Pointy Haired Boss / Not Always Working

"Should have guessed. It was a senior manager making the complaint. People at that level rely on others to problem-solve for them to the point where they can't problem-solve for themselves."

— The Office Manager in "Their Expectations Are Electric"

There are a lot of bosses in the stories of Not Always Working – and even other Not Always Right sister sites – that make you say "I can't believe this idiot is a boss."

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Not Always Working

• This boss is upset that people would refer to anyone else as "the boss" – even if that person is Bruce Springsteen.
• This deli boss doesn't know what kosher actually entails and threatens the author, who tells him what it means, with being fired. After the author threatens to sue him for wrongful termination, the boss tries to fire him anyway, but is implied to have not succeeded as the author mentions still being employed there at the end of the story.
• This fabric store general manager is told by the submitter that the rolls of fabric that aren't on the floor are custom orders not intended for general sale three times, yet she still puts the custom orders on the floor, resulting in one of them being ruined. The store has to prohibit her from handling custom orders because she clearly can't be trusted.
• This country club manager does pretty much everything wrong when a toilet clogs up on a busy night, causing sewage water to flood the kitchen. Instead of closing down the country club for the night and calling a plumber, he instead chooses to close down both bathrooms, continue to serve (potentially contaminated) food, and have his dishwashers (who likely are not trained to deal with sewage) sweep out the contaminated water from the kitchen. On top of all that, he even goes so far as to write up anyone who refused to clean up the sewage. Needless to say, the submitter, who also had to work sick that night, booked it out of there as soon as she could.
• This assistant manager proudly displays her discrimination against the wheelchair-bound submitter. After she is chewed out by the store manager for threatening to fire the submitter for calling out sick, the first thing the AM does when the submitter comes back is to make her work register and stock shelves - which the submitter cannot do because of her disability. When the the submitter tries to point this out, the AM instead berates her and again threatens to fire her. The submitter delivers a prompt "The Reason You Suck" Speech and leaves. The AM then attempts to fire the submitter for stealing from the staff room, only for the store manager to step in again and fire the assistant manager instead, both for discriminating against the submitter and being the REAL thief.
• For this boss at a grocery store, it seems that having "good customer service" and making sure the customer is always right overrides all else, including making sure people don't come down the express lane with more than 15 items, to the point that they take the side of a customer who left a petty complaint about the submitter having to rush through the customer's transaction (implied to be a full cart of items) so not to keep the people behind the customer in the express line waiting.
• This manager develops an unexplained hatred towards the submitter and eventually fires her under falsified claims of theft. The submitter then sues the manager for unfair dismissal, and while they and their lawyers are working, the manager actually has the guts to ask the submitter to save an important project for one of the company's clients. In other words, she was asking the submitter to work on something she was not legally obligated or even allowed to work on due to no longer working for the company. Not surprisingly, the submitter adamantly refuses, then proceeds with her lawsuit, and wins. The manager ends up demoted for her actions, and later fired for a separate incident.
• In this story, the front end manager places the blame on the submitter for an accident caused by a pre-existing fault in a scanner, even going so far to issue a write-up and threaten to fire him. When it happens again ten days later, she then tries to follow through on her threat, only for the assistant manager to stop her and call her out for issuing a bogus write-up over something that wasn't even the submitter's fault and didn't warrant any discipline at all. The front end manager angrily demands the assistant manager let her fire the submitter anyway, even after being told that doing so would violate company policy. Instead, the assistant manager shreds the initial write up, then suspends her on the spot and forbids her from disciplining employees without permission from the higher-ups. As implied at the end of the story and confirmed by the submitter in the comments, the front end manager was fired a month later due to a crackdown on unfair discipline caused by this very incident, just before the submitter requested a transfer to another store to get away from her.
• This manager at a pet store takes Bothering by the Book to Lawful Stupid levels: She tells the submitter (a dog trainer for the store) to reschedule three customers' puppy-training classes to a different time because corporate requires the classes to have four participants in order for them to be considered profitable. The boss refuses to listen to the submitter when they point out the customers may be unhappy about this, and the submitter reluctantly calls the customers up. Predictably, the customers are unhappy, and two of them refuse to transfer to another class and instead pull their business out of the store entirely; one of the two filing a complaint to corporate in addition. The boss then writes-up the submitter for the loss of business despite the fact that the submitter did exactly as they were told to do and the two customers refusing to accept the transfer was not the submitter's fault. The submitter's attempts to reason with the manager end up being fruitless, and they soon give up and go to work at a nearby store. It's later revealed that the boss couldn't find a replacement dog trainer and the store was losing thousands of dollars through refunded classes as a result.
• This manager fires the submitter just because she was having a bad day. The submitter initially thinks she's joking, until they are shown their pink slip which actually reads "I needed to fire someone to take out my frustration; lucky you" as the reason. Needless to say, when the union and the business owner find out, the submitter is promptly reinstated, while the manager is fired later over a separate incident.
