I never quite understood bosses that felt as though they needed to be rude to get their point across and to be respected. In fact, being rude accomplishes the exact opposite, resulting in a lack of respect from employees. Power tripping times 100.
(Content has been edited for clarity).
Matters Of The Heart
“It wasn’t my intention for it to be my last day but it was, and it was epic. I was working in a whole foods deli when I was 15, and I was making salads to be sold in the store (note they were chicken caesar salads with no chicken and no caesar dressing). I was halfway done when my jerk of a manager came out and lost her crap on me. Apparently, I had made the salads wrong and put the cheese on top of the croutons when I should’ve put the croutons on the cheese. She went off for 20 minutes, yelling at the top of her lungs about how teenagers are too immature to work in the deli, and how I should have never been hired.
When she finished, I yelled back about how she was a huge female dog for making me work 2 to 10 p.m. one day, and 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. the next consecutively and how she treated all of her employees like crap. She then told me that I needed to watch my tone, but I didn’t care and said ‘screw you, I quit.’ She got this smug look on her face and told me that since I was quitting without a proper notice that I can never work for whole foods again. I respond by saying, ‘I’ll remember that when I’m a 55-year-old who’s only skills are being a jerk and making sandwiches’. She looked like she was trying to say something but then fell. She was having a heart attack and had to be carried away by a stretcher to a hospital.”
On Christmas Eve
“While working as a waiter, my manager was always giving us an unwarranted amount of crap. She was always rude to us in front of customers, very quick to put us down and never said thank you for anything.
It was coming up to Christmas, and a different company had just offered me employment in a role that I wanted to pursue my degree. On Christmas Eve, (one of the busiest nights of the year) my boss called me incompetent in front of several customers and claimed that she was the only one capable of doing anything in the place.
I turned around and said to her, ‘If you think you’re that good and don’t need me, you can shove your job.’ I then walked out mid-shift, and she was left to deal with all those customers short staffed. It was one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done.
What made it better was that I had received a tax reimbursement a few days before so I didn’t need the money I had lost either.
That was a good day.”
Good Luck And Good Retins
“I used to work a secondary job at a little convenience store in a college town. I had a full-time job that paid well and was just using it for supplemental income. It was owned by a nice Middle Eastern man that unfortunately had to sell it because he had to move back to Iran to take care of his father. The guy that bought it was a pretentious jerk that said he bought it just so specific groups of immigrants couldn’t have it. He had no idea how to operate the store at all, even the tills. He assumed that because I rode a Harley Davidson and carried a weapon on my days off, that I hated immigrants too, and he told me why he bought it on his first day ever working. Which was also the day I was training my boss on how to do things he should have known as a store owner. As soon as he said a racial slur out loud in the nasty tone he did, I promptly took my store key off of my key ring, gave it to him, and told him ‘good luck with the Friday night drink rush around 8 p.m.’ and walked out.
The original store owner Muhammad heard about it and sent me a thank you card, and said he was not used to people treating him with any respect in America.”
Head Of Human Resources
“Between my senior and junior years in high school, I was a summer intern in the Human Resources department at a local contracting firm. I conducted job interviews, filled out and processed new hire paperwork, made phone calls, etc. At $13.50 an hour and 30 hours a week I thought I had a pretty sweet deal for someone who hadn’t even graduated from high school.
Well, one day I started work, and my supervisor, the head of HR was the starkest raving jerk I’d ever met. She would reprimand me for inconsequential things, and on top of that wasn’t even that good at her job. I had to correct formatting and spelling mistakes on half her documents. The only thing she was good at was payroll and handling expense reports, which she pawned off on me half the time anyway so she could watch Netflix. In doing this, I discovered she had paid for her SUV as an ‘expense report’ that she could only approve as head of HR and payroll. I checked the employee handbook, and as I thought, this was against company policy. I was trying to avoid further conflict with her, considering the pay was nice, and I got my mileage compensated, so I got over it. In my off time I also acted and worked for a Community Theatre, and in addition to being on stage for the shows I was in, I’d print programs and flyers for the other productions while at work because I didn’t have a printer at home. Maybe I should have asked someone, but what’s done is done. This continued for about a month.
She discovered me printing programs during my break and blew up at me, saying I’m ‘disrespecting her by not asking first.’ She said I was ‘irresponsibly wasting company funds’ and all that. People around started to notice, including the CEO of the company (it was a smallish firm, so he was around everyone a lot). I was tired of it, and I said, ‘you know what, you’re right ma’am. I’m sorry, especially considering how company funds are being misused already around here. Did you know someone paid for their new SUV as a company expense?’ Her face went white. The CEO came over, he liked me from my first interview and said to me, ‘Say what now son?’, so I went to my workstation and pulled up the reports she had sent me.
