Mean Boss / Not Always Working

“The diabetics are welcome to ask permission to leave their station to get their juice — if their current call has been completed. What’s that? Some calls can take over an hour? Well, I guess you’re just going to have to power through, then, aren’t you? I didn’t ask for your opinions, and I don’t care about your excuses. You have ten seconds to get over it. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. There. You are over it. No more complaining. Don’t you ever bring it up again in my presence! It has been decided, and it is now set in stone!”

— The Director in "We Can Weather The Storm But The Boss May Kill Us"

Not Always Working – and other Not Always Right sister sites – have more than their fair share of bosses with a substantial amount of issues.

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Not Always Working

• This guy's name may as well be Dilbert. In fact, the story's events happened almost verbatim in a Dilbert comic.
• This boss fires an employee for wrongdoings that never actually happened. Fortunately, the employee gets severance pay out of it when she threatens to bring it up with the Labour Relations Board after the boss fails to produce a paper trail.
• There's apparently a store where, at least within reason, being a Mean Boss is mandatory — the submitter ends up promoted to the bad manager's position after he intentionally breaks labor laws by making her work far longer than allowed. However, when she tries to avoid the same situation by covering for a co-worker's break a few months later, they actually reprimand her for doing her job, to which she immediately quits and never returns.
• This boss actually pulled a Did You Actually Believe...? on an office worker after he was ordered to work overtime to get a major order done by Monday.
  Boss: (laughing) You actually stayed here until midnight? You’re stupid!
  Worker: ...excuse me?
  Boss: There would be no way I would've done that much overtime for this. We didn't even need it until Thursday of this week anyway. It could have waited!
• This manager and his daughter have been stealing money from their company for half a year — and when they're about to be found out, the manager tries to get the worker processing the case to take the fall for it. It doesn't work, and the manager not only loses his job, he ends up jailed for embezzlement.
• This woman is implied to have been one in the past, as she states during an interview for a manager position that her best qualities are her ability to scream at people and fire people - which turns out to be exactly what got her fired from her last job.
• Apparently, some managers somehow believe that being ill or having to go to the hospital are not excuses for missing work:
  • The lunch manager in this story threatens to fire a worker with pinkeye if they call out sick again and forces them to work with the highly contagious condition. When the morning manager learns what happened, he responds by forcing the lunch manager to disinfect everything the sick worker had touched as punishment for her threats.
  • Another manager actually does fire a worker for not coming in sick. She does so despite the worker sending in no less than three separate emails to her boss stating that she had the flu, and her dad painstakingly explaining his daughter's situation to the boss over the phone.
  • Yet another manager writes up an employee for leaving work early, even though the worker left in an ambulance that the boss called himself. The disgruntled employee refuses to sign the writeup and quits on the spot.
  • Still another manager threatens to fire a worker if they call in sick ever again, regardless of the circumstances — such as the massive concussion they suffered at work a few days prior — because in his eyes the submitter is just being lazy. Sure enough, the submitter wakes up one day vomiting excessively from the concussion, asks if they can at least come in later, and subsequently loses their job. And then the manager has the gall to ask the worker if they'll be able to make it in for one of their busiest work days of the year, calling the entire above situation a "misunderstanding" and claiming they quit of their own accord rather than being wrongfully fired - even after the submitter calls him out on his Blatant Lies. The submitter then promptly pulls a Take This Job and Shove It, as they proceed to deliver a massive "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the asshole manager (for giving the submitter unreasonable working hours that didn't give them time to even get home and back between shifts for a month and a half, and completely ignoring repeated complaints about this) and then hang up.
  • In the same vein, the submitter throws up and calls the manager to clock out, as the contract states that anyone who does vomit cannot return for forty-eight hours. The manager instead threatens to fire the submitter for "walking out," even when explicitly told what is going on. The submitter dares the manager to fire her under the circumstances. The manager gladly obliges; however, her boss, upon finding out exactly what happened, nixes the firing, demotes the manager to a server, and promotes the submitter to team leader.