• This supermarket manager removes weight-checking from the self-checkout machines (thus allowing shoplifters to easily scan 1 item, put all of their items on the scale, and make the machine think that they were only buying the one thing) in order to keep employees on their toes because the machine wouldn't beep to let them know a scam was being attempted. Naturally, theft skyrocketed as shoplifters figured out that they could come in two groups- one to distract the self-checkout employee, and the other to take advantage of the obvious security flaw. Needless to say, that particular policy only lasted three weeks.
• On being presented with a company policy to push the store rewards program as much as possible, with write-ups and potentially firings at stake for employees who fail, this manager decides to set the bar at 35% of customers, already much higher than the company standard. After a week, she doubles it to 70%, which results in her firing four employees and more getting written up. Then she decides that's still not enough, and that not only do the staff have to sign up 100% of customers,^note an impossibility given that you can't sign up a customer who's already part of the program those who don't meet that quota will be fired full stop. End result: The manager fires everyone^note except the assistant manager, who bailed on her when the impossible goal was set. This gets the attention of the regional manager, who rides in, gets most of the problems fixed, and fires the manager for setting the impossible standards in the first place.
• This new operations director holds daily meetings that are always at least three hours long, and very often run over four hours. On top of that, he tells the other managers to schedule one-on-one meetings on various items on the agenda … which he almost never shows up to unless he schedules the meeting himself, as he commonly has multiple meetings scheduled for the same time. During one meeting, he finds an item back on his agenda that he asked OP to schedule a meeting about. The OP reveals that they fixed the issue rather than schedule a meeting, bluntly noting that the issue took five minutes to fix and that director would have never shown up to any meeting. The ops director attempts to fire the OP, but the owners of the company "give him the opportunity to succeed elsewhere." As a result, meetings return to a more reasonable length and frequency.
• The call center manager and her superior in this story are both convinced that their employees should be able to upsell at least 30% of customers if they just try harder. As if that wasn't expecting too much already, they're a service hotline for an internet provider, meaning that they're expecting to sell additional services to people who have rung up to complain that the one they already have isn't working, and only about 10% of callers are ready for an upgrade anyway. The two attempt to prove they're right by doing it themselves, only to annoy the hell out of all their customers with their pushy attitude. They learn nothing at all from this, and start to accuse their employees of being lazy, which leads to the poster quitting; soon afterward the company starts getting complaints from customers getting contracts they never agreed to, which leads to the center shutting down.
• This new manager reads an article about some expensive software, and decides that their company needs it, despite knowing absolutely nothing about what it does or how to use it. She then proceeds to blow all of her budget on the software and the overtime needed to install it, leaving none to take the (also expensive) training course needed to use it. The software ends up sitting around not being used and the manager leaves a few months later.
• This manager continually allows a lady to scam the restaurant for free takeaway Cobb salads because she keeps claiming something was missing or wrong. Even when the submitter points out how suspicious it is that she's the only one whose orders are wrong and her orders are always wrong, it never occurs to him that she might be a scammer. The submitter shows the manager a salad so he knows in advance that the order was right, but he doesn't pay attention. The submitter resorts to asking a chef to watch her like a hawk to make sure she's getting the order right, and when the scammer inevitably complains, the manager still falls for it.
  Chef: I WATCHED HER MAKE IT! IT WAS PERFECT! THAT LADY IS SCAMMING YOU!
• This bakery owner does not try to train new hires on how to bake the food, nor how to do practically anything else in the shop, in the expected way, instead simply throwing an apron at them and telling them to "figure it out". She then flips her lid and throws any cookies and other such baked goods the new hires bake out when they inevitably come out not looking the way she expects, all while still insisting to employees to "figure it out" instead of actually showing them how to do things right (in her eyes, anyway). Between the extremely High Turnover Rate, the owner's explosive temper driving customers and other new hires away, and her wasting hundreds if not thousands of dollars over the perfectly fine cookies and cakes she is constantly throwing out, she goes out of business in only around two months.
• These managers order 2000 units of a certain product to be manufactured by the end of the month, without overtime, simply to appease shareholders. After the floor manager's objections are met with a threat of "consequences" if this clearly impossible demand isn't met, he decides to show them exactly what happens when 2000 units are manufactured in under a month with no additional work time allowed, even getting it in writing. Quality control goes completely out the window, and every single one of those 2000 units fails a surprise inspection that the floor manager called in to coincide with the shareholder visit, leading to the entire management team being fired.
