bonkers boss
i too have been waiting for such a question, a while back now i spent 5 years working for a 'financial information publication' company if i say that they write "facts about money" you might get the name the founder of this company was probably the first person to have the idea to sit down... ring round some banks, write down what loans and stuff they offer and then publish the info to who ever wanted it... that was in 1988 and back then it was quite a good idea now it is a fairly large company, but unfortunately very misguided, which is why you hear all about compare this and compare that on telly but its nothing to do with the company this story is about.. even though they were the first company ever to collect and publish this type of data..

the main reason for this misguided outlook was the prick of a founder/chief exec, his company his way, he was the most pompous, egocentric, eccentric, stubborn, arrogant knob i've ever met here are a few highlights of things he did.

- every morning the 'house' staff would have to open the mail, remove any paperclips from documents and replace them with little neat black ones that had to be specially ordered from a certain company that did them to spec.

- each cubicle in the toilets had a toilet roll holder that held two rolls side by side... each evening the cleaners would have to swap and replace toilet rolls depending on their remaining paper sizes so that they matched and looked equal i actually saw a cupboard full of rolls at various stages of use.

- the company was housed on 3 floors of a 4 floor building and each floor was about the size of a football pitch.. they each had a main carpet with a different coloured border round the edge... this border was changed 5 times at a cost of about £7000 a time and still wasn't the right colour

- each floor was color co-ordinated and god forbid you should take a chair from one floor to another for a meeting or something like that.

- we once had a meeting to talk about how we should go about organising and having meetings.... i kid you not !!

- hired several web designers and spent over £1,000,000 building a website that couldn't do anything that google can't do for you and was slower at it aswell, then gave it no publicity except for a small ad on the back of the magazines the company published... it got about 10 hits a day and was decommisioned a year later.

- the same web designers would be seen crying on their keyboards after a visit from him, after using all the best technology and practices for designing websites at the time, with some incredibley impressive graphics work, he would walk in and completely undo all the work and ideas and insist on simple stuff like text based buttons and no flashy stuff that people (meaning him) dont understand

- insisted on the train once in first class that his cheap bottle of wine be served chilled in the appropiate silver bucket with ice

- during the fire brigade strike a few years back, he had the letter box sealed over, all microwaves, kettles, toasters, coffee machines and any other heating device removed and locked away and did ask if the house/security staff would consider doing night shifts.

- i worked in IT, it was beneath him to put paper into a photocopier/printer and so the machine would be declared "out of order" with a little hanging sign

- every fortnight the head of each department would have to go on the 'house walkaround' this involved going around with him and looking at problems around the entire building... so for my department he could spot a network cable or power cable out of place at 100 yards (all cables were color coded aswell) all empty desks had to have a working phone and computer to make it appear we had more staff then we did, this was difficult as our phone system could only connect 130 phones and there was 142 desks. he did however eventually give up coming into the main server room and trying to tell us how to manage space and cables and systems.

thats a few of a list of many, to be fair he did throw fantastic xmas bashes, everyone had hampers and that, girls used to get flowers on b/days and men got bottles of wine or scotch, the building was all the nicer to work in for his efforts and there was a fussball table and games consoles, although this was yet another effort to make his company seem to be competing with the likes of virgin or other high level institutions that provide entertainment and games to help their staff be creative, it was all show...

he did wonder why his staff turnover was so high and why the 'investors in people' award status he received one year was taken away the next.

oh and did i mention he was a prick ?

length ? 5 years of the shit
(maxumus HEY!.... diddly dee, de de de de de de, Sun 21 Jun 2009, 0:16, Reply)