She was out of a job by the end of the day. I was temporarily in charge of Human Resources, and I got a pay raise and a free steak dinner from Pappas Brothers Steakhouse in Houston, courtesy of the CEO. The rest of the summer was pretty good from there.”
Burning Bridges
“I administered a regional data center, so essentially if you needed it – we offered it. What that meant was that I single-handedly kept over 100 thousand in revenue flowing monthly, with no helpdesk and engineers to busy filling out their blocks to help me. After a little more than a year of busting my behind, I put in my resignation. It stated that I was overworked and needed help if they wanted me to stay. I got a 20-percent raise, for which most people would be thankful. But, I didn’t want the money, I wanted a staff that I could use to delegate between the tier one and two stuff.
I called in sick on a Monday; I wasn’t sick, I just felt stressed and crushed under the anxiety of trying to juggle all my projects. My manager emailed me and said that he really needed me in the office, and needed somebody that he could rely on in the data center. That did it. I went in the next morning, cleaned my desk and deleted any personal stuff I had saved. I walked out without saying a word. I went back to my apartment, emailed the bosses that I was done and that they were free to find somebody more reliable.
Within a month my manager quit because he started digging into everything that I had on my plate, and realized that he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it either.
Over the next six months, they tried to get me to come back three times, I politely declined, and I’ve started a consulting company with an engineer that also left.
Sometimes burning that bridge is necessary.”
‘I Don’t Work Here Anymore’
“I was working for a furniture company, doing home delivery. Being one of the more reliable employees I was always scheduled to work Saturdays. We always had at least one driver call out, so I always ended up with an overloaded truck and a 16 to 18 hour day ahead of me.
My boss would often tell us in meetings that if we thought we could do better, we were wrong and that we would be fired if we were caught applying to competitors (wish I had recorded him saying such is illegal here).
I ended up getting a better paying job with a moving company, so rather than give two weeks notice, I showed up on Saturday morning with my uniforms stuffed into two trash bags. I dropped them in front of his desk and told him, ‘I don’t work here anymore’ and walked out to cheers from several other drivers. I felt bad that they’d have extra work to do, but it was worth it to see the look on my boss’ face.”
The Winner
“When I was 19, I worked in a deli at a grocery store. I hated my boss; she was a spineless woman that loved to embarrass her least favorite employees in front of customers and managers.
We had a contest for a $100 gift card to the store. Whoever got the most deli tray orders won the contest. One day she’d just got done yelling at me for something and then told me to answer the phone. I picked it up, and a lady wanted 200 fruit/meat/cheese trays ready in a couple of weeks. The contest was over, and she hated giving me that gift card. I went to pick it up on my day off, and she said: ‘I need you to come in tonight and close.’ I said I would but then never showed up. I had 40 missed calls from her in just two days asking if I was going to show up for work! On top of that, I wasn’t the one who had to make those trays. Apparently, a few other people quit, and someone told me she got stuck making most of them.”
‘No Problem, I’ll Be Right There’
“I got a part-time job at a gaming cafe. I would work during the day at my regular job and then go to the game cafe at night. The last straw came during the launch of ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops.’ I told my boss in advance that if he’s planning on a midnight launch (not selling the game, just having a play party or tournament or something) that I’m not available after midnight. He said that it was no problem and that he was not going to do anything anyway.
The phone rang at 11:55 p.m. and my boss told me to get down to GameStop as soon as possible and to start handing out flyers for the store, and after that go back and re-open so we can have a tournament until 3 or 4 a.m. I reminded him that I told him I was only available until midnight. He screams ‘GET THE HECK DOWN HERE.’ No problem, I told him. I’ll be right there.
Yeah, I locked up and went home. I woke up to a dozen voicemails that I promptly deleted. Walk in the next day and handed my key over to the associate working. The awkward part is that my day job was right next door to the cafe. I saw the owner almost every day and he would glare at me but wouldn’t dare say anything.
I also got to call over there a bunch of times and complain about the noise.”
Sarcasm For The Win
“I didn’t quit, but my fixed-term contract was up, so my coworkers threw me a goodbye party on my last day. All my coworkers had been nice, my manager was a great guy, but the head of the office had been an absolute jerk: incompetent, manipulative, dishonest, cowardly and constantly demeaning to everyone while pretending to be good chums with the people around her. So when my turn to say a few words came, I thanked my coworkers, then with a wide smile, told the head of the office that she had a wonderful, hardworking team under her orders and that she should keep on taking good care of these people because they deserved it.
I’m still in contact with the friends I made there, and according to them, the jerk boss spent a good part of the following weeks cursing me at every turn. Because deep down she knew she was terrible to people, she took the compliment as sarcasm but couldn’t call me out on it.”
The Lazy Area Manager
“My first job after college was working in low management at a rental car company. It sucked.
