Screaming Managers May Make You Scream, Too

I worked for a betting shop in the UK for around five years. For two of those years, I was stuck with one of the absolute worst people for a manager. She was a power-tripping, egotistical bully who believed she knew best in any situation just because she had worked in the industry for more than a decade. Here are but a few of the terrible things she did.

She didn’t fully train me on how to use the shop systems and got irrationally angry when I asked for help on something she hadn’t trained me on. (I had to teach myself 75% of the job.)

She blamed any and all cash discrepancies in the shop on anyone besides herself because her till could never be wrong.

She refused to postpone her breaks and help out when the shop entered busy periods, yet she expected everyone else to drop everything to help her.

She abandoned me to work a nine-hour shift (12:30 pm to 9:30 pm) by myself as punishment for some minor infraction.

She would expect the shop to be perfect 100% of the time and would repeatedly scream at any employee, including me, over the tiniest mistake. The till was £0.50 short? Screaming. One small area of the shop was dirty? Screaming. We were unable to get the right marketing information out due to a high volume of customers? Screaming. We were unable to do something the instant she asked for it regardless of whether we were helping a customer? Screaming.

That last one caused my mental health to completely tank. I had to take three weeks of sick leave and be moved to another shop closer to where I lived in order to continue working. Some people have told me I should have just grown a spine and stood up for myself, but when this is happening daily, and I had very little confidence due to it being my first-ever job, that gets pretty hard to do.

The silver lining is that this manager was eventually suspended due to a not-so-significant amount of money — at least £250 — disappearing while she was on shift, leading to her leaving the company. Whether she was fired or quit I don’t know; I was with a much better manager who actually cared about her staff at the time. But she was left with a permanent black mark on her record.