I work for the federal government as an admin assistant. My boss is a
single woman, a fact she bemoans to anyone who will listen. She does
not know how to keep her personal matters private.

She usually spends the afternoons laughing and chatting with friends
on the phone. Though she sits in her office the door is open, and her
voice carries to the far end of the room.

One time at work, only days after the 2010 Vancouver Olympics began,
she was talking with some friend on the telephone and trashing the
opening ceremonies. A gaff had occurred when only 3 of the 4 torches
rose from below ground, allowing only 3 of the 4 sports stars to
light them. My boss ranted to her friend about how the torches looked
like dildos. “Whoever designed those things was using a dildo for
inspiration, I’m sure of it!” She was practically screaming and
laughing about the dildos, and must have said the word about 20
times during that conversation.

I snickered at my desk. I guess my single female boss knows a lot
about dildoes, and now the whole office is aware of her “carnal
knowledge”, too.

I worked for a large investment firm in NYC and my manager was the VP
of the department. One day, she asked me to run a personal errand for
her, which was not uncommon. She gave me her credit card and sent me
to Carnegie Hall to purchase tickets for an upcoming show. The
tickets were approx. $1,000 in total, and when I gave them the credit
card to pay for it, they asked me for ID. Since it wasn’t my card,
obviously I could not provide ID. They took me to the security office
and, lucky for me, they allowed me to call my boss. They said if she
could come down with ID, they wouldn’t have me arrested. I called my
boss and explained to her what happened, and she said she’d come
down. I sat there for FOUR hours, and when she finally came, she
didn’t even apologize to me! She was an evil, ugly woman who ended
up marrying a total mooch who sucked her dry and made her pay for
her own engagement ring. She got what she deserved.

Several years ago, I was hired to work for a partner in a law firm.
We seemed to have a pretty good relationship and the work was very
difficult and demanding but I was keeping up with it. Then about 4
months into the job, Secretaries’ Day arrived and the firm’s policy
was that each attorney would take his secretary to lunch and the firm
would reimburse him for the charge. One other real ass-kissing
secretary’s boss was out of town so my boss was designated to take
her with us. We’re sitting in the restaurant and she starts sucking
up to him. “Bill, why don’t you tell us what YOU think makes the
ideal secretary because I’m sure NOBODY knows better than a demanding
guy like you with YOUR high standards!” He smirks a bit and says
“Well, the ideal secretary should have a good bit of experience, I’d
say at LEAST 10 years.” I smiled, I had almost precisely that. “And
of course, she should be a very fast typist” (I’d been in a typing
competition locally and he knew this). “And I would expect her to be
very efficient and have good computer skills” (I had that and I’m
thinking isn’t that nice, he’s describing me.) Then he said “And
of course, the best thing is to find all of that in a single mom because
they always need money bad enough that you can really dump on them,
they can’t afford to quit, and you don’t have to give them that much
notice of overtime. Besides, what are they going to do, walk? Then
how would they feed their kids?” I WAS A SINGLE PARENT.

I started hating him that day.

My actual boss is absent most of the time so one of the guys in my
small team has taken it upon himself to be the “acting manager”.

Problem is, he’s an unprofessional douche.

Yesterday he pulled me aside for a chat that started with “Now it’s
none of my business what your home habits are, but you look very
sleepy when you come in every morning…” before degrading to “You
look like you’ve had 400 Kilograms of heroin.”

I was seriously being busted for not being perky enough in the
morning. I work on an IT help desk, since when was perky a prerequisite for
employment? I pointed out that 400 kilograms of heroin was enough to kill a small
nation.

His response was “Reality doesn’t need to be a factor in his
argument.”

When I was training for my job at the library, I was told taking
fines for overdue materials would be a part of it. My boss
half-heartedly trained me and showed me  how to handle payment with a
debit card. We had to hit the ‘No Sale’ button to get the register to
open to put in our copy of the receipt. At the end of each day, we
printed out summary reports from the register and my boss would take
the register and the receipts and double check the reports that
printed up, just to make sure everything, money and receipts, were
accounted for.

Each report had the patron’s name and a receipt number printed next
to it. The ‘No Sale’ receipts had the next receipt number in sequence,
but had bold letters next to it saying “NOSALE”, clearly indicating
it was a debit transaction. Simple enough, right? Er, no.

So my boss called me near the end of a day, and she literally
screamed at me about how half of my receipts are missing, and how could I
be stupid enough to lose six receipts! That day, I’d had six
transactions with the debit machine, so I started to worry that my
receipts really were missing.

I go in and look at the report my boss is frantically pointing to,
and every single receipt number that was “missing” also had a
“NOSALE” printed next to it. When I pointed this out to my fuming
boss, she snapped at me with, “Well, how am I supposed to know what
no sale means!?”

I didn’t point out that she was the one who trained me.

I was working at a UPS Store at the time, ran by a single owner who
was very sexist. At the time, I was about 2 months pregnant and at
times, the only means of getting to work was to ride my bike. If it
was bad weather that day, and I didn’t have a ride to work, I simply
could not make it in.

Early in the morning, my husband had left with the car and I was
forced to take my chances at noon for my shift with 50% chance of
rain. Like usual, I called my boss to let him know that I may not
make it in due to weather and having to use my bike. He insisted I
call a friend to drop me off at work and not to ride my bike anymore,
so I obliged. Little did I know that this would be impossible.

I called everyone I knew, even from church, and either no one
answered, or they had other plans. An hour before my shift, I called
to check in with my boss and he told me, “find a ride, you still have
time. It’s okay if you are late.”

I continued calling with no luck. It was now nearly an hour after my
scheduled shift, so once again I called my boss to let him know.
“That’s fine,” he said, “just come in the morning and we’ll talk.”

The next morning I had my husband drop me off *super* early to work,
before my boss even got there, with my clothes pressed and shoes
shined up (to make it look like I was REALLY ready to work). About 30
minutes after the store was supposed to open, my boss finally arrived
and invited me in after he unlocked the doors.

“Call a ride,” he said. “I only let you come in to work to tell you
you’re fired.”