  • Then there's this store manager, who threatens to fire the submitter for staying an extra day in the hospital after a medical emergency, and then makes good on that threat when the submitter comes in the next day, even though the submitter brought in doctor's notes detailing everything. The submitter promptly calls HR, who sends the district manager in to reverse the illegal firing. The submitter, stating that she is able to work with limitations, gives the DM her doctor's notes, which the DM then reads aloud to the manager. The manager then tries to fire the submitter again for "not being able to do everything", at which point the DM just gives the submitter paid leave, and then fires the manager later after discovering her history of issuing false write-ups and threats against workers for calling out sick.
  • Yet another example with this bookstore manager. A worker gets into an accident during a ski trip which left her hospitalized with a broken arm and leg, and cannot come in for three weeks. However, the manager thinks she's just being lazy for not asking for that time off and writes her up, much to the horror of her coworker, who already explained that the worker was badly injured and cannot come to work. When the worker does come back to work, with her broken arm and leg in plaster, the manager forces her to get a book on a high shelf and threatens to fire her if she doesn't, because according to him she's just lazy. After twenty-five painful minutes attempting to get the book, rather than thanking the worker, he just snatches the book away and calls her lazy again. Thankfully, the manager was quickly fired after the worker complained to the owner.
  • Here's a boss who absolutely refuses to believe injured employees, to the point that when he accidentally injures one himself, he tells them to simply get up and put on a bandage. Worse yet, he actually writes up the injured employee when (at HR's suggestion) they instead go to the doctor and stay home three days. The employee takes the unsigned writeup to HR, who quashes it and then demotes and transfers the boss for violating safety protocol.
• This boss writes up an employee after they refused to help a customer find a prostitute. Who cares if prostitution is illegal? Needless to say, the employee quits soon after.
• This boss does not give a damn whether his waiters are being rude to customers over completely inconsequential things like what sort of drink a woman orders, or that said customers are taking their business elsewhere because of this — but once he realizes one of them is an esteemed local food critic, his tune changes. Of course, this is only to ward off a bad review, rather than to actually make it up to paying customers that were mistreated (as evidenced by him repeatedly referring to things like the waiter deliberately spilling the woman's drink as a "misunderstanding"), which does not earn him their favor. The story ends by revealing that the restaurant went under shortly after this incident, despite (or perhaps because of) the critic not even mentioning them, while giving a positive review to the restaurant across the street where he and his wife actually ate.
• This assistant manager, as accidentally revealed after a prank gone wrong, has been stealing from his own store, both for himself and his friend.
• This boss actually fires an employee for clocking their hours correctly, because showing up two hours before you're actually scheduled and not clocking in right then, thus getting paid for not doing work, is "antisocial behavior". Unsurprisingly, the company ends up having to close multiple locations because of financial issues, and the "social" one is the very first to go.
• This team leader kept writing up a part-time worker for things they had absolutely no way of knowing beforehand. The part-time worker eventually quit over it.
• This owner offers the submitter a full-time position (they were working part-time both there and at another job)... then waits until the submitter hands in their two weeks' notice at the other place before telling them she can't actually hire them on full-time. Worse, this immediately precedes the submitter learning they will be working 36 hours a week, which basically is full-time (it legally counts as such in other parts of the world) but is just shy enough from it to still avoid the U.S.'s full-time laws so the new employer doesn't have to provide benefits.
• This assistant manager traps his employee with PTSD^note He was previously held hostage in a bank robbery to prevent him from taking a break, assuming he was faking just as an excuse to be lazy. Not only is the assistant manager chewed out by the boss when the employee has a panic attack, he's promptly fired for blocking an exit, creating a fire hazard.
• This boss blames the submitter for tearing a document that never once left the boss's hands. And this is apparently a regular occurrence, too; luckily for the submitter, he was able to quit when his National Guard unit was deployed.
• This church secretary is forced to become a security guard for the in-house daycare by the church's council. They point out that they don't know the kids' parents, their existing work takes them all over the building so they can't keep watch over the kids, and they were hired as a secretary, not as a security guard — and yet they're forced to do the extra work anyway, and are even written up for objecting to it even though the council member admitted that the objections were correct. They quit two months later, and later learn that whole situation was designed specifically to force them to quit.
• This bakery owner screams at people for the most minor mistakes, to such an extreme extent that her employees are terrified of her. The submitter, then a trainee, refused to work there any longer if that was how her boss would react to slight mistakes from the new girl, and found a place of employment with "a less psycho owner."
