"The Office" is one of the most popular T.V. shows of all time, and the boss, Michael Scott, is a huge reason why. He's funny, sweet, charming, and a little awkward at times. Who wouldn't want a boss like that?
People on Reddit who have had a boss like Michael Scott share what it's ready like. Content has been edited for clarity.
One Could Say This Was A “Golden Ticket” Idea
“My boss is certainly Michael Scott-esque. When I first started, I was essentially Pam. I was both receptionist and his assistant to some extent. My favorite story was back when we were prepping for a conference. Some context, he’s terrible with the English language in general and will mangle phrases and descriptions to no end (how the turntables…).
So on a group call, he kept talking about wanting a ‘golden hamster ball’ to use for giveaways. He was raving about how great it would be, spinning around while people walked by, all the while everyone on the call was just sitting in confused silence. However by that point, I had become so good at decoding his nonsense that I knew he was referring to a gold raffle cage and sent him image privately asking if it’s what he was thinking. To this day, he still talks about the fact I can read his mind and must be psychic. And he still refers to it as a hamster ball.
All in all, he’s a pretty nice guy and a solid boss. Hired me based on a gut feeling and has been decent to me ever since. I think I knew it would be a good fit when during the interview he tried to tell me about the four pillars of the company and forgot one.
Told me later it was ‘Knowledge.'”
This Is Their Version Of “The Dundies”
“My dad told me a story about his boss who was giving out awards to everyone in honor of how long they’ve worked there, and he would give speeches for each person.
A woman employee received her award and he gave a speech about the story of how she came to work there. And he said, ‘At first I didn’t want to hire her because she was so hot.’
My dad’s not working there anymore, but I love that story because I will not picture Michael Scott giving Pam a Dundie and saying that about her.”
“You Couldn’t Avoid Hearing It”
“I had a manager at my previous job that really, really tried his best to be everyone’s best friend. He loved giving pep talks and thought he could raise our abysmal morale by being Mr. Positivity. He’d crack jokes, randomly burst into song, and sneak up behind you to yell, ‘You’re doing a great job!’
Unfortunately, he was also super incompetent at his job. He relied heavily on a junior colleague for help with technical stuff (they practically did his whole job for him) and spent days working on paperwork that should really only take an hour or two. If you had a problem, his answer was usually either to stare blankly at you until you left or to say, ‘Think positive and it’ll work itself out!’
The thing he did I hated the most: whenever people would apply to work at the company, he’d print out the stack of resumes, sit at his desk and read aloud all of the parts he found ‘funny.’ He’d laugh at people for working at McDonald’s or other fast food places. He loved finding grammar mistakes and making fun of them.
If someone had a cringe-y objective statement, he’d guffaw over that too. This was all done loudly, and it was an open office so you couldn’t avoid hearing it.”
This Honestly Sounds Like A Deleted Episode
“Worked with a genuine Michael Scott. He was a nice, well-meaning person who just did some absurd things.
We had kidnapping drills one day, where we learned how to ‘not be kidnapped’. Notably, this was a regular, boring office in a regular, boring suburb. No reason why kidnapping would be on anybody’s radar.
He and several of the guys randomly broke out into a push-up contest. Again. White-collar office. Middle-aged dudes in khakis.
Couldn’t remember the nationality of our Hispanic colleague. Tried to ‘learn Spanish’ to make her feel special when she returned from maternity leave. What he learned was NOT Spanish, and she was from Portugal. She knew like, five words of Spanish.
Disappeared for four days. No call. No email. Wouldn’t respond to any of our attempts to reach him. Finally, someone drove out to his house to make sure he was alive. He was. He’d just forgotten to tell us he was taking the week off and then lost his phone in a lake.
There were many, many moments like these. Great boss. Genuinely cared about everyone in the company. Occasional moments of brilliance, where he really got things done. But my goodness, so many moments of ridiculousness.”
It’s Like When Michael Invited Himself To Jim’s Party, But Worse
“My mom’s boss was the head manager at an office job in suburbia, a pretty similar number of employees and function to ‘The Office’ in the show. He was in his late 40’s at the time and invited himself to my mom’s birthday party at our house one year. Basically, it was just my siblings and a few family friends meeting up to play corn hole and chat for a couple of hours.
