subject: Is Your Boss So Juvenile That He Actually Needs Potty Training? [print this page] Is Your Boss So Juvenile That He Actually Needs Potty Training?
By Jane Lee Bock
The recent economic downturn has caused many people to take jobs that are frankly beneath their station. People with great skills and experience have been working in menial jobs, or positions that use only a portion of their abilities. It is bad enough to have to take a job at a fraction of what you are worth, but the lack of choices has put some in the position of working for people they would never otherwise associate with just to put food on the table. Those bosses better wake up because when the economy turns around, their best workers will be the first to leave.
"I had to work for a boss who actually needed potty training," chuckled Amber, a paralegal who took a job working for a lawyer whose office was in his split level home. "Ordinarily I would never take a job in a home office, if only for safety reasons, but there were other people there and I needed the money to tide me over until I could get a permanent job, she said. Amber was a victim of downsizing from a large law firm that went from a staff of six paralegals/researchers down to two. She had twenty years of experience, and many successful cases under her belt.
Her new boss's office areas were the lower levels of his home and had a separate bathroom. "Not only did he rarely even close the door completely when he went in there, never mind wash his hands or put the seat down afterward, he soon took to not even flushing the toilet," she grimaced.
"It was disgusting, and even after I complained about it and how discourteous it was to the other people in the office, he just said it wasted water and he continued to do it. It amused him that I found it so disgraceful," she said. What made matters worse was the fact that the entire office used the same phones, computers, and other office equipment due to the way things were set up.
"I used several bottles of hand sanitizer a week," said Amber. "And I had to wipe down the phones constantly." Amber left that job after just a few months even though she hadn't found a new job yet. Since this was merely the most disgusting thing this guy did amongst many other violations, she just had to get out of that environment even if it did strain her finances to the limit.
"I never thought that at my age I would have to do potty training for a grown man," she said shaking her head. "My own children weren't this difficult even when they were infants."
Sharon had a similar, although not quite as repulsive situation when she took an off-the-books low paying job as a secretary when the publishing company she worked for folded under economic pressures. This guy only needed somebody part-time but expected executive secretary performance at minimal wages. "It was almost humiliating," she said. "He expected me to do everything in a few hours that would take anybody a week to do, including his personal business, and then he kept coming up with excuses on payday for not having enough cash to pay me."
What eventually sent Sharon out the door? His telephone manners and his management style.
"He would regularly have temper tantrums for no apparent reason and it was very stressful," she said. "He would fly off the handle if he couldn't find a file or a phone number, screaming and yelling and stomping his feet like a child having a temper tantrum. It was ridiculous."
This man was such a control freak, she said, that he even insisted that when anyone was on the phone they put it on speaker so he could hear what was being said. "Then he would constantly interrupt and talk in the background telling me what to say so I couldn't even hear the caller in the first place."
On occasion, she added, if he didn't like how she was handling the call (usually being too polite to someone who was not a customer was the offense), he would grab the phone from her hand, yell something obnoxious at the caller, hang up and then yell at her for not getting rid of the caller faster.
"He would actually run into the room if the phone rang and stand there listening or asking who it was over and over," she said. "I told him I have been answering phones for 30 years and I am pretty sure I know how to do this like a decent human being, but he would still grab the phone like I was telling his secrets to the FBI or something. What a nut job."
Sharon left that job for a part-time position at Macy's, working in their customer service department. "Even with the stresses of customer service, it is still better than that other job," she laughed. "At least I get to behave like a real person there and not some disrespected slave. And I still have the time to look for a good job that utilizes all my skills."
Clearly, a major problem with the few jobs that people have been able to obtain during this recession is that they find themselves without a skilled human resources person to go to when improper or even illegal practices abound in a particular business. This has been especially difficult for people coming out of a well-defined corporate environment with a structured hierarchy and chain of command. In those businesses, if the boss or supervisor was a nut case, the employee would have somewhere else to go to report the behavior and process a complaint in a civil manner. Now, it's just "deal with it or get out."
But with the economy on the rebound, employment situations like the two above will hopefully come to an end for people who have experience, skills and talents that are generally appreciated in corporate America, and bosses like those two will go back to the bottom of the barrel, only able to get inexperienced, uneducated employees who don't yet have enough wisdom to know that they don't have to subject themselves to bad behavior for a simple, small paycheck.
