I've just remembered another one
One summer I worked in a hardware store in a small Welsh town. The manager had recently left and, being a small chain, the company had temporarily sent over another manager to step in for a while.

This woman had basically come onto a fasttrack management programme, so hadn't actually worked in any of the roles she would be managing, plus was more than a little resentful to be pulled away from her 'vulture in the wings' position to be a temporary manager to our little shop in the middle of nowhere.
As you can imagine, all of this on top of her serious personality malfunction, and the fact that she was stepping into the shoes of a very liked manager, meant that she went down about as well as half a slug in your salad.
Anyway, we all got on with it, hoping to weather this unpleasant period with as little issue as possible, and that her dislike of our location/team would mean she would move swiftly on.

One day I was serving at the counter, the manager was wandering around trying to look busy, and I saw someone struggling down from upstairs with THREE big tins of paint in their basket! These were lovely plastic baskets in our company colours but not exactly sturdy, the handle merely clipped in either side and we'd had a fair few near misses from the unwise combination of flimsy baskets and an upstairs paint department! The maanger was oblivious and I was helplessly in the middle of giving someone their change, however I managed to catch the eye of one of my colleagues and desperately gestured to the customer on the stairs, seeing the danger he ran off in that direction to try and intercept but it was already too late. As the guy reached the bottom steps the basket finally gave up, the handle unclipped and the paint hurtled to the floor, two smashing open and pouring all over the bottom three steps and seeping slowly but with conviction out across the floor.
Manager-witch finally notices, there is a dead beat of silence, then she turns to my colleague who was on his way over and says 'clean that up', nothing else, just walks into the back and doesn't come back out for the next hour.

I suggest to the customer that they go and pick up some more paint and another colleague goes with them to help them carry it (by hand!), I found some card in the back and break that up so that a couple of us can start scooping up as much of the paint as possible before finally doing some serious mopping. It didn't all come up because the paint had stained, but at least it was clean and safe again. When we're all sorted I return back to the till and inbetween serving customers I make up a very neat, very polite note to stick to the back of the basket rack pointing out that we're sorry but the baskets are not suitable to be used with heavy items, such as paint tins.

About 10 minutes later manager-bitch finally reappears, sly glance at the stairs to confirm it's all cleaned up, no comment at all on it (not even 'wow you got that cleaned up fast, well done guys' which frankly would have done her a lot of favours as well as being pretty fair), does some more pottering around, eventually wanders by the counter and...pauses.
She's staring at my sign for a good 30 seconds, then suddenly she steps forward, tears it down and very purposefully screws it up. She throws it in the bin by my feet, unnecessarily shuffles some papers about under the counter and then goes to walk away again.
I've been watching all of this inbetween serving a customer, but they are out the door and gone and I'm stood there genuinely quite surprised at how petty her actions seemed to be, but even more so that she hadn't even asked about the sign ('who wrote this? why? I need to take it down because...') so in the void of her actually acting like a professional, nay adult, I call to her as she walks away.

"Was there a problem with that sign (manager-bitch)?"

She swings around, looking like I've just spat in her face

"YES. I'm not having that up"
"...why?"

Again, she looked at me like I'd just stripped naked and started rubbing furniture polish on my writhing form

"Because I said so!"

She turns to walk away at this point but frankly I've always had issues with people not answering perfectly reasonable questions. And also with over-trumped authority figures ;)

"(manager-bitch) we can't let people use those baskets for paint, they're just not sturdy enough"
"well that's OUR problem" she hissed "we can't go telling customers what not to do just because we're not providing the right things!"
"...so are we ordering some better ones?"

God, if looks could kill

"I will look into it, if it's available then I'll consider it"
"Well, surely we need a warning up in the mean time?"

That was when she walked back over to the counter and started in with her 'are you telling me my job? are you suggesting I don't know my job? how dare you question me! if you have a problem with me you can leave' thing. She just absolutely could not see that 'it's our responsibility not the customers' quite logically progresses to 'we need to do something about this problem that has just been highlighted'.

In the end she stormed off back to the store rooms, demanding that we 'clean those stairs properly' as she went and stayed there the rest of the day, only popping her sullen face out when necessary.

Thankfully I went back to uni quite soon after that, but I felt for my colleagues who I left behind having to put up with her for quite a while. Apparently it wasn't just us that had noticed her attitude problem and head office seemed strangely reluctant to move her back into a more central store.
( Jessie © needs pirate name suggestions, Wed 24 Jun 2009, 14:17, 5 replies)

What an arse
I'd have given her a mouthful of abuse, I think.

On another note:

"Again, she looked at me like I'd just stripped naked and started rubbing furniture polish on my writhing form"

I suspect that would have been a different look from that of us male b3tards. :-)
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Wed 24 Jun 2009, 14:26, closed)

You underestimate the gruesomeness of my writhing good sir ;)

( Jessie © needs pirate name suggestions, Wed 24 Jun 2009, 14:33, closed)

Hmm
I think I'd need to witness it to make a proper judgment...
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Wed 24 Jun 2009, 15:02, closed)

aha
she had been binned off to the sticks eh? Poor youse :-)
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Wed 24 Jun 2009, 18:49, closed)

Hopefully she was taken out
by a pot of paint...
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Wed 24 Jun 2009, 20:29, closed)