I am writing this from the office toilet right now because I’m still in absolute shock. I’ve seen toxic corporate culture in Singapore, but what happened today was on a completely different level of messed up.
To give you some background, our department handles IT infrastructure and enterprise systems. We have this manager who is notorious for being an absolute tyrant—the kind of boomer boss who manages by fear, gaslighting, and public humiliation. Let’s call my colleague “A”. A is a relatively quiet, hardworking guy who mostly keeps his head down and just does his job.
Lately, the team has been under insane pressure because we’ve been pushed to rush a massive enterprise software upgrade across the company. We are talking about upgrading critical systems from version 12 to version 13, and the timeline given to us was completely unrealistic. Because of the insane crunch, a minor configuration error happened during the deployment phase yesterday.
This morning, our boss found out. Instead of calling A into a private meeting room to discuss the issue like a rational human being, he marched straight into our open-plan office, slammed his laptop onto A’s desk, and just started screaming.
It wasn’t just a standard reprimand; it was full-blown, vein-popping verbal abuse. He was towering over A, red in the face, shouting strings of insults at the top of his lungs. “Are you stupid?!” “Why do we even pay you?!” “A primary school kid could do a better job than you!” The entire floor went dead silent. Everyone was just staring at their monitors, pretending to type, too terrified to intervene.
A was just sitting there, visibly trembling, completely frozen like a deer in headlights. The boss kept leaning in closer, slamming his hand on the partition, demanding an immediate answer.
And then, it happened. I was sitting just one cubicle row away, and I saw A’s face turn completely pale. A dark stain suddenly started spreading across his pants, pooling rapidly under his chair. He had literally lost bladder control from sheer terror and anxiety right there in front of the whole department.
The boss looked down, realized what happened, paused for a split second with a disgusted look on his face, and just sneered, “Clean yourself up. Disgusting.” Then he turned around and walked back into his corner office like nothing happened.
A just sat there crying silently for a minute before grabbing his bag and rushing out of the office. He hasn’t replied to any of our text messages since.
Honestly, I feel physically sick. The sheer humiliation this guy went through is heartbreaking. Nobody should ever be subjected to this kind of psychological terror at work. I want to report this to MOM (Ministry of Manpower) or TAFEP, but I’m terrified of retaliation. Has anyone ever witnessed or handled workplace harassment this severe in SG? What can we even do to help him?