Boss From Hell Chronicles: How I Learned What I Was Really Being Paid For

I’m going to pass a little lesson on to idealistic readers who may still hold on to the belief that some chink of their boss’s black, flinty heart shines bright.

Sort of similar. Bit more hair, slightly better dentition. Neck flab is accurate.

A year or so into my last job, when I was in my early 20s and still in the process of establishing my credibility, I was invited by our main conference partners to speak at their annual shindig, about the role of the media in promoting best practices in healthcare (interesting, right!?). It was a surprise to me, that anyone took me seriously – I think of myself as having a smart woman’s brain, whose potential is tragically cut down by the obnoxious whims of a scandalous, extroverted girl’s heart.

Monday I got to work and sat down with my boss to tell him the news, thinking he would be pleased but he seemed sorta disgruntled, which dampened my buzz. Didn’t he think this was a good opportunity to raise awareness of what we were doing shill for bidness?

Weeks passed and then one day the conference brochures arrived at our office with the list of presentations and speakers. I quickly scanned to the part where my session was and lo and behold under the title was…. Duh-duh-duh… My bosses name! Yes. I later found out he had phoned the organisers behind my back, told them “he’d be delighted to accept their kind offer which I had passed on to him” !!!!! and make the presentation.

“C’mon you guys, who gave Nosferatu a phone again, this isn’t funny…”

Bear in mind there was no conversation about this between he and I. After I saw what he did, it was apparent none would be had. We were to act like this never occurred, that he wasn’t that petty. I had to pretend I didn’t want to stick knitting needles in his heart.

This surpassed other bad shit he had previously done:
- Offer me as payment to a Greek taxi driver wearing stonewashed mom jeans.
- Later dump me in a nightclub with the same stalkerish taxi driver who tried to dry hump me as I sat with my back to him at the bar, wondering where everyone had gotten to. Turned out the boss went off to score coke and took my co-worker.
- Interrupt me every single goddamn time I was having a serious talk with a business contact, always to say something heinous and fuckwitted that embarrassed everyone involved. I developed a pretty good ‘I’m not with him’ face to the point that people regularly assumed I worked for another related organisation.
- Insist on updating my computer when he was in the middle of another outbreak of either facial herpes or warts on his hands. It always worked less well after he was done. Meanwhile I scoured the land for the finest heavy duty anti-bacterial, anti-viral spray money could purchase.
- Once he was praising the American sense of service to someone. After they left, he revealed to me he’d been referring to the escort who’d ‘served’ him in his hotel room the night before, a ‘lovely girl’. Bearing in mind at that point he was still married and I was acquainted with his wife.

You get it. And that’s just a random sampling of the bad shit that affected me.

At the conference, I spoke to the person who had originally invited me, and she was very surprised that my boss was the one speaking and not me. And not just because his English was an abysmal blend of Euro-bleurgh and he wore paisley ascots around his morbidly obese neck that made him look like Toad of Toad Hall covering up his taste for auto-asphyxiation.

My boss. Slightly looked like that guy *and* toad of toad hall.

She expressed to me her mortification that he had done this. She said she would have much preferred I spoke. However this world operates on professional courtesy and not letting your uglier emotions show. I know this because of how many people patted my back over the years and praised me for being able to tolerate him, her included. You probably think I’m joking, or I’m up myself, that’s because you haven’t spent five minutes in his company.

My boss was a colossal fuck-up, in life as in his work. It was a struggle over many years not to let him ruin the credibility of the project we worked on, or show us up with the very hard working and genuine people that contributed. I used to joke to co-workers that we worked despite him, not for him. So in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, two hours before he was due to get up, I politely enquired what he had prepared, already suspecting the answer: NOTHING. He had not a word put together.

This is a man who stutters profoundly, so there was already a strong chance this was going to make us all look very, very bad in front of these people. So, you guessed it, I helped write a kick ass presentation in record time, complete with jokes referring to other presentations given on the day, and I even coached him because this fifty year old man who had decades of experience on me was nervous to get up in front of a hundred people to talk for ten minutes.

On the journey back home, while he ate a pack of garlic salami in close quarters to me like an elderly seal choking down a bucketful of expired mackerel, I went over the new rules to myself:

1. You will never get any praise for work you do so don’t look for it from him.
2. Make sure you get what you want from him in payment.
3. If you get emotional or shouty, he wins. Never let him push your buttons. Don’t click send on that hateful email to him, don’t respond to his blatant attempts to wind you up, just know he’s small, and a cunt and be happy with that.
4. You have nothing to lose. He can’t do the job on his own, so stand up to him when it’s important. In this case, I decided it wasn’t. Other times I was happy to tell him he was a useless carbuncle to his face. He always took it because he knew he was. I continued to get paid. My job only ended when I was ready for it to, i.e. had something else lined up I wanted to do.

When your boss is a tool, but you love the work you do and are good at it, the only way you’ll survive is not by giving in to your temper, but focusing on getting what you want or need out of it – more flexible working hours, a company car, when we travelled I got a great hotel room, sipping bellinis in a five star restaurant overlooking the Aegean, etc.

And that’s how I learned, early in my career that my job was to do what my boss asked me to, since he was paying me. The intrinsic value was not increasing my own prominence or any career related glory, but what the money he paid allowed me to do with my free time and what perks I could squeeze out of him.