For the two years I was there, I was constantly being screwed over by my incompetent, lazy area manager (36-year-old male). Not only did his poor planning and complete lack of foresight cause my branch to lose significant revenue (and consequently diminish my paychecks), but he was a manipulative double-crosser who we all suspected of having an affair with this 21-year-old girl who worked for me.
I had found another job which would allow me to break into my current career, so I gave two weeks notice and was planning a peaceful departure. However, during those last two weeks, the 21-year-old girl left her email up on one of the office computers – so I started reading through it. Sure enough, I stumbled upon a months-long thread between her and my area manager; it was a dream come true. The emails discussed dates they had been on, flirted excessively back and forth, and one even explained how she had been laying in his bed after he left for work that morning. Hmm.
It was my company’s practice to have someone from human resources conduct an exit interview whenever someone left the company – so I printed those bad boys, handed them to HR at my interview, and threw him under the bus as the sole reason I was leaving the company.
He was terminated six weeks later.”
Pay People What They Are Owed
“I spent six months as a personal assistant to a finance guy while trying to stay afloat when I first moved to New York. I cooked all his meals, cleaned his apartment, dealt with all of his bills, basically did all the grunt work in his life. I did a fantastic job, and he paid pretty well in cash, so I was pretty happy with it. He was a heavy drinker but mostly after I was gone, so I just had to clean up a lot of bottles and occasionally vomit. No big deal.
Then one evening he tried to put the moves on me, and I told him politely that I wasn’t interested. I needed the job, and I wanted to just chalk it up to him having one too many drinks. He was extremely insistent and I eventually just left.
I wake up the next morning to an email that says to drop my keys off with the building, that my services were no longer required, and furthermore, I would not be getting paid for the last three weeks because things were ‘missing.’ He dared me to try and fight him in small claims court since I had no contract, nothing on paper and had been paid in cash. He knew my financial situation was pretty desperate and thought I couldn’t do anything about it.
I never replied to that email and did not return his keys, knowing that he was leaving for a trip to Guatemala in three days. I had booked the tickets. Three days is a long time to stew and be angry.
I assume he told the doormen to be on the lookout for me. However, he did not tell the guys who worked the freight elevator, because I was able to wheel an entire huge hockey bag of stuff up to his apartment. Then I got to work.
I called and reported his Amex, Visa, and ATM cards stolen, except one, which he hadn’t brought with him. I called and refunded his return ticket from Guatemala City. He didn’t have renter’s insurance (and had scoffed at me when I suggested he get it, saying it was a waste of money) or I would have canceled that too. I canceled his cell phone service.
I went through his computer and sent pictures of him blowing a guy to every contact in his outlook (I was too dumb to automate this, and had to send them five at a time). One by one I changed the passwords on every service I had access to. I spent a solid six hours doing all of this.
Remember that hockey bag? Inside were two five-gallon buckets full of waste motor oil, plus a roller and an extendable painter’s rod.
If you’re wondering, ten gallons of motor oil is more than enough to cover every single surface in a 750-square-foot apartment, including the insides of photo albums and every piece of clothing inside of it. It’s enough to do a number on an expensive Crestron electronic system that you are too stupid to work in the first place, and that whole wall of LPs you’ve been collecting your entire life. It was enough to make you question your decision not to pay someone just because they won’t screw your bald, drunken behind.
Anyhow, I had to leave the city for a bit after that and spent quite a while worrying about it, but I had no regrets, except that I could only get $750 of the money he owed me off that last atm card.
I never heard from him again after that. No angry e-mails, nothing. I don’t know if he even filed charges. About four years later he died in a car accident, driving under the influence, of course. A friend of mine sent me his obituary. I’ve never been happier to get an email, and hope he’s enjoying the fiery depths down below.
So ya, pay people what you owe them.”
‘I Never Saw Him Again’
“I didn’t quit, but a co-worker did. I was working as an emergency medical technician, and my partner had been doing the job for far too long. He was the quintessential burnt out medic. So one day we were getting our behinds kicked, just back to back to back calls, not even enough time to get a gas station lunch. Finally, it was about 3 p.m., and we are at the bottom of the rotation, and we ventured out to get something to eat. Dispatch then sends us to a call (difficulty breathing I believe). My partner protests, saying that not only are we on the bottom of the rotation but that we weren’t even the closest unit. Dispatch pretty much says, ‘I don’t care, you are doing this call.’ My partner, in an odd calm display, just says ‘responding.’
We got to one of the biggest intersections in the city and my partner slammed on the brakes. He turned the ambulance off but left the lights and sirens on, took the keys and hucks them as far as he could and then started to walk away. I sat in the passenger seat in the middle of the intersection with lights and sirens still going like…what the heck?
It was the last time any of us ever saw him.
Oh, there was also the dispatcher that said she was going out for a smoke and never came back in. A few months later we see her facebook, and she is down in Florida sitting on the beach.”