Workers Left In Shock After Learning How Out Of Touch Their Bosses Are (46 Stories)

I was working at an icecream place and someone got explosive diarrhea. There was s**t on the wall behind the toilet, on top of seat, and overflowing down the side of the toilet onto the floor around it because the toilet was really backed up. He expected me to clean it (fine) without gloves or a bodily fluids kit.... just with our thin paper towels, soap, and water. I asked him why *he* wouldn't do it if it "wasn't so awful" (which he claimed), and he said "Well it's f*****g disgusting and unsanitary to clean it that way."

I replied "Exactly." and quit.

Found out that my infant daughter was rushed to the hospital. In tears, went to my boss to tell him that I had to leave. That wasn't a problem, however, the boss decides it was necessary to lecture me on how "unprofessional" it was for me to be showing so much emotion in the office, before he would let me head out.

In the kitchen at McDonalds there is usually 2 or 3 people working on the line making sandwiches: One who looks at the orders and toasts the buns, one who puts all the condiments and cheese on the sandwiches, and one who puts the meat on the sandwich and sends them to the cashiers. For the most part everyone followed this procedure but often people would work together to do something because its more efficient. One manager disagreed with this and drew a line that I absolutely couldn't cross when I was working beside him. He then left the kitchen to take a call on his cell phone. So naturally I just let all the food pile up on the other side of the line he drew so he came back to 15+ sandwiches to make while I stood there.

TL;DR - Manager draws line in kitchen that I can't cross and then tried to dock my pay when I don't cross it.

I was working as a temp in a small office, and started to organize potlucks so we could have a nice lunch together once in a while.

Management heard and thought that was a great idea! So they took it over. Suddenly potlucks needed approval from management, despite it being solely organized by employees off-the-clock and taking place during our lunch time. There was also going to be a "winner" and we would vote for who made the best dish. I won most of the time, and actually felt awkward about it. One time the head of the company actually came in during the potluck, and started giving us a schedule for the meal and how and when voting was going to occur. We're just trying to have lunch here, calm down!

All I wanted was to do something nice for and with my coworkers. I didn't plan for it to be a management tool or a competition. :(.

I used to work at an investment bank where we all had these super-comfortable £300 chairs. These m***********s were shipped in from some chair boutique in Sweden, and were designed using the latest research in chair ergonomics and posture. I spent a couple of weeks customising mine by lovingly twisting and pulling the numerous levers peppered on the underside of the base, until it felt like the chair was crafted for my bottom. It cocooned me like a warm, soft hand and I looked forward to going to work just so I could sit in my chair; rest my forearms on the soft, cushioned armrests and hook my feet around the polished chrome legs. I even named her. She was my Susan.

Then my world crashed around me, flames licking at my feet. I was ill with the flu one day, and didn't go into work for two days. When I returned to the office, Susan was gone. I blinked furiously, hoping she would magically appear. I asked my colleague Rupert where she was, and he told me that he last saw her being wheeled away by the VP of the trading desk: my boss. I asked him if he'd seen my chair and he told me that he'd borrowed it briefly for a work-experience student but had returned it to my desk. Clearly, *clearly* - the m**********r had done no such thing. He had pulled Susan away from the only life she knew, and left her in some cold and godforsaken part of the office.

Problem was: I worked on a trading floor with around 120 traders, the vast majority of whom had the exact same chairs. My Susan looked just like nearly every other chair on the floor... finding her again would be impossible. I began the task of sitting on every chair, meticulously fondling and prodding the fabric, hoping to feel the soft cushioning of Susan's foam, but I was doomed from the begininning - my crippling doubt meant that I would always second-guess and question myself... *was this really Susan?* "The arm-rests don't quite feel right." "I'm sure there wasn't a scuff on the chrome leg".

My boss, the heartless b*****d he is, stole the one true love of my life. I know you're out there Susan, and I know you're probably scared and afraid, but I will find you. We *will* be reunited, in this life or the next.