• This employee was dismissed without unemployment benefits for racism, because they mentioned "Muslims and prayer time" in a speech. Apparently, Muslims are a race now, and taking into account anything they do differently from other religions is discrimination, somehow. Although the employee never got the job back, the unemployment agency overturned the employer's decision to deny unemployment, thus allowing the employee to get benefits until they could find a new job.
• This ableist manager orders an autistic mute employee to answer the phone — something he obviously cannot do. When the employee repeatedly presses a button and hangs up instead of talking, she screams at him and fires him on the spot. Turns out the caller was the employee's brother, who a) understood the Morse Code his brother was sending, and b) is the CEO. Upon learning the circumstances under which his brother was fired, the enraged CEO furiously berates the asshole manager and promptly fires her instead for discrimination.
• This boss for a video editing company is apparently so racist that she picks on the company's delivery man solely because of his skin color, filing complaints over things that are simply not a problem (like whether he physically enters the building to check if there are any packages going out, when they are left on a large table that he can clearly see through the window). Her racism actually caused problems for the delivery man as he had accumulated enough complaints from this woman for a single valid complaint to threaten his job. The submitter quits the job and later encounters the same delivery man (as well as another man with him) at their new job. The delivery man is in a rather upset state (because his job is now in jeopardy), and the submitter finally lets slip about their boss's racist attitudes. It turns out the other man was the manager for the delivery company and upon hearing the submitter's comments, lets the delivery man stay and terminates the delivery company's contract with the former boss out of disgust.
• As mentioned under Bad Boss, this boss tries to send an employee out for carts in the middle of a severe thunderstorm, and then screams at and fires them when they (rightfully) object, resulting in her being fired the moment the owner finds out. This story and two others that imply they're about the same person paint her as quite the Mean Boss before she went full-out Bad:
  • The first story notes that she was on thin ice to begin with, as she has a prior history of screaming at employees in front of customers, resulting in quite the collection of complaints and write-ups.
  • According to the second story that seems to be about her, she has a history of rejecting months-in-advance vacation requests in order to arrange her own last-minute vacations and threatening anyone who objects with discipline or termination, making it pretty much impossible to get a vacation scheduled without higher-ups catching her. It's anyone's guess how many financial shitshows she caused her employees due to cancellation fees or non-refundable ticket costs.
  • In the third story that seems to be about her, the day after she loses custody of her daughter—which, as mentioned in this and the first story, ultimately leads to her being arrested for assaulting her ex-husband over it—she fires an employee simply for existing near her. Both this firing and the one in the first example were overturned when she herself was fired.
• This produce manager fires an employee because she refused to handle produce in an unsafe manner (and it's stated that he's been written up for forcing other employees to do so in the past). When the submitter (the store's general manager) forces him to to call up the wrongfully fired employee to apologize, the produce manager instead hurls an insult-laden rant at the poor woman and tells her that she deserved to be fired, not seeming to realize or even care that he is still in the presence of the submitter. After a few moments of silent disbelief, the unamused submitter gives the manager some choice words, fires him on the spot, and bans him from the store for life. As for the unjustly fired employee, she was hired back shortly afterward into the jerk manager's former position as produce manager and has held it ever since.
• The restaurant manager in this story. A new waitress dives to avoid being groped by a creepy customer, who falls over and proceeds to hurl a string of invective and foul insults at her. The waitress' supervisor throws the man and his friends out, but the next day the manager blames her for the incident and gives her a warning over it. According to him, male customers just can't help attempting to sexually assault waitresses, and she just has to "get used to it". Unsurprisingly, she quits on the spot.
• Some managers don't understand that being off the clock means you legally cannot work:
  • This manager asks the submitter, a cashier, to go on register, not seeming to notice (or care) that the submitter is just shopping on their day off, and is not in uniform. She angrily sends him to the office, where she fires him on the spot for insubordination, only for the store director to intervene and tell her that firing the submitter would be illegal.^note Specifically, the manager ordered the submitter to work off the clock, and then fired him when he refused. The director then fires the manager instead for intentionally breaking federal labor laws.
  • Similarly, this supervisor expects the submitter to help an elderly lady while off the clock, even after she sent them on their lunch break just beforehand. Worse yet, she writes them up for refusing to do so, then fires them on the spot when they refuse to sign it. The unamused submitter goes to the store manager, who reverses the firing upon reviewing security footage, and then suspends the supervisor for two weeks before firing her almost immediately afterward when he discovers that she had been forcing other employees to work off the clock.
