Ever hear the age-old excuse “we don’t have the budget for that?” only for the budget to magically appear when someone in upper management gets annoyed by the issue? Yeah, happens a lot, or so I hear.

It happened to a nurse who then decided to post about it on Reddit. Apparently her work computer would break daily and one time when she was trying to fix it, her boss told her to work faster. She then maliciously complied by simply dumping the computer in the boss’s office and going off to help other people.

More info: Reddit

A bad manager is someone who can make even the best job a nightmare

Image credits: RODNAE Productions (not the actual image)

The poster is a nurse, who would start her work in the middle of a day shift, needing to pick up a workstation before work

Image credits: u/lexa_pro_ho

Image credits: Domenico Loia (not the actual image)

Since she’d start in the middle, she’d always be left a malfunctioning workstation and need to call IT to get it fixed

Image credits: u/lexa_pro_ho

Her boss told her that she was taking too long with it, so she decided to start dropping off the malfunctioning workstation in her office daily

Image credits: u/lexa_pro_ho

A mere week later they got three new workstations that they “hadn’t had the budget for” before this

Image credits: u/lexa_pro_ho

Also of note is that nurses call the workstations ‘wows’, while elsewhere they are ‘cows’, leading to heated discussion about it in the comments

The poster of the story (OP) works as a nurse and an important fact is that she would start work in the middle of a regular shift. When she’d come on, since she joined in the middle of the shift, there would be only one workstation available and it would always be broken.

The workstations are computers on wheels (abbreviated wow), where nurses get and submit data about patients. She would call IT to get it fixed, but her boss told her to move it along, as she’d be taking too long.

So OP would come in to work, roll the computer into the boss’s office and go around helping coworkers until the boss was forced to fix the computer herself. 

Less than a week later, they got 3 new wows and a memo that the entire shift would be written up if broken computers weren’t reported.

For this article, Bored Panda reached out to the author of the post, lexa_pro_ho, for more comments about the story.

Wondering whether bringing in the computer to the boss’s office would spark any conflicts at the moment, we asked OP about it. Apparently, she’d leave it there when she wasn’t in her office. “The couple of times I did it when she was sitting there, she didn’t say anything. Surprisingly,” OP added.

Lexa_pro_ho mentioned that she was a thorn in the side of her boss for a long time, so wondering whether she would try to harass OP, we asked her about it. It turns out that the boss never put her on the list of people she would harass till they quit. They had lost a lot of good nurses to other departments as the boss didn’t like them and would make their lives miserable, usually with poor scheduling.

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OP had come there because of her then-partner and took a huge paycut from a previous hospital. “I was probably a little excessive in my lack of filter,” she adds, “I told her there was no version of reality where I would have chosen to work there. She was at an actual loss for words.”

Lexa_pro_ho has loads more bad manager stories, none of them short enough to tell here, but maybe someday!

Image credits: Cedric Fauntleroy (not the actual image)

Besides the intense pace of work, studies have shown that bullying and toxicity in the workplace is not an uncommon thing for nurses. A RNnetwork study found that bullying and harassment is quite widespread among nurses.

According to the study, 45% of nurses have been verbally harassed or bullied by other nurses, 41% by managers or administrators, and 38% by physicians. This bullying could range anywhere from verbal abuse or intimidation to work interference, preventing work from getting done.

According to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health Safety, workplace bullying can have serious and diverse consequences. Individually, it can make a person feel shock or anger, as well as various psychological and psychosomatic symptoms, such as loss of appetite, headaches, and low morale, among others.

In the workplace it can increase absenteeism, risk for accidents, poor customer service, just to name a few, all of which are incredibly bad, especially for nurses.

If workplace bullying isn’t combated, it’s likely that people who cannot adapt to it will quit, while those who can will remain and eventually adapt to it, perpetuating toxicity. This makes it more difficult to uproot toxicity in the workplace in the future.

Nevertheless, it is possible to change things and there are several things that people can do – not only nurses but others running into toxic environments in the workplace. NurseGrid has some advice.

A potential solution may be to talk to your direct supervisor. Calm yourself down before the confrontation and think over what you’re going to say. Prepare several examples of behavior that is hurting you and how it is affecting you and your performance. 

This approach having failed, you can go another route. You may attempt to gather evidence, either written statements, or, depending on the laws in your country and/or state, consider recording with a smartphone. Furthermore, it may be useful to get support from your colleagues who would corroborate your statements. With all of this in hand, you can attempt going to your supervisor’s director and report them for harassment.

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This post collected almost 9k upvotes and almost 350 comments. The commenters shared their own stories of bad supervisors, some of them being nurses with similar stories. The poster also got a lot of support from the community. Have you got a story of your own? Tell it to the community in the comments below!

The community supported the poster, talking about the aforementioned ‘cows’ and bad managers of their own

Image credits: Tima Miroshnichenko (not the actual image)

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