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

I once had a former boss who told me, "You should be more of a team player and stop relying on others for help." So... working for a team means not bothering other team members or relying on them for support? "No, it's like a team of horses. They don't rely on each other to pull the load." Yes they do, that's why you have more than one. It's working together, in the same direction, that increases their net gain. "Yes, but horses don't talk to one another, do they??" So you're saying I should not talk to my fellow coworkers? "That's what I mean!" How will I learn anything? "The same way they did; by asking!" Asking whom? "This is what I mean, you're not a team player. You're always asking difficult questions!"

I quit that job.

I have had more than one boss consider "training" to be "the Internet." That's fine, as long as I have some dedicated alone time to study and read. "Do that on your own time, you have work to do!"

I worked with one manager (not mine, thank goodness) say, essentially, he doesn't like training people because then they get cocky and leave, or demand more pay, and when he won't give it, they leave. I asked him, "so you'd rather have an untrained person stay rather than risk training a person so they leave?" He said "yes..." with a smile and tapped his head like he was pointing to his brain. "So then why to so many people quit under you?" His answer was, "because the world is full of morons!" What a coincidence.

“I had trouble working from home because my cleaner and gardener make so much noise.”.

Complain about the traffic on their Friday “commute” to Bankstown airport to get into the private helicopter they own and fly to their weekend house / horse stud.

D**n this is normal stuff at my work.

1. Schedule 7:00 meeting about pending reorganization. 30 minutes later reschedule for 6:30. Cancel morning of.
2. Schedule client call for 5:30 AM. Don't let team know until night before. Client cancels 30 minutes prior because one person can't attend.

I'm sure I could think of others. One of my favorite past times is complaining about work.

I work at a small company of less than ten people. We were all told by the CEO that we wouldn't receive any raises that year because money was tight. A couple days later we were all at a meeting with another company for contract negotiations. Numbers were thrown around for price negotiation, and our CEO says, "$10,000? That's nothing. Don't worry about it." That being the price we would pay them.

Got made redundant. Executive asks “So what are you going to do now? Me “Find another f*****g job.” Awkward silence ensues. Happily employed elsewhere after a two week break and a nice boost to the bank account.

My old boss would get incredibly angry when customers would complain about prices. Almost every time this happened, he would raise the price of that item, and justified it by saying "The less volume I sell, the more I have to get for each item to break even. Customers shouldn't be so stingy".

I had a boss that was completely oblivious to social cues. One day a female co-worker gets down on her knees to get something from the bottom shelf. My boss sees this and decides to make a joke and says "You don't have to get on your knees to keep this job". My co-workers and I just stare at each other thinking, did he REALLY just say that?! A couple seconds later he realized what he said and says "To pray. You don't have to get on your knees to pray to keep this job".

And before anyone asks, no she didn't file any sexual harassment complaint, she was just as surprised as everyone, and she knew how awkward this guy could be and it was obvious he was trying to make a joke.

Director of IT asked me how to ping. He was dead serious.

He hadn't done any actual work in years and forgot how to do the simple things.

Our head of HR after announcing that a ton of people who had been assured that their role would remain fully WFH/flexible needed to RTO three days a week - “I understand that you may have family obligations to manage, but you can just get your husband, family or a nanny to pick up your kids”.

This is directly after nodding sympathetically for the first half of the meeting as we discussed the effects of cost of living pressures and inflation on team members and the fact that many were single parents, carers or had no support.

Boss' 20 year old daughter (who is actual very nice) came this summer to work with us and get experience in her family's business. We were told she'd just be another employee up until she actually got here when our boss announced that she'd be his right hand person and report directly to our main office. Our assistant manager had known for a long time that she was leaving to go to school so they trained up the next person in line to take over. Come time for the first assistant manager to leave, we are informed that the boss' daughter will be acting as assistant manager for her last three weeks with us. This girl once asked me why so many of us have college degrees when she has a degree in cosmetology and still works in this field. I couldn't bring myself to say "nepotism.".

This is my moment to shine!! I worked in an organic food warehouse for a very small company. My boss's boss leaves the company, and we get some executive type from a big company. The old boss was there 60-70 hours a week working on paperwork and running the warehouse & production. The new boss shows up, and spends most of his time locked in his office on the Internet & dosed up on pain pills.

One of his first acts was to completely redo the production process, taking a very efficient model (most employees work 40-50 hours per week with little stress) and flipping it on its a*s tripling the amount of work to be done. To process a single standard order you had to email back and forth 5 times. If the order had issues or was complicated, this could escalate to 10-20 emails for a single order. I went from 30-50 emails a day to 300-500.