  • There's also this manager, who orders the submitter to work before they have clocked in, writes them up for insubordination when they protest... and then fires them for working off the clock, even admitting that she ordered them to do so.^note Many of the comments suspect she just wanted to make up an excuse for firing them anyway. The submitter protests to HR; the unamused regional manager reverses the firing and gives the manager a two-week suspension, only for her to leave a voicemail announcing that she will fire the submitter again when she gets back, which she does. Cue another call to HR. The manager is fired for retaliation, and is stated to be attempting to claim unemployment pay, despite the higher-ups having the writeup, the voicemail and the security footage to confirm she got exactly what they deserved, while the submitter gets a promotion to supervisor.
  • And another one: in accordance with this store's new "Yes, I can!" customer service campaign, the employees are required to help any customer who asks for help — yep, even if they're off the clock. The OP, when asked for help while on his lunch break, instead finds a coworker to help... and is threatened with a write-up if it ever happens again. He had been dealing with a number of frustrations at this job, including previous managers at other locations who wrote him up and tried to fire him over technical issues that were simply not his fault and violated the store's break policy to keep him working longer, and being expected to break labor laws was the last straw; he quit soon after.
  • The owners of this pizza place expect an employee who comes in early to start working right away, but object to them clocking in when they start, insisting they should work off the clock until they are officially scheduled to start, and even announcing that they will change their time card. The next day the employee, understandably, arrives right on time — half an hour after three of the four members of the previous shift had already left, assuming they'd be there early as usual, and the restaurant has already taken $200 worth of orders in the meantime.
  • This pet store chain (which is a multibillion-dollar company, apparently) expects employees to work off the clock regularly as a matter of course, such as helping customers during their unpaid breaks and clocking off before helping to close up. When the poster refused to do so, they were called "greedy" and "not a team player". We're not told exactly how things played out, but it's worth noting that the poster refers to their employment there in the past tense.
  • A front-end manager at a grocery chain demands that a shelf stacker who is on their lunch break clean up some spilled cereal, ignoring the employee's repeated protests that they're off the clock, and finally writing them up for insubordination. Then she fires the employee for, you guessed it, working off the clock, insisting that they didn't tell her. Fortunately, however, the store manager intervenes at this point. The write-up and firing (which the FEM didn't even have the authority to perform, as the employee wasn't in her department) are both overturned, and the FEM is sent home and subsequently fired for intentionally breaking labor laws. The store manager also warns the employee to come straight to him if anyone tries to have them work off the clock in future.
• This new manager dislikes the submitter because he has Asperger's syndrome, and concocts a scheme where his wife poses as a customer, smashes a jar, and then claims the submitter threw it at her to get him fired (which the manager then does). Unfortunately for him, the submitter isn't willing to take this lying down, and contacts Human Resources. It turns out that the manager forgot to delete the security footage proving that the event was a setup, allowing HR to discover the truth within just three days. The manager is promptly fired upon discovery of the scam, and both he and his wife receive lifetime bans from company property, while the submitter gets his job back.
• The general manager at this restaurant is a complete and utter Jerkass; not only does he shout and swear at the submitter in front of all the other customers, he blows off an elderly lady when she tries to defend the submitter. Then, when the lady dares to show some sympathy to the submitter by giving her a tip, he blows his lid, steals the tip, and fires the submitter at the top of his lungs. The unamused lady stands up, delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the general manager's face, and leaves, followed by several other customers, a number of which don't pay. The district manager then finds out what happened before the day is over, likely because the general manager caused an unusual number of dine-and-dashes, and he reverses the firing, instead firing the general manager for his treatment of the submitter.
• There are at least two examples of bosses who think that because they're in an at-will employment jurisdiction, that gives them the right to fire whoever they want for any reason – or no reason – at all, which they of course are quick to abuse.
  • This asshole fires the submitter literally because she had a bad day and wanted to lash out at someone, even going so far as to literally put it down on the pink slip as the reason for the firing. Needless to say, it doesn't hold up very well with the union or the business owner, and the submitter is reinstated with back pay, although the manager is surprisingly not directly fired for her actions. She is, however, fired for a separate incident soon after, when she tries to book a trip to an amusement park with the company's credit card.
