.
Comments have been edited for clarity.
Her Illness Was No Excuse To Miss Work
“My old boss Jerry. He wouldn’t let me go to the emergency room after some heavy bleeding that I had been experiencing from my lady parts suddenly got way worse. I went over his head and got permission to go. I called my mom and told her to meet me in the ER. The ER nurse said that he’d never seen so much blood. An ER nurse said this!
It was determined that I needed a couple of blood transfusions and would need to be admitted. My mom called Jerry who then proceeds to tell her that it was just stress and that I NEEDED TO GO BACK TO WORK. At this point, I couldn’t even lift up my own head up, but sure, I bet I could take a bus across town and go back to work.
I ended up needing another hospital stay later for a D&C. They found a large growth that needed a biopsy. Jerry kept insisting that it couldn’t be cancer because I would have been tired and losing weight. I had lost eight pounds in a week and went to bed the minute I got home. I was still recovering from the procedure when Jerry called to let me know that I had been fired for taking too much time off.
Five days later, I was diagnosed with cancer.”
She Clocked His Time Every Morning
“I had a boss who absolutely hated me. After realizing that she wasn’t qualified for the position and had already slept with two different guys at the company, I came to the conclusion that she was a joke and was to just be dismissed. I never really paid that much attention to her, and when she would show up to my building (which was once every blue moon), I kind of just ignored her. I was busy and I didn’t have the time to play her games.
She wrote me up for being late on three separate occasions. One time when I was one minute late, then three minutes late, and finally six minutes late. I lived an hour from work and had to deal with traffic, so I would leave my house two hours earlier on most days to account for this. However, when there’s a wreck, there really isn’t much that you can do as the freeway is backed up and side roads are clogged. Each time I got stuck in traffic, I would also call to let her know.
Still, she would write me up every time in hopes of, eventually, firing me. So, I started leaving the house ridiculously early. I would get in super early and leave early, and she hated that.
Eventually, her behavior got her fired. Till today, people still remember her, and they laugh at what a horrible person she was. I also had that write up removed from my file as it was recognized that she was treating many of her employees unfairly.”
His Lack Of Energy Was “Bringing Down The Team”
“I used to work in high-pressure sales. Once a week, the director would come in, and to get everyone energized, she would bring in Monster energy drinks. She would leave them in her office for the salespeople to have. Now, I liked the director. She was nice and professional. My manager, on the other hand, was a special piece. I got tired of drinking energy drinks, so I decided to not participate this one week. My boss then came to me and said, ‘You didn’t get a Monster. You know Wendy (let’s call her ‘Wendy’ for the purpose of this story) bought these for the entire division?’
I said that I was aware of that fact but that I didn’t want one. He came up to me and said, ‘Listen, go into that office, and get one right now.’
I was so stunned, I didn’t know what to do. I got up, grabbed a can, walked back to my desk, and just left it sitting there.
He came back and asked why I didn’t drink it. I told him (again) that I didn’t want to have one because my body didn’t normally do so well with that much caffeine. He asked me to walk into his office. Now I wasn’t the best at the job, in fact, I hated it. He stated that my lack of energy was extremely distracting (especially to him, but NOT to the rest of my team) and that it showed in my performance. He ended with saying, ‘If you keep this up, we may have to let you go.’
All I said was, ‘Okay, well, that’s unfortunate. However, I won’t drink something that takes a toll on my body.’
Low and behold, I ended up getting fired. I enjoyed two weeks of unemployment until I got a call back from the same company. They wanted to hire me for a different position and not sales. No interview and it was higher pay. I took it, and I loved it (I have since moved on to a better opportunity). As for my ex-boss, he ended up being terminated for illegal ‘stimulant’ use. He actually had the audacity send me a friend request on Facebook. I didn’t accept it, but I heard from my prior sales co-workers that he was asking for money.”
Her Little “Accident” Just Went Away
“I once worked for a company where the CIO (chief information officer) sideswiped a woman’s car as she was pulling into a parking space. The woman who was in the car that got hit then got out and stood beside her car looking at whatever damage was done.
The CIO got out of her Mercedes and brushed right past the woman without even saying a word to her. She just completely ignored her and walked away even though witnesses were there.
The woman (whose car was damaged) had to go to our company’s HR department, and from there, they cut her a check for the damages. The actual business paid for it and not the CIO. She got away scot-free, never admitted to anything, and never had to pay for anything.”
Condescending Tone Of Voice
“My first real job out of college was working as a sort of office manager/executive administrator position in a branch office for a financial services firm. The office had six financial advisers (who came in and out throughout the day), two interns, and a branch manager (who was officially like my worst boss EVER).
