Unfiltered Story #323037

I’m the author of this story (https://notalwaysright.com/thank-god-you-got-out-of-there-alive/261709/), and I have a few examples of my narcissistic boss’s (at the time) behavior to share with you:

1) He covered the walls with articles about himself and his business no matter how minor. These were not high quality glossy prints of front page articles. These were literal cutouts of the newspaper glued inside a cheap paper photo border and hung on the walls throughout the office.
2) He constantly claimed to be “good friends” with various business and political bigwigs. CEO of a major tech company, CEO of a major warehouse company, state governor, both state senators… he was their closest confidant.
3) He would hold paychecks hostage, as in every other Friday he would throw a tantrum because something hadn’t been done correctly, demand that management scurry around to gather things, and eventually would sign the checks, but only after he’d made it clear that he was in charge. I’m not exaggerating. He did this every two weeks.
4) If you ever disagreed with him he would explode with anger, tell you that you were incompetent and that you were lucky that he’d hired you, and would insist that you change things to the way he wanted them (which were usually wrong). The people who continued to challenge him were invariably fired.
5) He once sent an employee home for being five minutes late to work. We were white collar professionals… it didn’t really make a difference if we started work at 7:30 or 8:30, but he insisted that we sign in and out every day.
6) Once when a group of employees went to lunch together, he chased them out of the building and insisted that they come back and that they couldn’t all go to lunch together. He told management he was sure they were plotting. Apparently it never occurred to him that people could plot just as easily outside of work hours.
7) To demonstrate that he had all the power, he would have employees and their managers come in, then tell the managers (in front of the employees) that the employee was performing poorly and that it was the manager’s fault. Usually the employee was “performing poorly” because of #4 above or #8 below.
8) He would change reports so they said what he wanted them to say, regardless of facts or data or the like. When he would get caught doing this by a client, he would explode and blame one of the employees.
9) He made everybody submit timesheets, and would arbitrarily decide that the time some people had charged was unacceptable, change their timesheets, and/or see #3.
10) He made an employee come back to work after they’d left at 4:30 PM on a Friday, after having worked their full 40 hours. He insisted that they hadn’t notified him and hadn’t gotten permission to leave. The employee was then lectured for 30 minutes about leaving without permission, then when they turned in their timesheet the following week reflecting that extra 30 minutes, the owner refused to pay for that time.
11) He would arbitrarily slash budgets then get mad when things went “over budget.” If you didn’t go over budget, he’d get mad because you didn’t do what the clients expected. This typically led to #3 above.

Those are just a few of the examples I can think of. It’s been more than 15 years since I worked there, but I still think about how ridiculous that guy was.