  • Similarly, this new assistant manager, who was already on thin ice due to her extremely toxic behaviour, smugly fires a shift manager underneath her "because [she] felt like firing her." Her general manager promptly returns the favour by firing her for violation of the company's termination policy, as well as for insubordination and her aforementioned toxicity. Before giving the fired shift manager the asshole manager's job, the GM learns from his boss, the district manager, that the asshole manager was only transferred to his store as an "experiment" by the DM.
  • When the submitter of this story gets called for jury duty, her boss tells her that she cannot attend due to the court date being scheduled for one of the busiest times of the year, and threatens to fire her, citing at-will protections. The submitter informs the judge on the day of jury selection, and he calls the restaurant owner, threatening to hold her in contempt (in the US, it is highly illegal to fire someone for attending jury duty, even in at-will states). The owner instead doubles down and makes good on her threat, firing the submitter. The result? The judge orders the owner's arrest and gives her a thermonuclear-grade tongue lashing on jury duty laws. To the owner's credit, she quickly realizes her mistake, and reinstates the submitter with full back pay and the judge similarly drops the contempt charges. The submitter nevertheless quits for a better job a month later to avoid retaliation by the owner.
• This store manager refuses to accommodate for the submitter's ankle injury, and forces her to work register or else lose her job, claiming that she's only faking it to get easier duties, even though the submitter has a signed doctor's note stating that she cannot perform duties that require standing up (like register). The submitter calls the district manager and explains what happens. The DM then chews out the store manager over the phone for refusing to acknowledge the note, with the store manager even admitting her actions were illegal. This ultimately gets her fired for discrimination and a multitude of other reasons.
• This florist expects delivery drivers to clock out when they go on deliveries. Because a delivery driver who is driving to a delivery is, according to them, commuting rather than working, which raises the question of what the hell they define "working" as for a delivery driver. The last paragraph notes that they are frequently advertising for new drivers, indicating they have trouble retaining them for some strange reason. (And as several of the comments point out, this is more than just Mean Boss behavior; it's downright illegal.)
• This pub worker (who has been diagnosed with sciatica^note  a medical problem where the sciatic nerve running from the lower back to the soles is causing the person constant pain in their legs) returns to work after several weeks off, armed with a doctor's note, to find the manager just assumed they were faking it and is trying to be a Lazy Bum and get out of working. The OP is constantly ignored (even though their sciatica is worsening) and made to do manual labor with no places to sit during breaks. On the first shift of their second week back, the OP collapses, unable to move their legs, and has to be taken away in an ambulance. After another two weeks, the OP returns to work to a slew of apologies. Time will tell whether or not the manager will become a Karma Houdini.
• An exemplary employee at a fast food restaurant gets promoted to shift manager and transforms into a Drill Sergeant Nasty overnight, writing up employees for so much as breathing wrong and embarrassing them in front of customers when they make the most minor of mistakes. When five employees threaten to quit over the increasingly toxic work environment in the span of one day, the general manager and franchise owner intervene and the employee is promptly kicked back down to cleaning the drink machines. He quits three weeks later.
• This trainer refuses to believe that the submitter’s medical service dog is legally allowed to be anywhere his owner is, and claims that she (OP) is “throwing a fit” over it. When HR confirms that the dog is a medical service dog and that they can’t force the OP to leave it at home, the trainer asks about the other people who may have dogs, and is upset for the entire time he’s with the OP. After the OP’s lunch break, he is yelled at by the boss for trying to send the OP home.
• In this story, a vendor giving out samples at a membership store is approached by a lost girl who can't find her mom. The vendor promptly puts their samples away and secures their cart and takes the child to customer service. Once the child and her mother are reunited, the vendor bumps right into the power-tripping store manager, who proceeds to ream the vendor out for abandoning their station and putting the store at risk. The vendor proves that they did secure their sampling station before taking the child to customer service. This does not deter the manager, who insists that the vendor still put the store at risk anyway (somehow) and kicks the vendor out of the store, and then lies to the vendor's company about what happened afterward seemingly in order to keep the narrative he wanted to have happened going. Luckily, the vendor's company already knew the real story by then and the vendor gets in no trouble, and they make sure to not send the vendor back to that particular store again.
