People Tell Us the Worst Things Their Horrible Bosses Have Done

On most days, an office environment doubles up as a makeshift home, colleagues become rant-receiving therapists and your boss, well, they’re basically the puppeteers pulling your strings. If you’re lucky, they’re the chill kinds who’ll buy you lunch, let you take the occasional day off and join you on your smoke breaks.

But just because most humans become garbage at the slightest sign of having power, bosses are often authoritarian assholes. Alongside refusing to see you as a fully functioning adult capable of making your own decisions, the lowest common denominator of such bosses can come with a ban from checking social media while at the office, taking credit for work you spent hours slaving over and almost always making you work weekends. What’s even worse about this whole ordeal is that since they’re usually the ones paying you, they pretty much own your ass, at least during office hours. But beyond these average kinda bad bosses, there also exist a rarer but far more terrifyingly tyrannical breed of shitty bosses. If you thought you had it bad, here are stories of people who had the worst bosses ever.

I had just joined this ad film production house fresh out of college. My boss happened to have passed out from the same college. At first, I was psyched. I thought we’d be able to bond over all the similarities of student life, most importantly, smoking up. Everyone in my college smoked weed so I automatically assumed even my boss did. But when I finally tried to break the ice with him, he was curt and dismissive and acted like he didn’t have time for my bullshit. Then, just when my spirits were down and I was disappointed that I couldn’t win over my boss, he called me to his office at the end of the day and asked me if I was serious about smoking up. I nodded excitedly and he flashed a sneaky smile. He told me he knew a guy who could get us some, but that cops were cracking down and so he was afraid of getting caught. He basically suggested that if I was willing to score for him, it would prove I was cool and fearless and would make for the ideal smoking buddy. Charged with wanting to prove myself, I agreed. The dealer called me to some shady abandoned school lot and dropped off a big bag of weed, at least 50 grams of it. I was shaking with nervousness, but I somehow managed to slip it in my backpack, slip out of the area unnoticed, and get to office by about 9 PM. I felt this giddy rush of excitement at the thought of how impressed my boss would be with me and imagined the two of us hotboxing his cabin. But when I actually showed up, two of his buddies were already drinking beer in his office. He looked at me icily, ushered me in, asked me to leave the bag and get out. I had to run after him for at least two weeks after that to get my money back and I never got to smoke even one joint of what I scored. - Sahil*, 20

I got bit by a stray dog on a Friday night, so obviously my instinct was to rush to the hospital the next day so I could get injections to prevent any infection. Except my boss had some big client pitch on the coming Monday, so she insisted I work through the weekend. I told her I would try but that I was at the hospital waiting to take my injection and that there was a long queue. She got pissed because apparently I was ‘wasting time at the hospital’, and asked me to just ‘go to a vet instead’. After all that, I somehow managed to help her with the pitch despite the pain I was in, only to later find out that she took the credit for all of my ideas at the client meeting. - Simran*, 21

My boss had quite the reputation of being a bitch to her employees, and then buying them expensive gifts so she wouldn’t have to apologise. This one time, some completely different team from the office fucked up with a marketing promo. Even though I wasn’t even involved in it, she needed someone to bash on. So she called me to her house at 3 AM, hurled abuses, threatened to ruin my entire career, and said some really nasty shit. The next morning, I came to the office to find the latest Louis Vuitton bag on my desk. I returned it and quit. - Narmada*, 37

I had just moved to Mumbai and managed to snag a job at an exciting media startup. The possibilities of what I could achieve were endless. Then I met my boss. While the company had clout in the industry, the dude who ran it was a major fuck-up. He was a shitty person who basically had no business sense and relied on his wife’s and parents’ money to run the company. One day though, his wife left him and suddenly he was left without a business manager and a dysfunctional team. Seeing his terrible work ethic, brands who worked with us grew doubtful and slowly we started to lose the little business we had. Finally, one day he called the team into his office and praised us to the high heavens. He told us we had a lot of potential, that he saw a part of himself in all of us and promised us a bright future. He buttered us up and then dropped the bomb: The company was so broke that we had to shift the office to Hyderabad because his parents owned a house there from where we could work and this way he could save rent money. So, he convinced whatever was left of the team to move there and literally live in the same space we worked in all day. He paid us a salary and we paid his dad rent. The final straw for me was when his mother said that since I was "the woman of the house" I should ensure everyone registers in-out times and go over the business ledgers to ensure everything was running okay. - Rachel*, 27

People always told me I'd have to work my ass off as a lawyer, but I was okay with the hard work because at the end of the day, I thought I'd make a difference. I got a job at a fancy law firm and slogged my ass off. I would literally only leave office for 2-3 hours to come home, shower, take a quick nap and then get back to the grind, working almost 18 hours a day. Every odd month, my boss would ask me to make ledgers consolidating months worth of research around a particular legislation, saying it was important for us to have all the information. I'm super diligent as a person, so I pushed myself to include as much information as I could. Finally, after I would make like 500-1,000 page binders, he would look at it and say, ‘Oh you did all this work, but it's irrelevant now.' This emotional abuse went on repeatedly. He would also constantly comment on what I was wearing, which made me uncomfortable. He would keep making me compile information and case laws and then never use it. I must have made at least 5-6 such binders during my time at that law firm. - Nidhi, 29

I was freelancing with this lifestyle newspaper in Goa, and my editor texted me asking me to cover a story. I was on holiday at the time, so I replied saying I would get back to her, which I totally forgot about. A few months later, I bumped into her while boarding a flight with my mom and brother. As soon as I saw her, I realised I had never replied to her so I went and apologised profusely. She told me she was really disappointed in me, which was fair enough till that point. But then, on the flight she was sitting in the row right behind us and began loudly telling my mom what a disappointment I was, how I was extremely unprofessional and wouldn’t amount to much, repeating my name so loudly that the entire flight could hear. If she had such a big problem with what I did, she should’ve just not worked with me in the future, but publicly shit talking me like this was not cool. - Mihika*, 26

*Names have been changed to prevent employer retribution

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