Okay. Real busy today but I can't let @tommchenry have all the fun. So let's do bad bosses.
1. At the first day of the first job I ever had, I worked an eight-hour shift and the boss asked me if I could work another hour. He did this four times. He didn't pay me for any overtime for my twelve-hour shift. I was 14 years old.
2. At the fourth job I ever had, our video store got taken over by Blockbuster. The regional boss came in and told us new uniforms were (a) mandatory and (b) to be paid for out of our pockets.
2a. That night, when I was doing store setup down on my hands and knees, he threw the trash from his dinner on the floor right in front of me and said "Well? Aren't you gonna clean that up?"
3. One job I had, the VP I worked for was fucking another VP, who headed the department. They would go through peoples' desks at night to try and find something they could fire them for, especially the low-level employees of color.
3a. The VP I worked for had an assistant whose main job was to snitch on people. He used to complain about the (mostly Latina) data entry workers, who put in 8-10 hour shifts, for 'faking' carpal tunnel syndrome, which he said was made up.
4. Once I worked at a factory owned by a guy who was, at that time, the richest man in the state. Half the employees were Laotians and Cambodians he'd brought over during the Vietnam War.
4a. When I tried to organize a union, he had his floor bosses tell them he'd saved their lives and that it was ungrateful to go against him after all they'd gotten from him. Many were men and women in their 50s who made minimum wage.
4b. I filed a worker's comp claim because the material I worked with in the cutting room gave me nosebleeds and hemorrhaged the inside of my nostrils so I couldn't breathe. He said I inhaled the materials on purpose to get time off work.
5. Once the HR director I worked for admitted to me that the company arbitrarily enforced stuff like drug tests and no-internet rules just to get rid of people they didn't like. This happened to me at multiple companies.
6. My boss at a consulting firm bought himself and his wife matching new convertibles every year for Christmas. He spent all day playing Minesweeper in his penthouse office. A co-worker of mine got AIDS and he fired him because he worried about the impact to the insurance plan.
7. Several bosses have asked me to write things for them or for the company for free because "I know you like writing".
8. I had a boss with a collection of leg porn in his office desk, which we all knew about because we had to fetch stuff from his desk. He asked us not to tell his wife, who co-owned the company. At company meetings they would check in about how great their marriage was going.
8a. He ended up firing me for asking for a raise after basically doubling my workload. He sent a sub-boss to do it for him and he told me "We're giving you the freedom to do what you want and pursue opportunities outside of this company".
9. Once I worked at a company where all the bosses were absentee. The CEO would only come in like twice a year, but he'd get enraged if the snacks he liked weren't in the break room. He was a multimillionaire.
10. I have had innumerable bosses -- almost all of them -- ask me to do personal favors for them for free, always with the slight implication that not doing it would endanger my job.
In conclusion, all bosses are bad. I learned that when I was 13 years old and it continually stupefies me that so many people WHO ARE NOT THEMSELVES BOSSES fall all over themselves to defend them.
