Current Events > Who were your worst and/or shadiest coworkers and/or bosses?

(+) Yeah! (+)

When I worked at Mervyn's, the general rule was if a manager was walking around the store and there was a long line at one of the cashier stations, the manager was supposed to stop and help ring up customers. One of the managers would ALWAYS keep walking when he saw a long line. He ended up getting fired.

When I did ISP tech support:

• I had a boss who would routinely yell at his employees and try to bully them into doing things that violate labor laws. He tried to get me to cut my breaks from 15 minutes to 10 minutes. I refused. He insisted. I then said that I could take the IM conversation to the workforce center and see what they have to say about it. He said nothing else about it and never brought it up again.
• I had another boss who didn't actually know how to do the job. He would ask me questions about rules and regulations for a certain ISP on a regular basis. I found out years later that he went to prison for something along the lines of stealing money from veterans or something like that.

When I did desktop tech support, I had a coworker who was running a bitcoin ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

---

a former boss called me cancer boy on multiple occasions, he felt I was taking advantage of my illness by taking off work when I wasn't feeling well.

multiple drunken idiots. one dude fell asleep on a conference call and was snoring on the line. found him under his desk passed out.

multiple thieves. guy stole the tags off a test truck we used for checking axles. put them on his shitty Honda, saved him probably 30 bucks and cost him his job and got him arrested.

oh and pedos. our on-site hardware tech was caught with 100s of gigs of child porn. then our metrics guy was caught soliciting young boys online.

---

I did tech support as an engineer and got a new manager. My previous manager was ok, but wasnt very involved with what I did. This new manager was very obsessed with me though. He and most of our team were based in the South. I and one other covered West Coast hours. He would constantly monitor me and send me messages about everything I did. For example, I missed a call coming in because I was asking a coworker a technical question and ran back to my desk and missed it. He immediately called me to ask what happened and why I missed the call. Its like he was just sitting there and watching my activity all the time. If I missed a lot of calls Id get it, but I rarely ever did. There were other incidents like that where it was like he was always watching me, to the point that other coworkers thought it was super strange. If I logged in at 8:02 instead of 8, he would call me immediately as I logged in. Mind you others were late too and never got calls, just me.

He would insist on weekly meetings with me. I asked other team members and they all said he didnt do that with any of them. I also asked the other West coast person, thinking maybe its because were remote, and he said they rarely had meetings together. In my meetings he would have me listen to my cases, that were handled well and were closed, and pick little dumb things about them to improve. He made a comment about how I should go above and beyond and made a comparison about his favorite waitress and what she does for him. I was an engineer solving a technical case, not a waitress but ok. Also that person on the call gave me all 5s. It was like he just wanted to nit pick.

Meanwhile my stats were great. I had the highest rated customer surveys on the team (got kudos for it in meetings and was used as a bar for others) and also was closing my cases within our deadlines. The other managers noted his obsession with me and agreed they felt like he was micromanaging me for no reason. I started pushing back against him and we ended up getting into arguments. At some point it became obvious he was looking to fire me and other managers were stepping in apparently to get him to back off. They kept assuring me not to worry, I was doing well, he was just new and trying to prove himself, etc. But it became too stressful for me and I quit.

All I can think is that he targeted me for being the only woman on the team. Old school southern guy who couldnt deal with a woman is all I can think as the reason he was focused on me. He didnt act like that with anyone else.