• This store boss is fine with an animal in the ventilation system potentially landing on and attacking an employee, but changes his tune when it's pointed out the same could happen with a customer.
• This manager thinks her former employee, who had to quit their job after being in a horrible car accident that left them paralyzed from the waist down and wheelchair-bound, is faking the accident for attention, so when she sees them at the store again, what does she do? She tips the employee out of their wheelchair onto the floor, and then just leaves them there afterward. The horrified store manager fires her immediately once she learns what happened.
• The submitter of this story has learned to pack for their out-of-state events efficiently, bringing no more than is needed in as few bags as possible (as opposed to the rest of the employees, who always overpack). For some reason this absolutely petrifies the company's president, who supposedly spends the entirety of an event so terrified that the submitter will show up looking unprofessional (even though they don't) that they can't handle some of their normal duties. Between this and spending their seven hours of off-time at the hotel eating and sleeping rather than at the bars with the other employees, the executives decide this somehow makes the submitter 'untrustworthy', which eventually drives them to quit for the sake of their own mental health.
  • The same poster later submitted another story, sharing a number of the frivolous writeups they'd received from the same company president. It's a very Long List, including multiple writeups for things that were completely out of their control and/or happened before they started working there.
• This video rental store boss is a real piece of work, screaming at employees to do work that they've already done, and at one point wound up in court after punching an employee in the face. As a result, the store goes through employees like a shark goes through teeth. The only reason the submitter lasted as long as they did was because they were lucky enough to work a shift that that the boss seldom attended. Eventually though, their luck runs out and the boss pulls another cleaning tantrum on them, prompting them to join the ranks of employees tired of her bullshit.
• This call center director takes her power trip to Lethally Stupid Bad Boss levels. As soon as she arrives on the scene, she enacts a draconian ban on all drinks except water – and water's only allowed if you have a doctor's note. This immediately gets pushback from the diabetics in the office – to which she responds with a rant that's "impressive in its horribleness" that currently forms the page quote. This in turn leads to a deluge of complaints to Human Resources, and the ban is rescinded (much to her ire).
  
  She also insists on workers paying attention to their work at all times, so she turns off the building's TVs (the call center was for a TV channel provider), closes all curtains, and orders that all phones be put in lockers. With no view outside or access to news broadcasts or the emergency alert system, it falls to a customer to tell them that a tornado is headed right for them. Even then, she tells the workers to stop evacuating and get back to work, and doesn't stop ranting until part of the building's roof gets ripped off. The phones-in-lockers policy results in the workers being cut off from their phones because the lockers are inaccessible, meaning they can't tell their families that they're all right. The whole debacle gets the director fired in a heartbeat and all of her rules rolled back.
• This fast food restaurant manager is known to alternate between Benevolent Boss and Mean Boss. During one of his Mean Boss turns, he screams at and browbeats the submitter (who has anxiety), even after the general manager tells him to knock it off. In the end, the general manager, along with a regular customer, both send complaints about the manager to the district manager, and a couple weeks later, the manager is fired for cursing out the district manager.
• This pizzeria owner decides that the best approach to getting Muslim customers to eat at his restaurant is to lie to the "headscarf people" (as he calls them) that his clearly non-halal food is halal, and makes it a point that the submitter will lose her job if she doesn't cooperate. The following day, when two Muslim women walk in and ask if the food is halal, the owner naturally lies to their face. When the submitter tries to intervene, he pushes her aside and then moves toward her threateningly. The customers run to the submitter's aid, but this causes the owner to completely lose his temper — he swiftly fires the submitter and kicks her and the two customers out. The women then help the submitter report the incident to the police, and the owner gets arrested for assault and eventually loses his business.
• This boss is introduced as "a soulless person, with his lips firmly glued to the corporate ideal." He displays this by refusing to allow the submitter to go to the hospital to be with their sick daughter, he refuses and tries to mark them as "no-call, no-show." The submitter goes over his head and appeals to their boss's boss, who allows them their time off and promises to deal with the boss himself. When the submitter returns to work, the boss is nowhere to be found.
• A group of call centre managers in this story found a way to mute the fire alarm for their floor of the office so that their end-of-year bonuses wouldn't be impacted by emergency evacuations, real or false alarm. They get fired and receive jail time.
