Had a manager at my previous job that really, really tried his best to be everyone’s BFF. He loved giving pep talks and thought he could raise our abysmal morale by being Mr. Positivity (note: morale was low because we were always buried in work and paid sh*t). He’d crack jokes, randomly burst into song and sneak up behind you to yell “you’re doing a great job!”

Unfortunately, he was also super incompetent at his job. He relied heavily on a junior colleague for help with technical stuff (they practically did his whole job for him), and spent days working on paperwork that should really only take an hour or two. If you had a problem, his answer was usually either to stare blankly at you until you left or to say “think positive and it’ll work itself out!”

Thing he did I hated the most: whenever people would apply to work at the company, he’d print out the stack of resumes, sit at his desk and read aloud all of the parts he found “funny.” He’d laugh at people for working at McDonald’s or other fast food places. He loved finding grammar mistakes and making fun of them. If someone had a cringe-y objective statement, he’d guffaw over that too. This was all done loudly, and it was a open office so you couldn’t avoid hearing it. That definitely lowered morale too.

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While a lot of these are annoying bosses, not much of them are actually like Michael Scott.

I had a senior leader in the Navy who was almost EXACTLY like Michael Scott.

The way he'd repeat a punchline over and over to silence, because he thought people didn't get it, when really it was inappropriate or not funny, or a thing people said a lot ten years ago. The way he'd walk into the main office area from his office, and everyone would get quiet and turn around. The way he'd talk your head off about something you don't care about, wishing he'd just let you get back to work. The racial insensitivity while trying to be sensitive, usually in the form of assuming a POC's background/upbringing. Stuck in the same position for a decade, for obvious reasons.

He would come up to you out of nowhere and just go, "bazinga!" And then say it again, and go, "Right?! Like in Big Bang Theory!" And then go laughing back to his office.

He would pitch these terrible ideas that we absolutely had to implement. I would protest, but he had a very passive second in charge - a lot like Toby - who would just bend over and let it happen.

The worst was when his leadership style brought a new girl so much anxiety, it eventually brought her to tears, and he felt like he was the only one who could console her, shooing away anyone who tried to help/intervene.

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smugdruggler

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This definitely sounds more like "The Office" than most. I can just see Ricky Gervais as David Brent acting this out.😆😆 I even read the quotes in his voice.😂

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My boyfriends HR lady is ironically the Michael Scott of his workplace. Today, she hosted one of her monthly meetings on random topics. The topic was heat exhaustion.. they work in the AC. As part of the meeting, she created a raffle gift box which included an autographed picture of Ice Cube in a frame (get it?) which “may or may not be authenticated”. He’s also run into her in the ABC store during work hours with a full shopping cart.

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Nathan Pogorzala

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My HR just doesn't process raises or promotions because it is too hard. Loses forms during open season and people don't get the insurance they want. Second guesses doctor submitted FMLA paperwork and stops paying people on maternity/paternity leave because she "hasn't seen them in a while" (back pay of course). Waste of an office.

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Kiran.

He went to Germany and rented a car. He didn’t know how to drive in Germany and hit 8 cars in the rental car lot. He asked me to use my company card to pay the insurance premium. I told him no.

We had so many communication problems (meaning I was a woman and he didn’t respect me) that HR recommended we have Monday morning 1:1’s. He never showed up for them. I kept record. He complained to HR that we weren’t having the meetings he wasn’t showing up to.

He told me that the woman who was stuck on a project with him could receive a form of gratis up to $500. She chose a PlayStation (obvi) and then when I was called on my company purchase, he wouldn’t say that he specifically allowed the transaction and attempted to get me fired because he was tired of me always calling him on his sh*t.

I handled his wife’s resume and application to the DMV, his mortgage papers, his insurance papers, his whole family’s passports; all things that went beyond my position’s scope. HR stepped in to tell him to only have me do work-related tasks and he told me to never talk to “Hay-Char” again. He’s the boss and I’ll do what he says.

