Absurd leadership. I've experienced it and lived it. Many years later, it still riles me! The level of ridiculous is unfathomable. And then I realized: there's some good stuff here; fiction writers can not come up with stories like these!
I listed the stories of bad bosses over a 23 year career, and there were so many that I have to write it as a series. I hope that you can find some enjoyment in them if you are suffering a bad boss right now. You are not alone!
It should go without saying that a maintenance supervisor should know something about maintenance. But unfortunately, this is not so. Be it nepotism, negligence, or just plain ignorance, it often happens that the boss man knows very little about what he's bossing people to do.
Ahmed had good intentions of leading the maintenance department full of skilled laborers. One of his first ideas was to arrange for a class on splicing belts. He knew that there was a lot of that going on, so surely everybody would benefit from the class?
We'd all been there and done that. We just had a class a couple of years prior on splicing belts. Funny thing happened, we ended up teaching the teacher. We had pioneered a technique that proved to be easier and result in a splice that never failed. It probably should have been a trade secret, but we ended up training the consultants on our superior technique.
As it happened, it was the same company with a new instructor coming to school us on belt splicing. The instructor was so excited to show us their new "state of the art" process of splicing. We had to play along by pretending to be interested in the methods that we had pioneered!
Ahmed was so gratified watching us knuckleheads learn from the class leader. Now, we could all be finally splicing belts the correct way! I hope he didn't choke on the free lunch the consultant gave him.
One day, Ahmed realized that I rode a motorcycle to work. He rode a motorcycle too! He was proud to share how he'd masterminded his machine so he could cover one hundred miles non-stop. He'd calculated, after that distance he'd have to stop and tighten the drain plug.
"And you'd better have a glove on!" He informed me, because he discovered it would be hot on an air cooled internal combustion engine.
I pitied him, but I wanted to help him. I explained that stripped drain plugs were not uncommon and the repair for it was common. I went to the trouble of finding the appropriate insert and printing the page with the item description, price and instructions. Furthermore, I cautioned him to prevent the problem in the future, by using a torque wrench.
"Okay, but what is a torque wrench?"
And that question struck my like a ton of bricks. I was having this conversation with my superior? The maintenance supervisor?
At least, he started to entrust us for making efforts for the success of the company. He wasn't ever helpful, but he didn't add to our difficulties either, which is more than I can say for other bosses I've had.
Another boss man knew what tools were, mostly. His problem was the lack of knowing how to use them.
He'd offered to help another employee with the front disk brakes on her suv. "Those tire stores are a rip off! I'll help you out in a couple of minutes after work tonight."
When I walked by and looked over his shoulder, he was using the heavy end of a pair of channel locks to hammer the new brake pads into the caliper! I remarked to my buddy how glad I was that those were not my brakes.
One day, he was late in the office and me and my sole companion suddenly became swamped with work. He pitched in to help, which we later regretted. Of the few things he helped with that we had to soon re-visit, the most ridiculous was the forklift radiator. The bottom of the radiator had sprung a pin-hole leak and he'd shoved a handful of plumber's putty on it and sent it back to the warehouse.
The bigger flubs were when he'd order the wrong parts for a major machine. This particular instance, we'd scheduled plant down time, a 50 ton crane, and four guys for the job. When we got it apart and set the old parts next to the new parts we were dumb founded! Two guys were overly frustrated and cussing as they dropped everything and went to lunch.
Me and my pard saw it fit to work through our lunch break to minimize the error and get the plant operating again. The plant manager came by mid-way and we kept out head down working because we didn't want to rat our boss out. He couldn't tell the difference that we were putting all the old parts back. We had to modify and finagle temporary solutions, working until late into the afternoon.
The next day, my boss called me up to his office. He made no bones about deriding me for leaving a menial task undone the previous day. I was fit to be tied!
"Do you know what I was doing for most of the day?"
He just sat there motionless, looking at me.
"I was doing my best, working with Jason, just the two of us, skipped our lunch, jerry rigging the plant so production could continue. Things did not go well. Do you even know why?"
He was just looking at me. No reply. He didn't have a clue. I could feel my blood pressure rising!
"YOU had ordered the wrong parts! Again! We trusted you; we didn't check it until it was too late. We had it all apart. It was screwed up! That's probably why you ordered the parts? It wouldn't go back together because it was AFU!"
He just sat there. Didn't offer anything. Certainly not an apology! His setting there watching me just made me all the more angry.
"We sacrified for you! Skipped out lunch, worked our asses off to cover your ass! And you don't even have a clue? You're worried about a computer that didn't get moved eight feet?"
He just sat there. And finally, I calmed down. I had my say, but that really torques my nuts.
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