• The managers of this pizzeria "keep hiring anyone with a pulse regardless of how many brain cells are between their ears", resulting in a High Turnover Rate due to incompetent idiots frequently having to be fired. And then the store manager alienates the one competent employee, who up to this point was willing to put up with the problems because they're planning to move away for college, by cancelling long-approved time off three weeks prior to the trip because his terrible hiring practices have left the pizzeria understaffed, resulting in them giving their two-week notice and no longer being as diligent as they were. After his attempts to convince that employee not to quit fall on deaf ears because he won't give them their vacation time back, he begins to retaliate against them, causing them to no-show on their last day and leave him to have to close the store.
• This new store manager makes a new policy that only she is allowed to access the manager's office for any reason, including opening and closing the store. This backfires when it turns out that it also makes counting drawers and high value refunds impossible when she isn't there, a problem that is only compounded when the employees state this issue to customers affected by this new policy. This means that the store manager has to spend at least an hour a day performing the closing duties and dealing with irate customers. After two weeks, she allows the other managers key access, except it's too late since enough customer complaints come in so that she's fired.
• The managers of this summer camp for some unknown reason require all of their employees to take the same IQ test. What makes them fall under this trope is that they also make the one person responsible for marking the tests also take the test, which they are still expected to mark themselves, and are then duly impressed that that person scored a hundred percent.
• This new marketing department manager, transferred laterally from a different department, objects to the submitter using Facebook on the job, not caring that they're a social media manager, meaning using Facebook, within certain constraints, is their job. When the submitter tries to reason with him, he accuses them of doing nothing but playing FarmVille and yells at them for violating a nonexistent non-compete clause when, while explaining their job to this idiot, they mention researching what competitors are doing on Facebook... something which wouldn't violate a non-compete clause anyway. The next day, he blocks all social media websites, preventing the social media team from doing their jobs and causing an expensive ongoing social media campaign to stall. Within hours, social media websites are unblocked in the face of the whole social media team threatening to quit, and the next day, the manager has been replaced with what had been one of the supervisors and reassigned "to pursue other career options".
  Commenter Dark–Otter: The lateral transfer within the company rather than promoting from within the department, couple[d] with the new manager's terrible attitude, suggests upper management was "passing the trash". The manager proved unsuitable for their previous post within the company, but someone decided to give him another chance in another department... which he ruined in spectacular fashion.
• The managers of this store are trying to cut back on staff so much that while they have thirteen checkout lanes and twenty four self checkouts, they only have one member of staff to cover them - and even then they're desperate to get rid of that last staff member, as in their own world every customer should be able to use the self checkouts without anything ever going wrong. This despite having to continually mosey on out to reset the self checkouts an hour or two after they all get stuck in Call Attendant mode because the only possible attendant is stuck on a swamped checkout lane. All the while, the store is increasingly gaining a reputation for extremely long wait times, resulting in customers shopping elsewhere and the once-busy store being empty most of the day.
• This manager is shown to be not only blatantly, but illegally incompetent. It's noted that she has removed signs notifying employees of their rights, and that she'll drive anyone to tears if allowed, but when pressed, suffers a Villainous BSoD and forgets about it. Over four days, said manager does the following:
  • On the first day, the manager refuses to train people, foisting the OP on her friend that doesn't have the authority to train her. The OP is, as directed by the manager, trained only on the garnish station (by the OP's friend) and then quizzed on which warmer slots specific burgers go into (by the manager). When the OP and the friend are scolded (OP for not knowing and the friend for not training), both the OP and friend note that the friend was only to train on the garnish station, and the friend's actions were done as a favor. This causes the first Villainous BSoD of the story.
  • On the second day, the manager refuses to allow the OP to clock in since she is only training, threatening to write her up as a no call-no show. OP immediately notes that the manager is required by law to pay for training time, and refusal to do so will cause the OP to go to the labor board. This causes the second Villainous BSoD of the story, and the OP to call an employee complaint hotline to complain.
  • On the third day, the manager berates the OP for going to the bathroom to change out a tampon (the manager forbids any breaks for any reason, even though they are state-mandated). The OP notes that she should be allowed to do so, noting that the manager just went out to get lunch, motioning to the takeout bag the manager is holding, and threatens to walk out unless she is allowed her break. This causes the third Villainous BSoD of the story, and the OP to calls the employee hotline again.
  • After the OP's shift that same day, another coworker announces her pregnancy. The manager immediately fires her in front of the staff and several customers for being pregnant (which even in an at-will employment state is highly illegal). This causes multiple calls to the employee hotline from employee and customer alike.
  • On the fourth day, the manager alters a customer's order to a more expensive option without permission. When confronted, the manager refuses to change the order back. When the customer shouts at the manager, the manager has her fourth Villainous BSoD of the story and walks back to her office, leaving the other employees to calm him down. Said rant only stops when corporate bigwigs come in and inquire as to what happened and where the manager is. The implication is that the manager is immediately fired for her blatantly illegal actions.
• This boss refuses to allow his staff to obey a police order to evacuate after a bomb goes off nearby. He only relents when the fire marshal threatens to have him arrested.