He was standing with his same-level executive coworkers, all of whom I supported and while the other 3 wished me good morning, he literally went out of his way to ignore me.

The irony is that he volunteered me for a lot of sh*t o excelled at and I failed up while he failed out. Turns out the protection he got while his brother was CIO disappeared as soon as brother left the company.

He transferred out of IT and became engineering’s problem before I left the company.

Also. At a company Christmas party he bet the department that we couldn’t climb the rock wall faster than him. He ended up severely spraining his ankle and withholding the $100.

Also. Another boss decided we needed to have a raffle to boost morale. I got an iPad and some gift cards. Boss who wanted to boost morale won the iPad. And kept it. F*cking what. None of us could believe it.

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I had a boss sneak up behind a middle-aged female employee and pick her up, then immediately drop her down saying "I didn't think you weighed that much!" He could not stop laughing. He was the principal. This occurred during passing period in a crowded middle school hallway.

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Incitatus

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Now I'm glad my principal is a very formal person.

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I had one for a year and it was awesome! If he would be in the middle of a story and the phone rang he would literally say “let it go to voicemail”. If a customer called 5 min before closing he’d demand I let it ring and go to VM. He was late more often than I was. He frequently bought us coffees. He always took our side in customer disputes and if a customer yelled at us or got abusive on the phone, he would call them back and get into an argument with them and tell them to order from someone else. He straight out told us that if weather conditions were bad he didn’t care how late we were, just that we were safe. Sometimes he would tell me on random days to take a two hour lunch ( I was salary and didn’t punch in or out). He was great! And he gave me so much free stuff. We used to call him Micheal Scott behind his back!

Unfortunately... the owners were a bit stricter.. Myself and another coworker got fired and said boss got demoted. It was fun while it lasted.

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Game Over

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Aw, man! Sounds fun, though!

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Yeah, and I worked for a church and he was the senior pastor. He had no filter and his own morality (which was questionable to everyone else). He'd say things to the secretary like, "I don't think you and your husband should be together in the upcoming pictorial directory photos since you guys are probably gonna get a divorce." (she was fighting hard for her marriage).
- If he didn't get his way during a meeting he'd go straight to the classic grandma Christian phrases like, "what's God gonna say when we get to heaven and we didn't let the charismatic church use our building for services?" (they were known to do fake faith healings and things of that nature)

- He'd also put his hands on every young girl's shoulders and flirt with every granny (he himself was mid 40s).

He got fired for cheating on his wife.

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BasedWang

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f*****g scum

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Dear wife is a public school teacher, and her principal is technologically illiterate.

A couple of years ago when the #MeToo movement was all over the news, he led a staff meeting to discuss how it might impact staff and students.

Thing is, he didn't understand hashtags, or how to talk about them in a public setting.

All during this staff meeting, he talked about the Pound Me Too movement.

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BasedWang

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yesssssss

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They certainly do. That's why the show's so funny. Had a general manager give a line that sounded exactly like it came out of the mouth of Michael. He wanted to say "be there or be square." He started the phrase wrong, but his brain knew it was a rhyme. So he said "be here or be queer"

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𝖊𝖆

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What if you’re queer and here?? Paradox! Space time continuum explosion!

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Female version of michael scott. About the time Harry Potter started becoming really big she wrote a story that was pretty much an exact rip off and all but forced us read the first two chapters. She then redecorated her office to look like a wizard room in a castle including plastic wallpaper that looked like CobleStone and fake LED candles for light. She evean had a small wooden table in the niddle with several wooden wands and spellbooks. Upper management finially had enough and took away her office and moved her to a cubicle with the rest of us.

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I had a boss that had many Micheal Scott tendencies, but for some reason I cannot remember many of the specific situations.

One that sticks out is: I had a 6'x6' cubicle and he had the biggest office in the building. It was probably 15'x20' and had all kinds of cabinets and storage. He walked up to my cubicle with a massive load of stuff from his office and plopped it on my desk and said "store this stuff here." I just looked at him dumbfounded and took me awhile to respond. I eventually refused and told him I would help him find a place in his office.

