The Boss from Hell: I’ve always been a people pleaser, perhaps to an excessive degree. In over a decade of marketing, I had witnessed my fair share of bosses—some good, some merely mediocre, and a few who were absolute nightmares. Five years ago, however, I served under a boss who would be considered the worst ever. Let’s just call her “Pamela.”
Pamela was the VP of marketing and sales for a medium-size retailer. She was brought on after several earlier attempts failed to fill the slot. It was evident from the very beginning that she wasn’t really bothered much about marketing at all. While she was rolling in in the morning, taking business lunches, and planning extravaganzas of company events (I ended up taking care of planning), I was actually running the marketing department—website and storefront merchandising, organizing monthly sales materials, developing ads, overseeing budgets and projects, and even crafting sales reports. I was even privileged to have the use of Pamela’s e-mail so that I’d often correspond with people just to get things moving in the process.
Just to keep up, I found myself working 12 hour days, cramming it all in late at night when my kid went down, and then catching up over the weekend after the rest of my family finally drifted off to sleep. It was killing me. I was so stressed. Well, Pamela’s “work” went on unabated: lavish company-sponsored shindigs and some dippy marketing initiatives that always seemed to fly in the face of everything our buy side had so painstakingly constructed. Things hit a new low during her first big holiday season. Sales were abysmal, mainly because Pamela couldn’t stick to a plan. She changed the visuals for our stores several times, brought in her own friends as consultants, and rolled out uncoordinated, last-minute campaigns, completely ignoring the promotions that our merchandising team had laid out.
Just when it all seemed to get even better, I fell ill, came down with sepsis, and was rushed to the hospital. Husband and doctors alike warned that this kind of pressure was dangerous enough to kill. Still, of course, old habits fell into place inside that hospital room. While lying in bed, I turned on my computer and opened my work email. That was a mistake. Shocked, I became even more infuriated over what I saw inside Pamela’s email account.
Then I noticed that upper management had sent me flowers, obviously on the insistence of Pamela. They happened to be her favorite, but not mine-something about which I cared even less. I waded through her complaints via e-mail to personal friends about the “failure” of the physician who could not “shake off” sepsis and “get back to work.” She complained she couldn’t find some documents, although everything is well labeled in our shared drive. In another thread, she was discussing with an old colleague how they could “save her job.”. She responded by agreeing that indeed I was but intimated that I was somehow “mismanaging” my job. A colleague told Pamela that at the end of the season, if the sales had not improved, she may have to “scapegoat” me.
I went back to work, recovering, not letting Pamela’s schemes slide. She called me into her office for a “concerned” talk about my workload. She took over managing the department budget, saying that I would only handle invoices. Then she added the rule: I could not discuss anything related to budgets with accounting, nor go to HR without speaking with her first. I was to see the trap that was being set.
But Pamela had underestimated my rapport with Lois, our main accountant. Lois was a kind but no-nonsense woman who had always said to me that she would help me however she could. Knowing this, I compiled all of this data: invoices, raw budgets, email printouts, and even actual photocopies of previous budgets with Pamela’s “edits” in handwriting. I made sure Lois got all that and reminded her quite sternly that Pamela was the only person she could discuss the department budget with now. She nodded, understanding the subtext, and assured me she’d take it from there.
Within a week, Pamela had been fired. According to what I could piece together, she has never since held a job. Not only that, HR even called me in and explained to me that they actually apologized to me on the part of the CEO in front of everyone there explaining how they knew how unbearable things had been for me and offered me one-week paid vacation as compensation for all that. Of course, I stayed there another year, but the whole affair left its mark on my psyche, and eventually I moved on to a job elsewhere.
Fast forward to today: I now lead a successful sales and marketing team with a wonderful manager who trusts my discretion. I was recently screening some applicants for an opening on my team when one particular resume caught my attention: Pamela’s. She included in her resume several false claims, including some obvious accomplishments that were my work. She even stated that she had done 87% sales over the same holiday season that she almost ran into the ground.
A perfectionist who always gives other people the benefit of the doubt, it was amazingly fulfilling to disqualify her application with one click.
Pamela fell as low as one could get, and I finally got my justice for all she put me through.
