I'll give them something to drink before the war...
My first job out of Polytechnic was working for a consultancy in my home town. The MD was a prat who looked a lot like John Cleese, and had his head up his arse. He took it upon himself to patronise me pretty much from the word go. He gave me all the shittest, most boring crap to do, and complained to me (albeit passively) when I didn't get it done or simply didnt get it.
Example.. The company produced a magazine on a bimonthly basis with bugs and features of their software listed and submitted by users. He asked me to go through these (there were a couple of thousand, mind) and reproduce them.
There was no point to this, he just wanted me to reproduce them.
I would ask why I couldn't work on the new windows software (which was easier and far more interesting) but he ignored me and instead chose to patronise me further with a weekly 'lesson' in computing. (Most of which I hasten to add, I can say was bullshit and only half correct at best).
After I'd been there only 4 miserable months, he sacked me. I had just completed on a new flat, and was mortified.
He complained about the state of my trousers, the fact that I wore an earring (so did someone else in the company, but that was largely irrelevant to him), and about my timekeeping.
I was physically choked up when I left, not because I was leaving, I couldn't stand the company or the job, but because of the financial shit I was now in.
13 years have passed since then... Was I caught bang-to-rights? In a way. I was a lazy little sod back then, and I merely wanted money to indulge my active social life outside of work.
In a way not, because the job was presented to me in such a boring way that I couldn't help but hate it.
When I take on junior staff, I give them plenty to occupy them, I don't patronise them, I appraise them regularly as to how they're doing and I never deal out suprises.
But then I learned how not to do it from a bunch of jerks in 1993
(LunarJim, Thu 23 Feb 2006, 15:07, Reply)