Production was the most efficient department before he showed up, and became the worst. We used to produce 20k-30k lbs a day, after his intervention we were lucky to get 10k. This wasn't helped by the fact that the production team was required to sit in on all meetings, so my boss spent 6-7 hours a day at meetings, on top of his normal 40 hour week. Yes, he was there for 12 hours everyday & 16-20 hours each weekend. His boss was there around 30.

He moved the meeting schedule from 1:30 to 11:30, when most people were on lunch. He tried to make them "lunch meetings", where you don't get paid and have to bring your own lunch to the meeting room, but that got shot down. So everyone's lunch schedule got shuffled around.

He'd routinely scream into his phone about someones incompetence, and this was in a very small thin walled office. If you messed up, everyone could hear every word.

After 6 months of work in the warehouse, he still did not know how to use the inventory system or the accounting system. He was the manager of production and the warehouse.

He hired a consultant to teach us more about the inventory system. Some old dude showed up (he forgot to tell us because he only hired him to win a fight with another department) so I was taken from my extremely demanding job and got to sit in a room with this old guy for 6 hours. I literally taught him how to use the system, and he was taking notes on how we used it. His flight & hotel plus wages were paid for by my company so that I could do his job while not doing mine. Immediately after the consultant left, he jumped up and went home. It was around 3pm.

He made some of his employees babysit his children when he was on business trips for no pay.

He hired his wife, then she was allowed to work from home, and then they got divorced. We all know this because we could hear their fights from his office. Not sure if she's still employed.

I have way more stories, but I think that's enough for now.

Edit: one more! He made the decision to fudge some paperwork and hide things that were salmonella or e-coli positive. One of our customers tested their product, found salmonella, the FDA came to our plant and spent a month there, and now when you google the company the second page is about the FDA investigation. I won't provide proof though because it was a small company and they'd immediately know who I am.

This topic makes me feel better about my old boss. The worst I have is him telling us that money is tight so try not to bother our sysadmin (who works for us part-time/hourly) with stuff we can take care ourselves. Fair enough, but the next time the sysadmin was in the boss had him spend about two hours moving his iTunes library from his desktop to his laptop.

My boss when I was working for a theatre company was a big idea guy. I was the little details person. I, for example, had to explain why having the actors hold flaming torches while their hands were chained behind their back would not be a good idea. Those were some interesting summers.

Not quite executive but a girl at work chipped her front tooth, about 4 months later one of the managers ($150-180k, D**k) says dammit Jessie ($47k, single mother) when are you going to get that d**n tooth fixed?

My company was run by s**theads and this was a prime example.

Company was failing and the board fired the exec team (founders) and hired a new crew to come in and clean up. New CEO leaves within 2 months, so the COO gets bumped up. Now he and those brought in with him are from an internet services company that had layoffs, and we are a gaming company. He brings in more execs, with zero experience in this field, at 6 figure salaries (all people from his old company) while firing hundreds and shutting down offices world wide. So: not a good time.

We have a Holiday Party at a bar shortly into his and his cronies tenure. This f*****g guy stops the music and declares that it's time to reward some of the people for their hard work. Fair enough, some of these people have watched good friends get laid of and many had been there for 5, 7, 12 years.

Each award he announces is to one of his cronies and it's basically some dumb certificate of excellence. Nice slap in the face to everyone there.

**TL;DR:** most incompetent man I've seen run a company. F**k that guy.

My old boss (who we all hated) once walked into the office laughing and shouting that she'd 'just screwed her husband out of $40,000.' She was in the process of divorcing him at the time.
We were all like, f**k - imagin what she'd do to US given half a chance.
Very unsettling.

During covid some people in our business thought it would be fun to make some “cribs” style videos and post on the intranet showing their work from home space.

Most of them were charming enough, people showing how they had set up work from home spaces in their kids rooms, or maybe someone living in a share house had to set up a desk in their kitchen.

Anyway, a GM who was clearly loaded and whose husband was a finance executive thought she would jump in and proceeded to film a walk through of her darling point mansion, which was basically a brag session of how rich she is and how nice her house is… she even made a comment on the fact her kids had to come home from boarding school so the house was crowded.

It wasn’t all bad because it provided us all with a massive amount of gossip for a couple weeks… every teams call started with “can you believe she did that”.

When asked his favourite cheap eats, he laughed and said "I make enough money i don't eat at cheap places"

D****e.

CEO spoke about how he visited a Chinese factory and was so impressed how the workers live on site and how committed they were to their employer. Yep, seriously.

Another time he told me he preferred to hire migrant workers because they didn’t have their hands out for more money like Aussies and were simply grateful to their employer “for putting food on their table.”

Unsurprisingly, this CEO didn’t pay his staff their superannuation and was engaging in serious illegal wage theft.