• This boss is a doozy. For the first strike, the manager dumps a new employee on another coworker to train, even though training is part of the manager's responsibilities. Furthermore, this manager is, in the words of the coworker, unable to deal with getting any pushback without blue-screening and having to hide in the office to hard reset. For the second strike, the manager tells the new worker to not clock in for training, which is highly illegal. The third strike comes on the third day when the manager gave the workers a hard time about taking state-mandated breaks because the store is, in the manager's words, "too busy" - despite the manager themselves having the time to drive to another fast food chain for lunch. The fourth strike comes on the same day, when she fires a worker for announcing a pregnancy - which is, again, massively illegal. The fifth and final strike comes on the fourth day, when the manager changes a customer's order - without their permission! - from a regular cheeseburger to a burger with all the bells and whistles, then orders them to pay up with no remorse at all. An impressive explosion of expletives in at least two languages other than English ensues, with the manager walking away to the office mid-rant, with the expletives only stopping when some very professional-looking people walk into the restaurant. The poster submitted their notice at this point, the manager was fired, and the pregnant employee's situation was apparently "made right".
• This substitute manager is brought in to cover for a Benevolent Boss general manager who's out for cancer treatment as a test to see if she's ready for promotion. She promptly takes a dislike to the submitter, constantly micromanaging them, then cutting down their hours to give her the same as the other cooks. When the submitter points out they're full-time while the other cooks are part-time, the manager tells them “Full-time employees don’t exist unless they are management.” The submitter has to contact the general manager to make sure they get paid for the hours they worked… which gets the submitter screamed at by the district manager for disturbing the GM while she's on sick leave. Eventually enough employees complain that the GM comes back to work early to put an end to the substitute's shenanigans. Both the submitter and the GM would later quit over corporate's handling of the GM's declining health. The submitter would later learn that the substitute manager would be put in charge of her own store… where within three days, her entire staff would walk out during the dinner rush.
• The mentally ill submitter of this story finds that someone's broken into their locker and removed electronics and their medications. When they notify their manager, not only is he unsympathetic, but security camera footage reveals that he was the thief, and it's implied that he tossed out the electronics out of spite. Thankfully, the store promises they'll fire and press charges against the manager.
• This manager/Vice President of Business Development is a toxic, bigoted individual who is only referred to as "Captain Evil" for her sheer malice. The second paragraph alone mentions she's guilty of discriminatory hiring practices, fraud, sexual harassment, and firing three people out of bigotry. Despite losing customers over her dishonest practices, she manages to get away with her incompetence and toxicity for so long because she's convinced the owner the company can't function without her and she keeps making the submitter her scapegoat. Fortunately, karma catches up to her when a new president takes over who isn't as enamoured with her, and she winds up fired… though she still works at another company in the same building for some reason.
• This manager is ex-military and acts like The Neidermeyer with his workers, belittling them in front of customers for the slightest of mistakes. But what really sets him up as this trope is when it's discovered he was scamming his workers by tampering with their pay stubs. Thankfully, he was caught and fired, and his workers were compensated the money he'd denied them.

Not Always Right

• This customer claims that the cashier (OP's mom) gave him incorrect change. The manager immediately believes him and yells at her to give him the "correct" change, saying that "women are so bad at math". At the end of the day, the cashier's till is short by the exact amount the customer was given and she is fired, with the manager not considering this incident and realizing that she was actually correct.
• This sales VP, who likes to boast about her wealthy lifestyle and treats people who work for her like servants, is returning from a conference and finds that one of her "underlings" on the same flight as her has used air travel points to upgrade to first-class. Incensed that someone beneath her on the corporate ladder should have a better seat (which, again, he paid for with his own points), she demands that the flight crew swap their seats. Unsurprisingly, they refuse and eventually have to threaten her with removal from the plane to get her to back down.

Not Always Legal

• This boss's boss Invoked this trope to get workers to quit so she could replace them with ones who would work for less. She does this by setting impossible demands, firing people for minor infractions like typos, obnoxiously interviewing new workers in front of their predecessors, and altering workers' schedules at will so they can't use transit, forcing them to buy cars. By the end of the story, she's unemployed, and convinced that her ex-employees are out to get her.

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