AOL bought Netscape a while back. AOL is a Virginia company that doesn't understand tech culture that well (which is one reason why it sank).

So, in the early 2000s, this executive comes in from the East Coast to Mountain View, and because everyone East goes to work early, and there is a 3 hour time difference, comes in at 7:30AM. And he's shocked no one is in the office - so he demands that people show up at 7:30AM.

Now this is a culture of people who get up late, code late, hate meetings, and hate being forced to go anywhere. Naturally, a lot of people quit. A good chunk were already rich, and the others moved to other Mountain View companies. You know, like a small startup named Google and the like.

I worked at a high-end handbag store. During the holiday season, it gets really busy especially since we have to gift wrap EVERY F*****G ITEM with f*****g tissue wrap, ribbons, boxes, bags, and one f*****g sticker. My Co-Workers and I are all rushing to ring up and gift wrap the items when suddenly my boss (just slightly smarter than a bag of t**s), he calls me to the gift wrapping station and takes a whole HOUR to explain the importance of "sticker placement." I S**T YOU NOT. He later got angry that I couldn't complete my sales quota on a three-hour shift, no s**t! I only had two! I quit the next day and stole the f*****g stickers.

HR executive tried to pull me up for using the word "feminism"' in my (the office coordinator at the time) International Women's Day email to our local team because it "promoted a different set of values that didn't align with our company."

I had copied the text from the HR team's IWD pack.

Worked for a family owned company, the family was rich, like millionaire rich, mom, dad, and grown son. There were only about five of us that worked there for minimum wage.

Grown son boss (who has a Stephen Harper calendar and had previously told me that he didn't believe in student loans because that is his tax dollars helping others) has been asking me to stay late to close up. I mark the extra fifteen minutes or half hour on my time sheet.

One day I have to go to his desk to answer his phone (I regularly did his job in addition to my own for the last half of the day because neither one was hard) and I notice a small calendar with my name written beside the month and in each small square things like "3m" or "4m".

There was one day marked "15m" that I specifically remembered being a day where my car broke down over my lunch break and I had called to say I'd be late. I went and got my time sheet and my pay stub to do some math and saw that not only was he meticulously clocking minutes I had been late returning from lunch (all under five) but the a*****e had also not been paying me for the time I stayed late (all over fifteen). For a summer job. Where the government paid a large portion of my wage. This man was a millionaire, I made minimum wage.

Although it was my second summer there and I liked the job otherwise for its setting and how it let me save money by staying at home I applied for and got I got a job offer in my university city and quit shorty after this to go back for the second half of the summer. F*****g p***k.

EDIT: to the people saying I should be fired for being late back from lunch: 2 or 3 minutes speckled throughout a couple months, I've probably come back from lunch 2 or 3 minutes early a hundred more times. I'm a decent employee.

When I got a ~2/3% pay rise that was equivalent to some $2000 extra salary pre tax, and my boss congratulated me and eagerly suggested I treat myself to a few items from Chanel to celebrate.

The increase didn’t even match inflation.

While interviewing people to be our new receptionist...

Boss: "Why would anyone take this job? You can't possibly live on that salary."

Me: "Umm, you pay me less than that, and I have a master's in engineering.".

Much of my job is repetitive from week to week. Every week I compile a report, send it to my boss for review and then upload it to a server upon aproval. Deadline for sending to boss for review is before lunch on Wednesday. Deadline for uploading to the server is 1:00 on Thursday. I sent the file to my boss as per usual. This morning (Friday), I was asked why it hadn't been uploaded to the server yet. Well, I hadn't been given the greenlight to do so. Now I have a checklist for my duties that I have to complete by Thursday each week and basically it includes reminding my boss that the file needs to be reviewed and approved so that I can upload it. Yep, my boss drops the ball and I am given more work to compensate. Every. F*****g. Time.

My old boss, in a construction company, thought that if I ate my lunch while driving the company truck from one site to another that I had to knock the half-hour off my time card for lunch. I explained to him, just because I am eating while working doesn't mean I'm not working but for him, it's the other way around. He thinks the fact that I am eating means I should be working for free.