Nothing was ever said to me in a normal tone of voice. If it wasn’t sarcasm then it was condescending. EVERYTHING was condescending. Nothing I ever did was right. If a FedEx envelope was sealed, and it was even the tiniest bit crooked, I got yelled at and scolded for being messy. If it was perfectly straight, then I was asked, ‘Did you use a ruler to get that line? What, why can’t you just close an envelope like a normal person?’
Forget trying to have any sort of regular conversation with the guy. If I agreed with him, he would sneer and say things like, ‘That’s how you really feel? Yeah, right.’ If I asked a question, I got the, ‘Figure it out yourself, you’re so SMAAAART’ speech. That one still haunts me. Just like the way he used to draw out the word SMAAART in my face.
I regularly got accused of stealing, which I never did. I was also reminded, at least once a week, that he had cameras ALL OVER the office and that he was going to catch me someday. I was working with one of the interns on a project, and we had a column that wasn’t reconciling. The manager blew up on me and not the intern. He said that I had to come in over the weekend and work on it until the error was complete. Oh, and I was NOT going to get paid for that. At the time, I didn’t know that I should have been getting paid for working in a situation like that. I was also in a bad living situation, and I had grown up in an abusive home. So, I honestly thought that working unpaid to be punished for an error was totally normal.
I could go on and on about this guy and how he ordered me to pick up his dry cleaning. I had a panic attack once because it looked like his ugly suit was discolored until I ran into his girlfriend and subtly hinted about the suit, and she actually confirmed that it was SUPPOSED to look that way. I felt so bad because I’m pretty sure he treated her terribly, too based on her reactions like, ‘Yeah, it’s a good thing that you notice that kind of stuff. Thomas (not his real name) is really picky and intense. I know sometimes it’s too much.’
The incident that made me decide to leave was right before Christmas. One of the advisers had given me a small handful of Christmas cards for his clients and asked me to put postages on them. I asked if Thomas had given his approval, and the adviser said, ‘Yes.’
Later that day, Thomas saw the stack of envelopes sitting on my desk and started screaming at me about stealing postages (again). I explained that those were not mine and that they were for Jerry who told me he had Thomas’s approval to mail them. Thomas stomped into his office and called me in about half an hour later. He then said that he had spoken to Jerry who denied ever giving me envelopes to stamp. I handed over the envelopes and said to please look at the addresses. These were Jerry’s clients, and no one I knew personally. It didn’t matter. He was still yelling and raving at me over all of this. At this point, I was extremely shaken and trying to not break down completely all the while denying that I had never stolen from him, I never stole any postage, and if he was so concerned about my apparent theft habits, maybe he should have checked the cameras that he had all over the office.
At this point, he picked up his metal wastebasket from beside his desk and threw it at my head. Fortunately for me, I ducked and it hit the doorframe. Then he asked If I ‘liked that, huh?’ Was I ‘going to learn my lesson and not to back talk anymore?’ I didn’t say anything and walked back to my desk, finished the rest of my day, and left my keys behind. I walked home, told my boyfriend what had just happened, and ended up getting yelled at for quitting my job without having another one lined up. Never mind that we had plenty of savings and that he had a really good job. I found a new job two weeks later, but until the day that we broke up, I had to hear about how I was ‘stupid and lazy’ for quitting a job without finding a new one first.”
Falsely Accused Of Theft
“A long time ago, I was fired from my job as an assistant manager at a convenience store by the district manager who hated me. I applied for unemployment insurance, and the company said that I wasn’t eligible because I had been fired for a specific cause. I wasn’t, but that was a matter for the review board to decide. We showed up for the review, and I was prepared to explain how my direct boss had decided to the leave keys to our inner safe out in the outer safe area overnight, which resulted in more than $100 going missing and the reason that they gave ME for getting fired.
Mind you, this wasn’t even my error. However, I was the person on duty when it was discovered, so the district manager tried to say that I had falsified paperwork. Uh, okay. I settled in to hear her tale of woe. Then she proceeded to show how I had ‘padded paperwork’ to hide the missing money. Uh, no. I showed them that my manager had accidentally put $50 extra into the bank the week before the incident they had fired me for. So, I made a note of that on the paperwork for the day she made the error and then made a note of it on the day that I was doing the paperwork for the day that showed the $50 missing.