He was also very easy to get off task and I remember us doing things like having arm wrestling matches in the middle of the work day. Nothing wrong with that but it was just funny.

He would sometimes hide around cubicle walls and scare the women in the office. It wasn't unusual to hear women scream at the top of their lungs throughout the day.

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Yoga Kitty

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Wow, if he tried that with me he would need a new nose pretty quickly. I am quite easy to scare, the problem is - I do not scream. I punch. And kick. Sometimes both. I know it's "fight, flight or freeze" in theory, only they seem to have forgotten flight and freeze when programming my subconscious. Shock me and I will hit first and ask questions later. Ask some of my male colleagues how they found out. And how long it hurt. Which nearly 2m tall guy thinks it's funny to creep up behind a female coworker in a dimly lit corridor and grab her from behind? He can call himself lucky that his face was too high for me to reach, I not sure he enjoyed the punches to his stomach, though...

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Yes. He’d never admit it though, he swears he’s a Jim.

“Do I need to be liked? Absolutely not. I like to be liked. I enjoy being liked. I have to be liked. But it’s not like a compulsive need to be liked. Like my need to be praised.” ——— Pretty sure this is the mantra my boss lives by.

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Man I wish I could remember more but I’ve blocked most of it out.

Told us he invented Apple computers before Steve Jobs. That the computer he invented is still to this day more powerful than any other computer

Threw knives in the air and said if you can catch them he’ll give you money. This was apparently at a Christmas party. I wasn’t there but believe it 100%.

Came to work wearing nothing but leopard print underwear and a pink cowboy hat (he’s like 70?). Unfortunately I was there for that one.

He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder but ‘not the bad kind, the kind that makes you super smart’

Got drunk at work and gave alcohol to whoever would take it.

He literally needs to be institutionalised but he’s rich so he gets away with everything and everyone is scared of him.

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BasedWang

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I would be down to drink and catch knives with this dude

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I used to work for a cybersecurity start-up (now a huge public company). The office director that intitially interviewed me for the role turned me down because he felt "a woman couldn't do this job." This was for a sales job.

I was eventually approached by a different manager for the role, and, against my better judgement, took the job. As the only woman in the office, the director that intitially interviewed me, shockingly, continued to be a huge, sexist POS. He constantly made comments about my lack of or too much of make-up, my clothes, my weight, my voice being too deep or too high, really anything that had to do with being feminine.

At one point, I had a serious illness that spanned several months and I lost over 20 pounds. While I've never been fat, his first comment to me after I spent the previous night in the ER was, "Changminny, you've lost so much weight. Now if only we could do something about how pale you always are. Have you tried blush?"

He was so surprised that his office had more HR complaints than every other office in the company COMBINED.

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My brother had two bosses at his first job that I think fit this. It was an old married couple that owned the gym across the street from us. Probably in their 70s when he started working there. The wife was from Germany and super strict, the husband was clearly losing it Some notable mentions are:

•when the husband combined bleach and ammonia to clean the hot tub and sauna room, tear gassing my brother in the process

•wife insisted the street be swept once a week, this was my brothers task. Almost every single time, the husband would come out halfway through with a leaf blower and destroy any progress my brother had made

•husband would regularly sit in the sauna for way too long and have to be rescued by brother and coworkers

•brother opened every Saturday. They never gave him a key so he would have to hop the fence to get in.

There’s so many more but I know he’s asleep right now and I can’t ask him

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Fat Harry

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Doesn't bleach + ammonia create chlorine?!

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Mine was less entertaining than Michael, but we often compared him for the following examples:

- only hired people he would "have a beer with"
- grossly under qualified to manage, but he was good at sales so got promoted
- made really awkward, distasteful jokes/comments (e.g. asked an employee if he and his twin brother "shared" a girlfriend)
- just really wasteful, pointless meetings
- nobody knew how he spent his days, his assistant manager did all the heavy lifting and he would wander around making conversations
- literally showed up to a meeting with his superiors having done 0 preparation and they kicked him out of the meeting

He actually got fired for calling COVID "kung flu" to a Chinese employee back in March... I think that would have to be the craziest. He had worked there for 8 years but had so many notes on his file, this was just the one that pushed it over the edge.