• This manager is brought in as a substitute "jumpstarter" from a smaller branch to see how she does with a larger store. Only trouble is, this manager has only been working a month in retail and has little to no experience working directly with customers. Within one day, she's reduced to tears about how difficult it is. On her second day, during an event run in partnership with a dementia charity where a number of elderly customers are brought in, the manager throws a temper tantrum – complete with lying screaming on the floor – at one customer with dementia for spilling some orange juice, then shoves them out of the store. To everyone's surprise, Human Resources not only takes the manager's side, but makes her position at the larger store permanent, prompting half the store's staff to hand in their notices in protest and the dementia charity to move their event elsewhere. As a result, the store's reputation craters enough that the manager agrees to leave the store in exchange for the quitting staff withdrawing their resignations.
• Expect bosses who obtained their position through Nepotism to fall under this category:
  • This manager is promoted into the submitter's job because he's the owner's nephew, then ignores the submitter's advance notice of their vacation, and has a vacation on the same week as the submitter without arranging cover, resulting in the store being closed for much of the week. The submitter was put back in their old job the next day.
  • In this story, the general manager of a country club brings in their friend as a manager. The new manager then institutes a new policy for party bookings whereby each table gets four bottles of wine for free, and doesn't tell the other workers until the party's well in swing. The workers are so caught off-guard by this that the submitter misses a table, prompting the manager to chew them out. The submitter gets out of dodge a month later. The new manager doesn't last much longer.
    Manager (while chewing out the submitter): "I'll tell you how it happened: incompetence."
    Submitter: <Stunned Silence> "You know what? I agree, incompetence was definitely the problem here."
  • This owner's daughter-turned-manager loses a USB stick and immediately assumes the submitter stole it since they were seen running out of the manager's office in a hurry. In truth, the submitter had forgotten to hand in a document and left it in her office at the last minute before rushing out to catch the last bus of the night. But the manager refuses to let them interrupt her rant and terminates them on the spot. In reality, the manager had just bumped the stick off her desk. After discovering this, the manager tries to apologize and offer the submitter their job back. The submitter just gives her a "Reason You Suck" Speech and refuses point-blank.
• This manager accuses the poster of trying to defraud the company because they logged their leaving time three minutes after when their vehicle tracker said they left (due to being overtired after a busy shift). Annoyed that the boss is threatening to fire them over three minutes, the poster proceeds to begin working precisely to rule regarding times, inspiring others to do the same, which causes productivity to tank. The manager tries to accuse the poster of turning everyone against him for no reason, but when his superior (who knows the submitter, having received on-the-floor training from them some years earlier) hears the truth, he fires the manager for misusing the trackers (which were meant for emergencies only) and has the workers' on-call hours reduced.
• These managers decide that the best way to speed things up is simply to halve the time permitted for tasks, and give a "we don't want to hear it" reply when told it just isn't possible to get everything done in the time allotted, resulting in everything tanking. As the poster explains further in the comments, large numbers of employees — including seasoned workers — left due to being yelled at for failing to meet impossible targets, making the problem worse, until finally the managers decided to review the targets set and gave new ones, which just happened to be the same as the original numbers. Naturally, they then took credit for "saving" the company.
• No less than three particularly vile examples (a store manager, a district manager and an HR rep) in this story. The submitter, arriving at work, has a collision with a shoplifter fleeing the scene and is knocked down and hospitalized. On returning to work, they are accused of attempting to tackle the thief — a violation of store policy — and fired, the bosses refusing to listen to the explanation of what actually happened, and uncaring that they have a family to support. The poster almost loses their severance pay for refusing to sign a form confirming the managers' version of events, can't afford to get a lawyer, and is left to pay their own medical bills since their bosses still insist they broke policy. Three years later, they're still in debt and struggling to pay rent. The editors sum it up pretty well: "We're So Angry About This That We Can't Even Write A Funny Title".
• This "consultant" bases her advice on astrology, blaming a co-worker being out with the flu on Mercury being in retrograde.
• This vice-president is noted to have No Listening Skills and routinely miscommunicates things by leaving out important details. Case in point, she tries to get somebody to fix a light, but somehow the guy she sends ignores the fact that the lights are out and fixes some "hanging grating" instead.
• This senior manager tells the submitter – the office I.T. support – to fix a microwave and complains to the office manager when the submitter tells her that that's out of her purview. The submitter later fixes it anyway when it turns out the microwave wasn't even plugged in.
• When an irate customer claims that after talking with them, the submitter sent him a package full of excrement, these managers take the guy completely at his word and try to fire the submitter based on his word alone. The submitter has to spell it out for them that they couldn't have sent the package in the short timeframe between the call and the package's arrival. After that, the submitter goes over the idiot managers' heads and files a complaint, resulting in one manager being fired and the other put on probation. The submitter would later resign anyway.
• This manager tries to have business continue like usual while the store's power is out.

