Posted by denised in 
It’s a sinking feeling. One I’m all too familiar with. It starts out with your boss telling you she, or he, wants to talk to you. If he’s a real heel, he’ll get a hold of you on your cell phone (company provided or personal) late in the evening or even on the weekend. When your boss calls you at night or on the weekend, it’s never to give you a raise. The worst part about it is when you’ve got to wait until Monday morning to get the news.
This recently happened to a friend of mine. A bunch of us were hanging out on Sunday evening, when she gets a voicemail from her boss telling her to give him a call back, “if she feels like it.” WTH? Who does that? On a Sunday? With no hint at all about why he’s calling? I’ll tell you who does that. A jerk. And unfortunately the business world is full of them. When I was laid off from my last position, my own jerk called me on the first day of my vacation, to lay me off. Why, you might ask, didn’t she just tell me the Friday before I left for vacation? Did I mention she was a jerk?
What I do know is that bad bosses – really bad bosses – whether by design or sheer incompetence, choose the worst times to do the worst things. Layoffs, “come to Jesus meetings” and run of the mill, work-related bad news are all par for the course wherever you work. My issue is with the way these bad bosses choose to handle delivering it. Once after a particularly disastrous quarter, one boss called to blame me for the entire million dollar company’s poor performance. Even though I was the marketing manager, he held me responsible for sales, production and inventory failures. Why? I was the only one stupid enough to take his call on a Friday evening.
I’ve spent over ten years working for bad bosses who made holding the proverbial ‘other shoe’ over their employees head into an art form. Some seemed to actually derive pleasure from passing on bad news at inopportune times. Others just seemed oblivious. Whatever their motivation, it was just one of the many really bad habits of really bad bosses. The light at the end of the tunnel? The worse these bosses were, the harder I worked to get away from them. I’ve also found that eventually there’ll be a shoe looming over their heads as well. And I have to admit, when the other shoe finally did drop squarely on the shoulders of one of my most notorious bad bosses, I got a big kick over it – pun intended. Is that wrong?