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Game Over

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Kung flu? Racist guy indeed.

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I’m a graphic designer, had a former boss walk to my desk with the front page of CNN.com printed out, cut up and taped back together in a fashion he preferred. He then asked that i redesign the homepage like that. We didn’t work at CNN...

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2012 . Working the top end apartment market in Melbourne, Australia.

The boss is in his 70's and seriously old school. Like didn't believe in social media marketing old school.

The IT guy changed our data storage from an old box in the office we worked to a cloud.

Boss didn't want a cloud server, because the wind and thunderstorms might mess it up.

Deadly deadly serious. I would have said something during the meeting but the look on IT guys face was too good to disturb.

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One time my boss stepped into my office as he was walking by and said “... so... you’re pretty tall for a Mexican aren’t you?”

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oh yes! some examples (hope i can format it correctly)

he called the UPS delivery man « marshawn » every time because he was african american (his name was james)

he dismissed my claims that one of our partners (sister company’s CEO) was sexually harassing me because « men say things like that and i should take it as a compliment »

would have the most useless meetings

would bring pizza and beer for lunch and try and get us to stop and party with him even though we were slammed with deadlines (our office was an open one so we would be at our desk and he’d be drinking at 2pm, playing music 3ft way from us while we try and make phone calls)

one day he came in pissed and called a meeting so one colleague put candy on the table and he stopped mid sentence in his rant because he got distracted by the shiny wrappers

he would constantly make « white knight » decisions, even if that made work 10 times harder for us, and went directly against policy that he created.

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BasedWang

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sounds like summa the traits of my boss

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I have been lucky and had fairly good bosses. My worst boss was at a large technology company, he was a network engineer that got promoted to management and had no idea how to do it which was usually ok he would just approve vacations and the like and let every one do their job.

The main annoyance was he was a network engineer and I was a windows server engineer. So any time the customers would ask us to do something impossible or that would actively hurt them he would leave me to defend our companies stance. If the network team had any push back he would jump on and defend them and act as the point of contact he was supposed to be. He also didn't understand a lot of what I did so his measurement of if I was doing a good job was if I was at my desk. The network team could work from home whenever they wanted to if I worked from more then once in a 2 week period he would send me emails letting me know how important it was to be in the office ended up getting fired for working from home when I was sick. Had a project due so I was trying to get it done got sick faxed him in the doctors note saying I was allowed off for the rest of the week then logged in and started to work. He said since I was working I had to be in the office I ignored him the next Friday he had me meet with him at 8am I showed up and HR was siting there to walk me out.

That said the most Michael Scott thing he did is during the lead up to and through football season he had a team meeting the last 2 hours every Friday for fantasy football. If team members didn't want to play fantasy football he said they would have to go back to work instead of just hanging out with every one. Ended up just draft picking people from the Miami Dolphins so I could sit and talk with every one. There were several other people that just randomly picked people and never traded and one guy just went back to work and didn't attend any of the meetings.

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Not sure how Michael Scott-ish this is, but I had a boss who was a complete f*ck-up. She'd get caught messing up, blame me, yell and curse at me, realize later it was her fault, and then want to take me out for a private one-on-one lunch as an apology.

After a while I just started telling her thanks, but I have plans already. Because she was too tone-deaf to realize that of course your employee doesn't want to spend their break eating with you, after you yelled and embarrassed them in front of their colleagues for no good reason.

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Yoga Kitty

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Some people are socially tone deaf and there is not much they can do about it. Being angry for getting chewed out without reason is understandable, however, not accepting an honest apology is just petty. Don't make up excuses and wonder why other people don't get it - why not simply tell her that you do not want to have lunch with her?

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I had a grumpy boss...mid forties, newborn baby, got passed up on a promotion...

