My 4 Years of Boss Hell

As a college student looking for a job with slightly more pay than the computer lab helpdesk monkey job, I decided I would go hunting for a job that was actually related to my field. After a few months of "not enough experience" from the bigger businesses in the area I thought maybe I could get a job with a small business in the area. Sure enough I found a mailing house in the area needing someone "good with computers". I turned in a resume, and a week later got a call for an interview. A week later and I was hired.

If only I had known.

My first warning sign came when I was asked to make a database to help automate the job ticketing system and job flow. Figuring I would crank out an access database with the necessary capabilities to fill in the void until I could put together a more efficient system (There was literally no organization to the company, a job could come in and no one notice it for a week.). The second day I had put together the forms, had the databases set up, was working on the basic integration with the applications the company was using, and the boss walks in wondering why it's not done yet. Now keep in mind that I had gone through every step of the process with him, and given him about a two week deadline for a working concept. After being yelled at (not in the whiney "he had some harsh things to say" definition of the word, but the literal "40 dB scream fest" definition) I ended up leaving it a shell of a database, where the only thing it did was allow us to print up the job tickets rather than have to hand write them.

This would continue for the rest of my four years with the company. Primarily the boss simply didn't know how to run a business. He had managed to build a business on the sole principle that the customer was right. Now in mailing, this is a pretty crappy idea, not only do customers learn that they can walk all over the boss, but customer don't know the postal regulations, and when their pieces would fail postal regulation because they insisted that they wanted their super high gloss finish postcard printed with our high-speed inkjet printers instead of having a label put on the piece, we would eat the excess postage costs. Often we would have customers bring in jobs at the VERY last minute and demand they went out that day. So with a rush and scramble we would get the job out, but often at the cost of quality. Inevitably when the job got to the customer they would DEMAND their money back which the boss would give them in hopes of repeat business. He priced every job below our profit margin so that even large jobs would loose us money. Any changes the employees would attempt to make in the business would be met with criticism and apathy, so that any organization to the business would inevitably fail. A textbook case of poor business management.

On top of this his idea of making the company better was to "cut back on payroll cost" Which meant firing everyone he could. Soon I wasn’t just maintaining the computer network and printers, but also running the print jobs, maintaining the databases, taking all the customer calls, generating sales, doing all the graphic design work troubleshooting issues with systems on the floor, cleaning, attempting to keep track of the jobs coming in, dealing with irate customers when a job came back, fixing issues when a job failed postal regulations (which anyone whose had to deal with the post office knows happens often) and acting as the secretary. Every time a person quit or got fired, I had to do their job. Not to mention that there was only 1 person who actually understood how to run the machines on the floor, the rest had to come and ask me how to set up the machines, or how to unjam the paper.
Soon the boss was telling all our customers that I was lazy, that I never got anything done, and continued to threaten me with garnished wages everytime a job that someone on the floor botched cost extra postage. He would tell this to my wife, my family and everyone he knew. He blamed the condition of his business on my lack of organizational abilities.

Eventually I decided enough was enough. I designed an entire organization system that would streamline and prevent any jobs from being lost, not to mention leave a clear trail of who made what mistake where. I got everyone in the company to sign off on it, make suggestions, and clean it into a perfect system. I warned everyone about the new processes, printed out step by step illustrated guides, tested and retested it. Then I started taking bets on how long the system would last.

I won with two months.

In the end we lost a major client that the boss had banked the entire company on. We started to see bid proposals on the business in his email account. (Yes we monitored his email account, customers would send in jobs to his email account which he would forget to send us, then ask us why the job didn't get done) A week later he announced that he had sold the company to a good friend of his. This friend owned a trucking company that he had partial ownership of that was located above the mail house.

The new owners came in and of course, after having been smooth talked by the boss were appalled at the organization state of the company, but worse darker secrets were hiding for them to find. First they found that his half of the trucking company had actually been financed by the mail house’s credit. Not to mention that he had taken over $30,000 of company money (that didn't exist, it was all credit) right before the company was sold. Top that off with not having paid the bills in over 3 months. The new owners scrambled to keep the place afloat. They sapped money from their trucking company to try and save things. In the end the new owners had to get rid of me as I was the highest paid person.( I had fought tooth and nail to get raises over the period of working with the old boss, and counter intuitively, and probably why I stuck around, the old boss was usually a pushover for more money, once going so far as loaning an off the street vagrant who worked for us for a day 300 dollars)

The number of horror stories I can tell about this 4 years of my life would take too long to write, but some of the best include the boss hiring his lazy 15 year college student son to come organize the company, hiring a "supervisor" for me, who would quite literally sit behind me all day and watch me work, assigning me a database to process that involved about 80 different conditions, coming back five minutes later and asking and I quote "Why isn't that job finished, I asked to do that five minutes ago?", or my all time favorite, actually docking my pay for a job that failed, even though I had only advised someone how to do one part of the job, and that part was done correctly.

The job turned in to an abusive relationship. Everyone told me to get out, and I knew I should, but I stuck around, because I loved the company. I learned more about business and marketing in those 4 years then I did in any class in college. I ran that company for most of the time (albeit with a partner would revoke my decisions and run the company the complete wrong way) and I made it mine. That the boss didn't come to me when it came to selling the company wasn't surprising, after all he would spend every day in his office upstairs, or out on the golf course, and assumed I was sitting downstairs surfing the web all day. I now work for a fortune 500 company, doing helpdesk work. Not exactly glamorous or high paying but the decrease in stress has made the job like a vacation.

Oh and last I heard the boss is now spending his retirement out on the golf course, and is making decent money selling his friends on a pyramid scheme. Ain't life grand :)