The Bad Boss Blog

"YOU'LL EAT IT! YOU'LL EAT THAT CAKE AND YOU'LL LIKE IT!"

This story got me thinking today about some of the bad bosses I've had. Most of us have had at least one. I love my current boss... oops, wait, I AM my boss. That explains it.

I've had some great bosses, too, and honestly, before my bipolar disorder was stable, I wasn't such a great employee. I'm nothing if not honest.

But the bad bosses I've had were really bad bosses. One, in particular, takes the cake.

I was working for a group home for teen mothers - a job I loved and was pretty good at. My major flaw was that I didn't put my foot down as easily as others. I was the "good cop" and looking back, I wish I'd been a little more hardcore. But I loved my girls and their kids and the fact that several of them keep in touch with me 5 years after leaving the job is a testament to that, or at least I think so.

My second supervisor at the group home will always live on in my memory as a crazy person. To say we weren't friends is putting it nicely. On her first day - at the ministry-run home (important to note) - she first told me about her faith, then told me she had a reputation for being a b*tch, and that she was proud of that, because b*tches "got things done." Praise the Lord! If she had never said another word to me for the rest of her life, I still wouldn't have liked her based on that conversation alone.

She went on to tell me she had a daughter my age who was "bad." She ran away from home, got into trouble, that sort of thing. She never really went into detail about what made her "bad" aside from that. Anyway, when her daughter turned 18, she promptly kicked her of the house and told her to never come back. She had a son who was a little younger than me who was absolutely perfect and never did anything wrong. She felt like she was more of a "boy's mom" than a "girl's mom" and didn't really like teenage girls.

So she came to work at a Christian group home filled with teenage girls. Hopefully the "crazy" part is starting to come to light for you now.

I had been working there a year at the time, and she explained that if it had been up to her, the entire staff would have been fired so she could hire an entirely new team. Nice to meet you, too.

Over the next 18 months, she made it abundantly clear that she strongly disliked those of us who were there before her, slowly cutting our hours, writing us demeaning notes in the staff log, and praising the new staff up, down, and sideways in as public a way as possible.

On more than on occasion, I took my concerns to her. We never had a professional meeting in the nearly two years I worked with her. She would immediately begin screaming at me and even threw things across her office. We didn't have meetings, we had matches. She insisted I give a girl "restriction" one time when the girl had done nothing wrong. She said she "needed to know who was boss." When I refused, a stapler zinged past my head.

She spent no time with the girls and all of her time in her office, leaving before the girls got home from school so she wouldn't have to deal with them. She did her best to get rid of us, but most of us were stubborn and held out as long as possible before we were certain she was going to drive us to insanity.

What bothered me the most was how often she referenced her daughter when discussing an issue with one of the group home girls. It became obvious that she was one of those people who should never have been permitted to procreate, and certainly never should have been able to run a ministry. Many of us - with the exception of her pets, who bowed to her every beck and call - agreed that she was taking her anger towards her daughter out on the group home girls.

Finally, I decided sanity was more important than stubbornness, and I handed in my resignation. She never acknowledged it, just took me off the schedule. It was the shortest resignation I've ever written - I simply said I was leaving and gave the date of my departure. No flowery words, no complaints, just the facts. The day I left, there was no good-bye, no card, no nothing... not that I had expected anything.

A few weeks after I left, I got a call from one of my old co-workers who was also getting ready to take a different job. She told me my old boss had finally lost it. One of the girls refused to celebrate her birthday with the rest of the girls for 3 days straight. She was angry and lonely and didn't want to be bothered. On the third day, my old boss stormed into the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife, started calling the girl "that little b*tch" and massacred the birthday cake, forcing staff to eat heaps of the murdered dessert whether they wanted to or not. The ministry's administrator responded...by doing nothing. She continued to work there for years after that.

Until the administrator was charged with stealing from the ministry, and the group home finally shut down.

Hands down, THE WORST boss I've ever had. Everything else doesn't even seem worth writing about. Pin It