worst boss i had was at my shortest stint as contract staff. it was a role that i got through a human resources agency.
i only survived 3 months before i couldn’t take it anymore. let’s call my horrible boss D. here are some of their antics:
- D banned their staff from having lunch together (our work didn’t overlap, D just didn’t want us to spend time together. when colleagues and i talked D would pull us aside and question us on why we needed to talk to each other.
- following up on previous point, there was once i offered to help my colleague. D overheard and pulled them aside after, telling them “who do you think you are, getting help on your job?”
- D was ridiculously moody. they would yell at their staff sometimes because of some small mistakes and you would hear them yelling in the whole office. D had an awful rep with the other departments who sat with us because of the constant yelling. one of them talked to me and pitied me for being in D’s team).
- i was hired as a graphic designer. D gave me a lot of senseless comments for my work. case in point: D wanted me to set all of our collaterals’ font type to Arial in font size 12 and they said it was because it was our ‘corporate font’. (it was not).
basically every day was like walking on eggshells around D.
anyway on why i left: one of my colleagues went on a 2 week holiday and D asked me to cover her work. my colleague worked in operations and i was a designer so i did not have any clue on what to do considering that we were in completely different fields.
i was asked to liaise with our on-site vendor to collect an artwork from them for their shop and they had informed me on the phone to tell me that they would send it over in the afternoon. i called at morning. when i had informed D, they demanded that i get the artwork within an hour. obviously i had no way of getting it since the vendor was third party.
D proceeded to spam call me every 5 minutes on my landline and shout at me every time i told them i didn’t have it. wound up hiding at the stairwell sobbing to my agent hours later and saying that i couldn’t do this anymore.
next day i was told to never return. apparently this is not the first time and other people who complained to the agency were asked to leave as well. no surprise that the role was open for a few years after that, until D got into trouble and left their post as the boss of that department.