The panel of reviewers asked my district manager how I SHOULD have noted it, and she went off on some incomprehensible and highly illegal (did I mention one of my degrees is in accounting?) way of ‘subtracting’ the amount from the numbers in a way that would under-report income. I got as far as ‘But that…’ when one of the panel members shushed me. They informed her that what she was trying to tell me to do was illegal, and they would be informing the local tax office in case they wanted to perform an audit of the company. Oh, and yes, I was eligible for my unemployment money. Win win win, and the look on the DM’s face? Classic. I wish I had a photograph!”
The Flier Incident Really Took The Cake
“My supervisor at this nonprofit was maybe a couple of years older than me, and for the six months that I worked there, she never bothered to set me up with my own computer. I’d work in the mornings, and she tended to show up around lunchtime. She told me I could use her’s, which was pretty annoying in and of itself, but more often than not, she would come in about an hour before I was scheduled to leave and stand over me while eating her lunch as I worked at her desk. I’d say things like, ‘Oh. I’ll go find somewhere else to work.’
She would say, ‘No, no, you’re fine.’ And continue to stand over me as I sat at her desk.
She was also the director of marketing, and for about two weeks, she had me walk around the city putting up flyers in various cafes/buildings for this class we were hosting. Two weeks later, she was frustrated because no one had signed up. As the director of marketing, you should have had a better strategy than just putting up flyers in the coffee shops around town.”
He Found Himself In Charge Of The Whole Store At The End Of His First Week
“I walked into an off-the-rack suit store with my resume in hand and spoke to the store’s assistant manager. The guy was a couple of years older than me and looked like the kind of guy that would sell you a timeshare in Florida with his all fake tan and bad hair. Anyway, he hired me on the spot, though, so he instantly became my new best friend. Turns out, the manager of the store was on vacation in his native Jordan but would be back by the end of the week. Okay, cool.
The job itself was pretty laid back. We spent a lot of time folding clothes and even more time slacking off behind the till waiting for people to come in and buy ugly suits. I was pretty good at selling things and even better at slacking off. So, everything seemed pretty peachy for that first week.
The assistant manager was going to go camping at the end of the week, but I thought it would be cool because the real manager was coming back the day before. Except, all of a sudden, the country Jordan revolted, and the first thing the revolutionaries did was take the airfields. So, our store manager was now stuck in Jordan. I tried to convince the assistant manager to stick around for the weekend given that I had less than a week of experience and no training. He decided to give me a key and go camping anyway.
With less than a week of experience, I was now the ‘de facto’ manager of the shop. On Saturday, the vice president of operations ended up coming in from across the country to see how the shop was doing. Oh, he was not happy, not happy at all. As a result, the assistant manager was fired. I was given his responsibilities and a very brief rundown on what my new job was supposed to be while the VPO was storming around the store trying to make it presentable, barking orders, and being (understandably, I think) very grumpy about stuff.
My new day was to come in at 7:30 in the morning to prepare to be open by 8 AM. If we were to open five minutes late, we would accrue a $500 fine from the mall. So, there was no wiggle room. I was the only person on staff able to come in that early (there were only three people on the staff that weren’t in Jordan). I was also the only person who could reliably close. So, I started working 14-hour days, every day, for a little over a month trying to do a job that I was unprepared, untrained, and underqualified for.
To be fair, the guys at HQ were great. They offered me a lot of support and were the ones to get the store through its roughest patches, walked me through payroll management and scheduling, helped me do the orders, and calmly got me through merchandising and display making. That month was one of the hardest I’ve ever worked (it wasn’t just the long hours but constantly trying to keep up with stuff that I wasn’t prepared to do), but the HQ guys made it as easy as they could on me.
Then the manager got back from Jordan, and he was ticked. Nothing was like how he had left it. The displays were kind of a disaster, his assistant manager had been fired while he was absent, and the guys from HQ were nagging him about letting his store get that out-of-whack in the first place. His job was now much harder than it would have been before if he had just come back home on time. However, he decided that the best way to deal with it all was to take it out on me.
He snapped at me. He berated me in front of the other employees. He made it very clear that the state of the store was my fault and that I had screwed everything up. He complained about me to the HQ guys. For a full week after he came back, I was working the same schedule I had been working while he was in Jordan, but now I was getting put down the entire time. So, what did I do? I quit.
The guys from HQ were unhappy with that choice and made the manager call me at home to ask me to come back. I went in to discuss the terms of my return, and it was pretty clear that the manager wanted nothing to do with me by offering me exactly nothing above the same entry-level position I had already been hired for originally. No pay raise, no promotion, and no acknowledgment even. The guy never even thanked me for keeping his store from collapsing. Just $10 an hour to continue being his butt monkey.
