At some point in your career, you’re probably going to come across a bad boss; the kind of supervisor who fails to lead by example and makes everyone’s lives a nightmare with their petulant demands. It can get particularly bad when your boss is also the owner.

For one woman on Reddit, her boss’s inability to save a file correctly led to her being reprimanded, along with the company’s whole IT team. It didn’t matter that she had shown her boss how to do the simple task countless times. She went online to vent.   

More info: Reddit

A bad boss can make life miserable for their employees, as this woman unwittingly found out

Image credits: drobotdean / Freepik (not the actual photo)

Her boss was working late as usual when the file he was busy with crashed

Image credits: ArthurHidden / Freepik (not the actual photo)

When the boss tried to retrieve the file, nothing had been saved, so he reached out to the IT team for help, but they did nothing that night

Image credits: Freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)

The next morning the boss reprimanded the woman for not contacting the IT team herself, even though she hadn’t been asked to and had shown her boss how to save countless times

Image credits: Fabulous-Barbie-6153

The woman concluded that her boss earns well over a six-figure salary, which just goes to show you can be rich without being that smart

OP begins her story by telling the community that she just wants to share the complete idiocy that goes down at her place of work. She explains that her boss, who’s the owner of the company, frequently works late. One night he was working on an important Adobe Acrobat file when it crashed. When he reopened the file, none of his work had been saved.

The boss immediately reached out to the supposed 24-hour IT support team but had no luck. The next morning, OP arrived to a flood of emails about the boss’s issue. Even though it had never been explicitly outlined, her boss apparently expected her to have called the IT department, despite the fact he’d already done it himself.

OP said she hadn’t called right away since she was trying to sort out the situation first, but her boss ended up reprimanding her, along with blaming the IT team. As it turns out, they couldn’t do anything anyway, since the file hadn’t been saved, something OP had shown her boss how to do countless times, to no avail.

From what she tells us in her post, OP’s boss seems to be pretty toxic, and perhaps a bit of a narcissist. Either way, he definitely likes to play the blame game rather than take responsibility for his own ineptitude. 

In his article for Harvard Business Review, Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries writes that, according to the most recent Gallup “State of the Global Workplace” study, half of all employees in the United States have quit jobs at some point in their careers in order to escape their bosses. The figures are similar or even higher for workers in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Image credits: Freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)

In his article for Psychology Today, Nir Bashan writes that having a bad boss may just be one of the best things that has ever happened to you, because sometimes the most valuable thing you can get out of a bad situation is your ability to change the way you look at it. A bad boss is a treasure trove of potential learning; in this case, the learning is what not to do, especially if you manage your own team.

Bashan goes on to say that, should you be saddled with a boss you’re no longer learning anything from, try moving to a different department within the company. Different supervisors have different personalities and ways of working that you might find better suited to you, and a change like this can yield plenty of positive results. 

In her article for Forbes, Margie Warrell puts forward some strategies to “manage up” and better cope with a demanding or difficult boss. Firstly, know your boss’s “why”, or identify their prime motivations. By putting yourself in their shoes, you can see the workplace as they might, and approach them with more empathy, or emotional intelligence. 

Next up, support their success while you work around their weaknesses. Help your boss focus on their natural strengths, while anticipating issues that might crop up as their blind spots, say organization or timekeeping, and being armed with a solution. By making yourself indispensable to your boss, you show them that you can be trusted, which could lead to less micromanaging.

Warrell also advises never being intimidated by a bully. Rather, ask questions, seek clarity, and work to de-escalate difficult situations while remaining firm on your boundaries of never being yelled at, humiliated, or judged without evidence. Doing this will ensure your boss understands they’ll need to get their power kicks elsewhere.  

OP might do well to let their boss know they’re not anyone’s scapegoat and compel him to own up to his own part in the drama, which is all of it.

What do you think of OP’s situation? Should she confront her boss or start looking for another gig? Let us know your opinion in the comments!

In the comments, readers agreed that the boss was toxic and that the woman should start looking for a new job

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