Managers behaving badly: International edition
It’s oddly comforting to learn that American managers aren’t the only ones that can act like jerks sometimes.
The website of the Guardian newspaper in Britain recently opened an online discussion on the question, “What’s the strangest thing your boss has asked you to do?”
Here’s a sampling of the responses (prepare to be occasionally confused about some of the details):
Questionable taste
A boss once got hammered at a company function (attended by senior management and clients), jumped on my back, rode me around piggy-back for 10 minutes, and made me buy 32 Jägerbombs from the bar – without expensing them.
That was the annoying bit: once she’d sobered up, she refused to put the receipt through, as she’d promised to at the time, because it would apparently make us look unprofessional. I did point out that it was a bit late.
I have worked in China. As a welcome party, our boss took us for dinner, managed to get us drunk (as per Chinese custom) and then took us to KTV (karaoke), which we didn’t know in China also doubles up as a brothel. I am a woman.
Really weird
Tickle trout out of the river in his garden. My job title was Head of Graphic Design.
I was ordered to be friends with a co-worker who liked to pretend she was a vampire, and would grab people from behind and bite them. I was disciplined when I didn’t take her to the zoo on a weekend, on my own time. I should have quit and sued them for allowing the assault, but I was desperate to keep my job.
Family matters
As an intern at the Manchester Evening News, one of the journalists used to send me to buy flowers for his wife and mistress – along with love notes to them both – taking care not to mix them up, of course.
In a previous job, my boss asked me to take his 9-year-old daughter to the cinema and buy her McDonalds afterwards.
Creepy and gross
My boss’ daughter couldn’t get her car started, and I was asked to go to their home and give a hand. Fortunately, she hadn’t looked under the hood of the car. The family cat had crawled up into the engine compartment for a warm lie down. When the car was started, it was caught in the fan belt and strangled.
When the daughter called my boss to let him know what happened, he asked me to remove the strangled cat from under the car hood and get her on her way, which I did. That part of the job description that stated “other duties as assigned” includes an awful lot, but dead cats?
Whilst working for a dive company in Australia, it was part of our daily duties to try to find the legs of a man who had been bitten in half by a white pointer a couple of years previously.
The royal treatment
Once my boss was on a business trip to San Francisco. Our office is in New York. She called me from the hotel room and told me to call the front desk to order her breakfast from room service.
My boss decided once that for a team-bonding experience, we should design, print, laminate and then cut out invites, menus and party bits – all to promote a huge family BBQ which none of us were actually invited to.
Ah, bad bosses. Think of how boring the world would be if all managers acted like saints and everybody just did their job and got along.
Have to admit, though, we’re still wondering about how one would go about tickling trout out of a river.
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