I went to work at a comic shop after that.”
He’d Hidden Cameras To Watch Her
“I worked for a small independent company and ran their little office doing admin, accounting, etc. I hated my boss as he was an egomaniac and probably a psychopath, but he got on with the job. However, unbeknownst to me, he had decided to plant a hidden camera disguised as a movement sensor which was perfectly placed to watch me. He told me off for doing a crossword while he was out of the office. I had a snoop around, found it, and quit.”
Every Day Was Another Fight Over Nothing
“I had a boss who tried to turn every single interaction into an argument or confrontation. I would be at work, going about my business, doing the same things that I did every day, and he would come around and our interactions would go something like this:
Him: ‘I want you to do it this way.’
Me: ‘That’s how I’m doing it. That’s how I’ve always done it.’
Him: ‘Don’t argue with me. Just do what I’m telling to do!’
Me: ‘But I…’
Him: ‘IF YOU CAN’T DO IT THE RIGHT WAY, I WILL FIND SOMEONE WHO CAN!’
My only course of action around this guy was to act dumb and make him feel like he was a wise old sage because he had been in this business longer than me. Sometimes 30 years of experience just means that you’ve sucked at your job for 30 years. Oh, and during my last review with him, he wanted to know why we weren’t better friends.”
A Sexist Bully
“I worked at a grocery store for almost three years. At first, it was great! The job was easy with lots of hours, and I was making money, so that was cool, since I was living at home, at the time, trying to save up for a car. But then, corporate changes happened. They fired one of my managers and brought in the general manager as a new permanent manager. I would often ask him things to make sure that I was doing it right so that I wouldn’t get yelled at later. Only to be yelled at with, ‘It’s common sense, you’re not that bright are you?’ whenever I was asking for reassurance.
Anyway, I had a front end manager who was basically my second mom. She had been there for almost 10 years (for as long as I could remember). She helped me begin driving and took me to my driving test. She let me vent to her or cry in the back room about personal stuff. I loved her. Unfortunately, the GM loved to bully her. To the point where he would make her cry, a lot. And note, he only bullied the female employees because the men did everything ‘perfectly’ each time. There were three male workers there, including him. 90% of the store was run by women.
So, not only did he bully her, but he also bullied me as well and told me how ‘I didn’t ‘t even deserve a job and that I was stupid, incompetent, and would be just like my dad, etc.’ So, I cried every time I worked with him. When I quit, he fed me some lies about how he loved working with me and that I was the best worker, etc. Since I quit this past March, THREE OTHER PEOPLE have replaced me and either quit out of fear, or they have been fired because they were too intimidated by him.”
She’d Curse Him Out Over The Phone Over A Bunch Of Trivial Nonsense
“I used to work at a museum. The board president basically cussed me out over the phone before a big seasonal event could take place by saying how she heard from other people that I was not giving 100% dedication to my job and that I needed to step my game up or else I would be facing some serious consequences. Everyone was pretty stressed out due to the event, and I was pretty ticked. I emailed her after the conversation because it had come completely out of left field. I had never had anyone complain about how I did my job. Tourists, the executive director (my direct boss), or even the president, or the rest of the executive board. No one had complained before. So, I asked her who it was that was having a problem.
Turns out, no one had said a word to her about the job I was doing. She hadn’t ‘heard’ from anyone. She just listed a bunch of her own grievances about what I was doing (wearing a costume to work on Halloween and not labeling some artifacts that she had brought in which had zero historical value, keeping my bike out of sight in the office, and other trivial stuff). I told her that she could just tell me if she was unhappy with these things as they happened, especially seeing as I was never told not to do those things rather than cursing me out over the phone months later. I lost a lot of respect for her that day, but I was still employed. So, I counted my blessings.
Also, I found out that the executive director and the president were paying me $1.25 less than they originally agreed to. When I had first gotten this job (two years ago), they gave me a job description with the original pay listed on it. Naively, I didn’t make a copy of it. When I started the job, my paycheck was much less than I thought it would be, and I was given another job description with the lower pay on it. I didn’t make a fuss because I was hard up for money, and I needed the job. Plus, the museum was kind of doing some shady stuff. Additionally, I was an idiot who had no backbone at the time.
Anyway, some stuff went down earlier this year. My boss and the entire executive board stepped down from their positions, and I found my original job description with the original pay. Needless to say, I’m now getting paid what I was supposed to plus some back pay. Working here used to be a nightmare, but the new executive board is pretty nice.”