My current newspaper editor is hysterical. She demands the highest possible ethical standards but insists I only write news articles about businesses that buy ads and I am not allowed to give coverage to any business owner that doesn't buy ads. I think I may quit soon.

Hahaha i have a good one. a few years ago i was working at the corporate office for a rather large company that was about to do a big layoff due to financial problems that had been going on for the last few years. i was sitting in a conference room with about 30-50 other employees who were all getting laid off waiting for the vp to arrive and give the official announcement and pass out the paperwork etc. everyone else was there, the hr people and unemployment rep etc, but we all had to wait 20 mins for this guy to show up before we could officially proceed. it was beyond tense and awkward. so the guy shows up and apologizes to the other suits up front about how his plane was a little late arriving from his COMPANY PAID VACATION IN THE FLORIDA KEYS and proceeded to talk and joke with them about how much fun he had on his trip for about 10 minutes. then it was like he suddenly remembered what he was there for and was all, "ok so lets get this thing over with" and turns back to the rest of us to start his schpiel about how this whole situation was so unfortunate and though the company valued all it's employees equally this was unavoidable and how they were so soooo sorry blah bah blah. i like to think he was facing a whole room full of these: ಠ_ಠ but maybe it was just me. I'm still pretty pissed about that experience. jokes on them though, they just recently announced that they are liquidating the company after several rounds of trying to save it through bankruptcy proceedings and buyouts! suckers.

"Did you enjoy your vacation?" (to a mother returning from parental leave).

Working at a country club for a year, one of the meetings our manager spent some time telling us that the best kind of workers are the ones never have to be told what to do. A few days later we were working a wedding reception, during the ceremonial speech we decided that we had some time to start polishing the silverwear, after about 20 minutes the manager barges in and scolds us for doing something we weren't told to do.

I put my two week notice in a few days later.

Had a boss who liked to work early, so he routinely called 6.30am meetings, often sending out the notice at 11pm the night before, even though our contracts clearly stated work was to start at 9am (we could get in earlier if we wanted to, but they could not require us to).

Got back from a conference in Vegas at about 3pm. Boss called from Cancun to be sure everyone went back to the office for the last two hours of the work day.

Worked at a preschool, the site supervisor walked through the room I was supervising children in and began to berate me about a tiny dirt pile in the corner of the room that needed sweeping....

In front of the children,

while I was helping an upset child with a cut on their leg.

1st rule of being a teacher: Children come first.

I put her in her place though, she brought up the incident again infront of the other teachers during our meeting time in an effort to assert her authority. I interrupted her, explained the situation from my POV and our behavioral consultant backed me up and lectured her about how to act as an adult in a classroom infront of all the teachers. It was glorious.

The consultant reported the incident to administration and they decided that our site supervisor wasn't allowed to sit in our teacher meetings because it was counter productive AND she wasn't allowed to make any comments or decisions about the day to day operation of the school, because thats the master teacher's job.

That site supervisor was a real idiot. She didnt know anything about running a school, she just came from a privileged background and treated the preschool like it was her own little private gigantic dollhouse for her to decorate. She would blow our entire budget on furniture that often times the children wouldnt even be allowed to use, it was just so the school would "prettier". She constantly interrupted children while they were working on something so that she could pretend to be marry poppins or some s**t and try connect with them. Problem was all the children hated her because she was a mega b***h 95% of the time and children know whats up, they arent dumb.

The most annoying thing she did was always bring up the fact that she has a master's degree. She would always be super vague about it though and eventually I learned that her master's degree was in theology and she got it from a f*****g online school. I hated that b***h with a passion.

TL;DR - Worked as a preschool teacher, idiot boss tried to school me. I turned the tables on her and put her in her place.

CEO was out and he was giving the organisation an update (mostly distribution centre employees, forklift drivers, pick/pack etc etc) to the team that there would be no annual pay review that year, he finished with “this impacts me too guys, I don’t get a pay rise this year either”.