bosses
after all the ribbing from /talk, i think my boss actually does have Crippling Undiagnosed Aspergers.

he is utterly inflexible; his only interest is the law - and i mean his ONLY interest. god help you if you get stuck next to him at a team outing - he has bizarre habits such as having to stir his tea 3 times, clockwise, only. he has a stupidly fixed routine, right down to the order of how he does everything in the morning, never mind how a file or instructions to counsel should be organised. i once got bollocked for using pink highlighter instead of yellow. he has precisely no small talk, cannot meet people's eyes, frequently offends colleagues and clients, and has an absolute obsession with washing his hands.

he is also fully single, and i suspect right at the back of the closet.

what is your boss like and does s/he make your world a happier or a sadder one?
( rachelswipe with a fork, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 14:15, 16 replies, latest was 16 years ago)

Ooo! he sounds fun to work with.
As I have mentioned before, my boss is my step-dad. He is a pain in the neck to work for but quite frankly there are so many perks to this job it would be churlish of me to complain.

I just wish he wouldn't fart in the office.
( girlinthehole, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 14:21, Reply)

That is really bizarre!
Surely everyone knows you have to stir tea an even number of times!
(Rich T has a clever and witty sig, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 14:27, Reply)

He sounds a bit like a man I used to work with
called Derek.
Derek went to church every Sunday. He played table tennis in a league. He had the same thing for breakfast everyday and always had a ham sandwich for lunch. He would go to waitrose every lunch time at 1.15 to buy bread.
He didn't like 'foreign food' so refused to eat some gingerbread I'd once made because he thought it would be too spicy. He didn't have a passport and had only even been on holiday in Devon. He had a stash of latex gloves and vaseline in his desk draw (I never asked why). He knew I liked rock music so once when we were in his car he started playing teenage kicks by The Undertones. It was, in all honesty the single most creepy moment of my life.

Ohh and he was 49 and still lived with his mum.
( wanderlust, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 14:34, Reply)

A guy who used to work for me
used to make cardboard cut out everything. When he first started he came from working in an office and missed having a water cooler. As the shop was so quiet he spent days making a proper life size cut out of one so he and the one other member of staff here could stand around it and gossip. In the end I had to ask him to stop as he started making human cutouts and placing them around corners to scare customers.

He's been gone 4 months now and I still find the occasional memento of our happy, cardboardy time together. :(

(when I say gone I mean working elsewhere, not gone gone)
(Holy Cremola Foam Batman will be back on, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 15:00, Reply)

Stirring your tea is normal, but only if you stop.
Current boss I have no complaints with. I work with some really nice people.

Former bosses? How about the guy doing Department of Defense stuff who started drinking Coors Light at 9:30 am every day? He would call me at all hours and rant at me because he couldn't understand my drawings and wanted to have final dimensions on everything- which would make sense if we had a definite fixed design in mind, but as we were building a prototype and trying to fit components into a shell this made zero sense. It would have been like putting up curtains in a house while you're still framing in the walls. He then had the other engineer on the project show up three days before we were to present it to the military so we could assemble this thing and present an untested piece of hardware to the Air Force. And then he was enraged when it didn't go well.

Shit, I'd better stop there before I get angry all over again...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Wed 8 Oct 2008, 15:05, Reply)

Sounds like OCD.
HOW BIZARRE HOW BIZARRE
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 15:17, Reply)

OCD OCD OCD
Is the one for me.
Yaaaaaaaay.

My boss is brilliant. Won't let me back to work until the doctor signs me off that my wrist is sorted.
(porkylips looks better as the sun goes down., Wed 8 Oct 2008, 15:27, Reply)

^^ damn you and all your kind, mikewozere^^
now i'm going to be singing that bastard song all afternoon!
( rachelswipe with a fork, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 15:28, Reply)

@Holy Cremola
That sounds ace. You should never have let him go.


I normally make a point of arguing with my boss at every opportunity. I've just listened to him talk for an hour, though, and could think of nothing cutting to say. Largely because he said nothing non-trivial - but, still: it's not playing the game, is it?
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 15:41, Reply)

my boss is one of those everybody's best friend types
she has no real life friends.
(bazmorningstar efil4nat3b, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 16:09, Reply)

A boss I had once
who also happened to be my father-in-law at the time used to insist that I only produce rough figures plucked out of thin air for both the accountants and the bank. He argued that projected figures were a waste of time because things might change and the bank should ensure his cash flow because of who he was.
Whenever I attempted to work on a proper business plan he would hide figures from me and generally be very difficult.
We even had a government advisor come in to help us consider diversification (this was a large farm btw) but he refused to give them the accounts as he suspected the advisor knew his brother.

I gave up eventually and the business continues to go down the tubes slowly.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 16:15, Reply)

My boss is lovely
He's a hardcore, bible bashing Christian, but doesn't shove it down your throat. Instead, if anything's wrong, he does his best to help.

He asked me to take a 2 month leave of absence from work as the company is doing shit (he knows I just got my inheritance money off mum) and my salary has helped shore up the company and it's now turning around.
He kept my health benefits on, and bought me a shiny laptop for when I was traveling.

I was supposed to go back tomorrow, but I asked if I could go back Monday. He said yes.
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 16:28, Reply)

@ Enzyme
Yeah I didn't really want to but he was moving to Glasgow so had to transfer away. For our Christmas display window last year he spend hours making a cardboard nativity (no joke) complete with cardboard Jesus. I had it in the window for just over an hour and somebody complained. Arseholes.
(Holy Cremola Foam Batman will be back on, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 16:28, Reply)

Ah Professional Firms
I've worked with accountants like that, the funniest thing is watching them make carefully planned, but hideously ill considered passes at female colleagues.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Wed 8 Oct 2008, 20:00, Reply)

My boss is currently suspended following allegations of fraud.

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Wed 8 Oct 2008, 20:58, Reply)

Fruitloop
My old boss had the worlds worst breath. We'd walk into the office and the air would still smell sometime after he'd already left the room. We'd give him a quick call and ask if he was looking for someone. He always thought we were clever for knowing this, but we never told him the reason we knew he'd been in the office was his bad breath. I worked as an engineer at the time and he had no engineering knowledge, but would wax lyrical to myself and the maintenance dept about how to repair something. It's particularly embarrassing when we had outside clients in and he would attempt to educate clients on something he knew less than nothing about. What a c*nt.
(The Archduke of South London I'm in your Girlfriend eating her organs, Thu 9 Oct 2008, 15:09, Reply)