He would walk around saying “snakes are gonna get ya snakes are gonna get ya”

“Swallow swallow swallow ya lunchhhhhh”

And my favorite;

“TRUJILLO”

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Incitatus

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What the actual f?

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Me: “Ok if i take vacation with my family last week of august?”

Boss: “Sure, no problem.”

Me on Monday after vacation: “hi”

Boss: “Where have you been???”

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I had one.

he constantly commented on the weight off all staff

he would talk sh*t about us to each other (unaware that we talked to each other)

he would share way too many outrageous details about his life(probably all fake)

he was delusional about the success of the company

if 2 people were having a conversation he would have to jump in and one up them, even though it was almost always fake

always mentioned he was busy but never actually did anything

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Absolutely. Here are some gems from my previous boss:

He hired a private investigator to follow his "#2" around because he thought #2 was having sex with his wife.

Thought I was having sex with his wife at one point, and had #2 follow me, then confronted me when he found out I had hugged his wife. She was the manager at a fastfood place I worked before, and had gotten me the job at the plant. I was 18, she was 50 - she was a mother figure.

Loved to play this 'joke' where he firmly insists I'm not going to get paid because I forgot to clock in or out. He would wait until he had me absolutely convinced and threatening to quit before he laughed and said he was just foolin' to teach me a lesson.

Used to play-fire me for absolutely no reason other than his amusement.

Would tell me to clean my hands so people didn't think I was black, because they don't employ black people.

Even though computers are used everywhere now, he would still do all calculations by hand. It was a chemical plant, and he was calculating weights of ingredients using a 10-key calculator. He made mistakes often. And he would always always blame the mistake on the person making that batch.

I was a student, and he would threaten to fire me for missing work to take finals. He would lecture me on how if I wanted to be a successful man like him, I'd throw myself into my job and work my way up the ladder. I'm a first-gen college grad, and nearly quit school because of him. But I eventually just quit that job to go to school full-time, finished my BS, went on to grad school, and have been a prof at a pretty awesome school for 4 years now.

Would order six burgers from McD's and a salad for lunch, then eat the burgers in his car, and the salad in the office, telling everyone he was on a diet (dude was morbidly obese)

Writing it all out, seems like it's all made up. I guess Michael Scott's character really isn't too far off from some of the craziness that makes its way up the ladder.

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smugdruggler

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Some of these are amusing, but " wash your hands so people don't think you're black, because we don't employ black people" ? That's disgusting.

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Had a boss who was very peculiar. For instance, he'd open a random closet, look at the stuff inside, then go on a tirade, "look at all this! Who bought all this c**p?!?!" - "Uh, you did". "Oh. Well somebody needs to throw it away!" Constant stuff like this.

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My boss is like Michael Scott in the bad ways:

She thinks she’s friends with everyone.

She thinks she’s really cool, but is super lame.

She constantly distracts you from your work.

She calls frequent meetings with no purpose or direction.

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I used to work as a copywriter at this decently sized ad agency and I remember one of the VP's coming up to me after a meeting we had where I was presenting some headlines I had. I had only been there like a few weeks at that point, but she puts her hand on my shoulder and loudly says in front of everyone, "Great job Edgar, or should I say Juan Draper."

Everyone kind of gave a bit of a chuckle, and I honestly thought it was a bit funny, but probably not the best thing to say to one of the only Hispanic people working at your company.

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I had a latin teacher who while wasn't exactly like him gave some serious vibes. She was loud, obnoxious, and would do things like shouting the words she was teaching repeatedly, even when she was talking in english, or make sound effects in an attempt to be... funny? It was very michael-ish.

Her crowning moment was when she randomly shouted at a kid who was right-wing leaning about how his political views were wrong in the middle of a lesson. I'm left leaning, and happened to disagree with the dude pretty strongly, but he was a very nice guy and was just sitting there! It wasn't the place or time to talk about modern polotics, not to mention an extremely innapropriate thing for a teacher to say to a student in her class! Like, what the f*ck!

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For the most part, it kinda sounds like *someone* doesn't have a sense of fun.

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