He showed up in pastel blue shorts, a pink polo, and flip-flops with a case of Natural Light. He got hammered by like nin pm and started yelling at everyone. He saw a couple of our neighbors (younger guys) drinking next door and took the liberty to invite them over. Eventually, he ended up in a wrestling match with one of the neighbors in the living room, which he finished by lifting the neighbor up in the air and body slamming him directly onto our coffee table. His final act of the evening was pooping his pants in the kitchen and passing out on the linoleum.”
Michael Probably Did Something Similar To Pam
“I had a boss, and I am not kidding it was like he watched The Office and took it for a real documentary and applied Michael Scott’s management lessons accordingly. Not the craziest, but the best example of a daily interaction with him:
He decided that the reason we were struggling to keep to time frames, is because our checklist was not right. However, he has no experience in our field of work, so he did not know what was actually needed (the real issue was severe understaffing). But he got it in his head, and there was no talking him out of it.
So I redid the checklist to have the same layout, I just changed the order of the items. He didn’t actually realize I changed the order, he just took one look and decided that nope, it’s not right.
So I went back to the original version and put the checkboxes on the left instead of the right. That was literally, all I did.
Apparently, it was perfect and we would see an improvement in our time frames because of his idea to ‘fix’ the checklist.”
“He Doesn’t Know What The Heck He’s Doing!”
“I worked in a print marketing/graphic design department, and my manager would always come around trying to give photoshop tips and whatever (photoshop was basically the only program he kinda knew). I had a regular, real nice preacher, who would come in a couple of times a month to print out little event flyers. He always had a print-ready image, wanted x amount of quarter sheet flyers (cut), and x amount of full sheet. So of course I’d pull up MS publisher, print, cut, and get him out the door in just a few minutes.
One day, I was going on my lunch break, and as I’m walking out I see him walking in. My manager assures me he’ll have it taken care of.
About 30 minutes later I’m back and let me tell you, I have never seen a preacher man show a hint of anger, but there he was just fuming. He said, ‘Thank God you’re back I really need to get going and he doesn’t know what the heck he’s doing.’
I get to the computer and there he is with the image in photoshop with a sheet size canvas trying to precisely shift four copies of the image into place with guides on. And honestly, you can totally do that even though it takes a little longer, so I’m not sure what issues he was having. Didn’t even ask because I immediately went to task getting the customer on his way.
The manager was appropriately humbled and even came back later so I could show him what to do.”
Never A Bad Time For A Pep Talk
“I used to work stocking shelves at a grocery store. Thanksgiving was coming up and we were slammed. We were getting a massive shipment in, almost twice as many pallets as we normally get. After we unload the truck, we’re all scrambling to get things done so we can leave on time.
Well our manager calls an emergency meeting. We all get into the back office and he proceeded to have a 45-minute meeting about how this is a big shipment and we can’t waste time. I thought it was a weird joke, but he thought he was giving us a pep rally.”
Sounds More Like Creed
“My boss (Jay) became everyone’s weed man.
He seriously dealt his homegrown weed to 50% of our guests who were staying at our hotel. Made a huge profit on it. He was a very ‘bro’ guy (even though he was 45), and would go out and party with half the kids that came into the place, it was absurd. We had a whole staff meeting that consisted of a crash-course on weed (different strains and whatnot) and how if any guest asked for the ‘Jay Special,’ Jay was to be contacted immediately.
He let us get away with way too much. Seriously. I got into a huge mess with my old roommates and was looking for a new place to live, and Jay told me to just live in the hotel for a while. So I stayed there for two months for free, no questions asked.
We would have this one crazy homeless lady who was always high out of her mind who would try to steal the free coffee from the lobby. Every time Jay saw her, he would actually BODYCHECK her to the floor. She would scream at him, saying ‘Get off of me you weirdo!’
And he would say, ‘I’m not the weirdo, you’re the weirdo!’
And they’d just go back and forth calling each other weirdo.
She’d sneak back into the hotel to shoot up in the bathroom, and would make a mess everywhere because she always seemed to miss her vein. There would be blood all over the ceiling and walls of the women’s bathroom, it looked like a crime scene and everyone was horrified. Not Jay though, he’d just grab some bleach and a rag and mumble about ‘that crazy weirdo.’
And he did not seem to care at all about the customers. If a customer wanted to speak to the manager, Jay would be right there, with a slice of pizza in his hand. All that man did was eat. He’d listen to a customer complaint and nod while still munching down on his food.
