Posted by:
JamesL
(
)
Date: December 03, 2011 12:38PM
My worst boss was at the same job I currently have. Just a different supervisor. This woman was very full of herself, proud of the fact that she was a supervisor and thought that made her better than everyone else. Let's just call her "R".
One day she heard me on the phone and just stopped to listen. I was speaking to a customer, so didn't think much about it, as I was busy. I was speaking French, because the customer was in Montreal, and her English was weak, while my French is quite good. This one was of my regular customers, and my speaking French to her was always the way we operated.
On this day, though, R paid attention to what I was doing. After a few minutes of listening to me, she grabbed the phone out of my hand and hung up on my customer. Naturally, I turned to her and asked what she was doing. In full view and earshot of everyone else in the department, she said, "I will not have you playing around like that! This is company time, and I demand that you devote your time to work!"
I explained that I had been speaking to a customer.
She responded, telling me that I had not been dealing with a customer, but had simply been on the phone babbling and playing around.
"I was speaking to a customer," I said. "She's more comfortable speaking French, so I use French when she calls."
"You do not speak French," R said.
I gaped at her. "Yes, I do. I speak fluent French. That's why she's my customer."
"No, you do NOT speak French. I do not speak French, and I am your manager. Since I don't speak French, it's not possible for you to know it."
I was mad. I said, "Then please explain the eight years I studied French in school, the year and a half I spent living in French Canada, and the summer I lived in Paris. I really do speak French."
"You do not! And I will not have that sort of insubordination." She called up her supervisor to begin the process of having me fired. Her face started showing absolute terror, and then she got up, walked out, got in her car and drove off.
About an hour and a half later I got a call from G, R's supervisor. G was the one who had originally hired me, and one of the things she had hired me for was to handle our Canadian customers. She had demanded that R come talk to her in person once she had heard what had happened. G was laughing her butt off that anyone could be that stupid. She had sent R home for the day and told her to familiarize herself with the people who worked under her, since she clearly had no clue what people could do.
R was fired a month later. Not for the French incident, but for refusing to send billing reports to the accounting department. Her defense was that she didn't know where the report came from, so it clearly didn't mean anything.