Not Always Right

• Some commenters note that this story should have been crossposted on NAW because the main conflict is the result of a nonsensical corporate decision to remove the branch's highly popular children's clothing section because none of the surrounding shops stock children's occasion wear... which is precisely the reason it's so popular. When customer complaints result in the decision being reversed, it's chalked up to an "admin error", which basically translates to "I refuse to take responsibility for my idiotic decision but I can't bring myself to throw anyone under the bus". The submitter is not impressed with that explanation because the decision cost the branch 70% of its profits and caused them to be abused by a woman in a bad mood who didn't even have kids.
• This store manager's reaction to a man punching the self-checkout, damaging the whole system and inducing $700 in damage, is to give him his stuff for free and gives him no punishment whatsoever, making things more difficult for the workers as replacing the computers took longer.
• This customer orders one item at a drive-thru, is asked if that will be everything and says yes, then whines when the cashier politely asks him to continue his order at the till if he wants to add more items. He promptly complains to the manager, who apparently takes every claim he made at face value and threatens to fire the submitter for their nonexistent "bad attitude".

Not Always Learning

• A milder example than most, but this elementary school principal forgets that he ordered the submitter to post some photos on the school's social media accounts and doesn't want to admit it, so he tells the submitter to get his approval first – even when he ordered it himself.