Speaking of food, he stole from the vending machines all the time. I ate so many free bags of lays potato chips when I was there I feel sick just thinking about it.
We also had groups of high school kids that would come through for field trips. Whenever a group of kids gave Jay trouble, he’d go up to their room and peel the tape off their door (so they’d get in trouble with their school) At least two kids got kicked off of their school trips and had to be picked up by their parents because of this.
He was definitely unique.”
A Very Important Meeting Indeed
“Once, he came out to the office where all of us sit in cubicles and told us we needed to have an emergency conference.
‘Get up, get up everyone in the conference room, this is really important let’s go!’ he said.
So we all go in, he turns off the lights and the projector turns on. On the screen is not what we expected. It was an ultrasound video of our coworkers GOLDEN RETRIEVER. Our boss wanted us to guess how many puppies we thought we saw in the ultrasound and that the person who guessed closest would win 100 dollars.”
The Harry Potter Version Of “Threat Level Midnight”
“I worked for the female version of Michael Scott. About the time Harry Potter started becoming huge, she wrote a story that was pretty much an exact rip-off and all but forced us to read the first two chapters. She then redecorated her office to look like a wizard room in a castle. This included plastic wallpaper that looked like cobblestone and fake LED candles for lights.
She even had a small wooden table in the middle with several wooden wands and spell books. Upper management finally had enough and took away her office and moved her to a cubicle with the rest of us.”
How Jan Was As A Boss
“My boss was certifiably insane. One day, I had to leave early and she told me to be sure and change my voice mail before I left. Of course, I forgot.
I’m sitting in my office the next day and she comes storming in. She always wore these heels and you could tell how mad she was by how loud she walked. Well, I heard her coming a long way away. Anyway, she storms into my office and says, ‘You didn’t change your voice mail yesterday so I had to handle something and couldn’t do my errands at lunch. On my way home, I was in an 8 car pile up and wrecked my Lexis.’
This is the Lexis she came to work at the state to buy even though she had a huge pension from work. She then starts crying and storms off.
I’m stunned at first, then I get upset I’m about to get up and go tell her where she can shove her Lexis when she comes bouncing back into my office, all happy and laughing and say, ‘I shouldn’t have blamed you for that, sorry,’ and goes bouncing off down the hall.
In most other ways, she was a great boss. She would fight the devil himself for us and she gave me one of the biggest pay raises of my life but she was insane.”
“Couldn’t Help But Like Him”
“I worked for a great guy who was competent at his job and at building an amazing team that worked as well together as you could ever want a team to. The guy was a good person – loved his family, loved what he did, etc. You couldn’t help but like him. But he always did weird stuff.
He would constantly refer to himself by nicknames no one else ever called him. We were never sure if these were college nicknames or what, but he was the only person who ever used them.
He would, somehow, go into way too much about his wife that annoyed him but do it in a way that you could clearly tell he loved her and didn’t mean to paint her negatively. The main thing here was he would always do ok and then, without warning, cross into TMI territory. Always.
He spoke all the time using phrases that could easily be double entendres, dirty in nature, and everyone in the room would take them that way. But this guy seemed so genuinely naive that you could never tell if he realized how he phrased things. Like, he seemed genuinely sincere in using the phrasing he used.
He would try to talk about his younger days and all his ‘conquests’ but, somehow, every single story would have some strange subtext that seemed dirty in nature. Again, he seemed to not realize any of it at all, he seemed to just be genuinely sharing his stories. They were clearly TMI, but that’s beside the point.
The one thing he really wasn’t good at was confrontation. He couldn’t confront anyone when they really needed it. Luckily we were a small, tight team and policed things well ourselves. Whenever he’d try to approach some sensitive, managerial topic, he would wind up cracking the corniest joke you’d ever heard when he couldn’t take the tension anymore.
Finally, he made great money but was so, ridiculously cheap. I worked for him when I was first married. We received a set of everyday eating utensils as a wedding gift. I told him I was planning to donate the ten-year-old set of silverware I had purchased and used my entire single life – we’re talking a $20 set of knives, forks, and spoons here. He took the silverware off me and gave it to his wife as an ANNIVERSARY GIFT. Said she had wanted ‘new’ silverware for years and was so thrilled he got her some… Things like that, all the time. Dude was beyond frugal.
Seriously, though, we all loved him and were glad to work for him and would have done just about anything for him. Total Michael Scott.”
Something Very Similar Did Happen On “The Office”
“At an old retail place I worked that no longer exists, we had a big, special ‘VIP Day’ where sales folks were supposed to dress up and we were to do our best to make the store feel like an event. Anyway, the store was notorious for ending the careers of many general managers, and one, in particular, was a real piece of work. I could tell a couple of stories about his idiocy, but my favorite is what happened at this VIP Event.
Honestly, there’s not much to tell, but I feel like if The Office was on Netflix originally, this could have been something Michael Scott might have done by accident, but it happened in our store for reals.
So the freaking guy hired ‘ladies of the night’ to come to the store to ‘class up’ the place. Three girls showed up in their thickest makeup and skimpiest outfits (all red outfits because it matched the store’s theme.) I think Michael Scott would have done it by accident and it could have been funny for a sitcom, but our general manager did it deliberately. He ended up spending an hour in his office with them and the doors closed. No one did anything about it, but we really should have. He was fired for unrelated reasons.
That having been said, I can totally see something similar happening on The Office.
Another time, the company had rented out a theater for a conference of all the general managers of the company to attend. My general manager at the time, the same guy from the previous story, was sitting in the middle of the theater and tried to sneak a fart but pooped his pants. He had to excuse himself and shimmy out, stinking poop and all, past all of his peers. Apparently, he left a trail of liquid feces all the way up the aisle.
Before he worked at our store, he was a low-level manager at another location, where he came to work very hungover one day and ended up passing out on the sales floor. He was SO HATED there, that no one bothered to help him and let him sleep it off right there on the sales floor. Very unprofessional of them, but completely understandable after having met the guy. Again, the company doesn’t exist anymore and the gloves are off.”
“All Of The Awkwardness, None Of The Nice”
“I work in a pretty big department, around 150 people, and every so often the boss will gather all 150 people for a big ‘morale boosting’ meeting. Every time, it’s horribly awkward.
I think the worst of these was just after a dragon boat event our company participated in, so he does this speech about teamwork. Then, he rolls out a 60inch TV and proceeds to show pictures of the event. However, every single picture is just him smiling at the camera and him confidently saying how great the picture is.
So after 10 minutes of picture time, his secretary rolls out a freaking birthday cake and he acts super surprised. One of the upper management encourages everyone to sing happy birthday. English isn’t the native language here, so half the people are unenthusiastically singing happy birthday in English and half in Chinese; it’s just a huge mess all around. The same guy then brings out a bottle of bubbly with three glasses and spends about three minutes fumbling about with everything.
After having 149 people watching one guy opening and pour the drinks, 147 people now have to watch three people toast and drink to the sound of silence with golf claps sparsely sprinkled in.
Boss had all of the awkwardness of Michael Scott and none of the nice.”
That’s What She Said
“I went to Germany for a month-long hiatus to decide whether I’d accept admission to a university there. I decided I didn’t have the money for it and the degree wasn’t for me, so I came back to my job where I was gladly welcomed back.
During the next Monday morning meeting, where the entire company (about 65ish people) is in attendance, my boss goes, ‘I would like to welcome (my name) back to the firm. She visited Germany for a while, where she ate a lot of sausages.’
Then everyone looks at me and starts giggling. My boss put his head in his hands after realizing what he said and goes, ‘No no, that’s not what I meant,’ as he’s giggling along with everyone else.
He has relatively frequent slips like this, but he’s a good dude and simply doesn’t think before he speaks at times.
He Even Has The Same Car
“I had a boss named ‘Mike Bono,’ and he would always have the craziest things to say. We still impersonate him over a decade later. He had a thick New York accent and a grumbly voice. He would always yell (because, according to him, he got kicked in his head trying to milk a horse when he was younger)/
One good story is I would always bring a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter to work to make a quick sandwich on the run, because we installed gutters in the Florida death heat and I would get light-headed if I didn’t eat. I know it sounds terrible. It was. But you do what you have to make it work. So, Bono shows up late to work and says he was just at Cracker Barrel for breakfast and he brought me some Jelly for my sandwiches.
And as he says that, he reaches in his pocket and pulls out his car keys (a convertible Sebring to add extra Michael Scott flavor), covered in jelly from smashed Jelly packets. He looks up at me and says, ‘That’s what you call being bad to the Bono.'”