Yes, I know that the bourgeoisie is bad, that capitalism makes them bad, that they cannot function without exploiting the proletariat, that every last one of them would exterminate the planet before surrendering a single penny for something other than treats or investment that they couldn’t claim as tax-deductible, etc., etc.
But I’ve had a new job for the last few months and my new boss was pretty nice and paid relatively well, sometimes even more than they owed me, long story short. But things have gotten busier at work lately and the boss has shown themself to be ridiculously moody and even threatened to fire me today due to a miscommunication. I wasn’t completely innocent here, I did make a mistake, but it was a new situation that I wasn’t really prepared for (and none of the customers knew it happened, no one was in danger, it wasn’t a huge deal, it was an aesthetic thing basically).
Anyway, I was just kind of shocked at how this seemingly nice person instantly transformed into a demon who even threatened to fire me! I shouldn’t have been shocked, I had been telling myself during these last few months not to trust my boss or get too comfortable—we spend an hour or two together each day, just chatting, and they were pleasant 99% of the time. They had also somehow managed to lose their phone just before we started working today, they were pissed about that before they found my mistake and took it out on me. Half my job at this place is being their therapist. A month or two of friendly underpaid therapy for my boss to just explode over an aesthetic issue and threaten my daily bread.
I don’t know, it’s just remarkable how material circumstances make a person into who they are. (Everyone is three missed meals away from rioting.) When I was a teenager my friends and I would go to a restaurant owned by my friend’s dad because the food was awesome and free. All the waitresses there were nice of course (since they were serving the boss’s kid) and we all tipped them proportionally as if we were actually paying for the food. One waitress from that place inherited a hotel in the area, and I found myself working for her when I had a different job, and she ended up complaining about my work to my bosses—not because I messed anything up or made any mistakes, but because I went through everything too quickly. She had always been nice, she was also polite when we interacted at her hotel, but when I said goodbye, she didn’t mention that she had an issue with my performance—she waited to complain to my bosses, basically. Which of course got me in trouble with them and necessitated a meeting. I was doing annual maintenance work on some of her machinery, and she’s also the only customer in the area who has that kind of annual maintenance work done twice a year, so there usually isn’t even that much to do there. I saw that her hotel has some negative reviews and it looks pretty crummy and old-fashioned, so I’m always praying for it to go bankrupt when I drive past. (I’ve thought of leaving a negative review there but these fuckers will actually sue you if they find out that you were the one who did it!) I live in a touristy area so you really have to fuck up in order for that to happen, but it’s not impossible.
I also have a little executive experience from when I was running a political campaign many years ago. Using some money I got from the state (I was running a “clean” campaign with no large donations, just a lot of small ones), I hired a couple of field workers for a month or two basically and learned a number of important things. The first was “nobody wants to work anymore” is really “bosses don’t pay enough to attract workers” (no one answered my job ads until I increased the wages I was advertising; this is why these fuckers don’t have wages advertised in their job posts 90% of the time, they are fully conscious of the fact that their jobs pay far too little and that if anyone knew what they were paying, no one would apply, literally not a single person).
The second thing I learned was a horror I felt at the obvious visible desperation of the workers, how they have virtually no recourse if you screw them. You might not notice that visible desperation until you’re on the other side of the table, or you may not know just how obvious it is. Yes, workers can sue you if you steal their wages (for instance), but how many actually have the time and money to do that? And they’ll all be blacklisted even if they beat you in a lawsuit. If you’re a petite bourgeois, your workers are almost 100% at your mercy. It was sickening for me. And there are people walking around out there who pull this shit every day—they’re our fucking bosses! And if they have a problem with it, it’s not enough of an issue for them to stop being bourgeois.
I’m just using hexbear as a kind of therapy journal and for some commiseration I guess. It’s also making me wonder if there’s something “wrong” with me, if I just can’t do anything right, etc., etc.
So have you had a boss who wasn’t a total scumbag? Someone who was fair, reasonable, and trustworthy, even when issues arose? And let’s limit this to the private sector: I worked for 8+ years as a government employee and never had any major issues (and was also never fired).
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I work in academia, so it can vary a lot. A lot of professors are assholes, most of them are perfectly nice autistic people that just really like their subject and want to talk to you about it. All of the professors I’ve worked for since undergrad have been great, the one I worked for in undergrad was a dick but I barely interacted with him.
Pre-academia I only worked service jobs, and there it depends on how you define “boss.” Store managers were hit or miss, but restaurant franchise owners are scum of the earth and every one of them should be put in a wood chipper. They also have a habit of firing good store managers and replacing them with shitty ones.
You bring up a good point by what you call managers actually. I’ve had sooner jobs where even shift leads are called “managers” and others where even the GM is just an arm for the franchise owner or district manager. The most decent managers I’ve had (I don’t count the shift leads) usually have shitty ass franchise owners or district managers.
I once worked a short gig in fast food though where a district manager (corporate franchising) was constantly yelling (through our manager) about how our throughput was too slow. None of us were happy with it and would say stuff like “I’d like to see her do it then” but one day she actually showed up and she really did do it faster and was pretty supportive when explaining her processes. She was pretty old and while obviously it was about her financial interest and I wasn’t getting paid anything good I gained a little respect for her after that because most people that high up and removed from the grunt roles are absolute shit at said roles if they even know how to do it at all.
A month or two of friendly underpaid therapy for my boss to just explode over an aesthetic issue and threaten my daily bread.
Nah, this tracks, even in comfortable white-collar corpo land. In everyday conversation, they’ll express support and make solidarity noises, but the goddamned hemisecond that HR or upper-middle management tells them to crack the whip, they cave like a house of cards in a wind storm because now their neck is on the line. ACAB includes first-line supervisors, because ultimately they are the ones who have to pull the trigger for some higher-up’s decree.
I don’t like to talk about it, but I’ve been on both sides of this, which is why I refuse to ever take another supervisory/managerial position ever again.
I was hesitant to talk about my “executive experience.” It fucking sucked.
I don’t like to talk about it, but I’ve been on both sides of this, which is why I refuse to ever take another supervisory/managerial position ever again.
I take the same position. Promoted, did well for two months, then my life became hell shortly after I refused to make life difficult for one of my reports for daring to have ~3 more sick days than usual. Suddenly I was ‘cast out’ of the management circle - not invited to meetings I was supposed to be in, they refused to backfill my old position and told me to just work two jobs, denied their promised pay rise was ever promised, deliberately kept making impossible demands of me, after a while upper management just came and told my reports to ignore me entirely. That was the year I almost became an alcoholic.
After I noticed myself trying to work out how much I could drink in the morning and legally drive home later, I realised nothing was worth this shit, I decided poverty was the preferable choice and quit.
Looking back I should’ve sued for constructive dismissal, but strangely, people in the midst of a nervous breakdown aren’t quite mentally ready for such things.
CW: Creep/pedo behavior
spoiler
My first boss (this was like 10+ years ago) would creep on teenage girls who came into the store and openly stare at them and make gross comments and when people called him (he was mid 30s or something) a pedophile he would literally say, “No, I’m an ephebophile” or however you spell that term. He would say it was “natural.” I got outta there pretty fast. He tried to call/text me after I quit and I blocked him. He also once told me while I worked there, “If we were all on a deserted island and we had to eat eachother then I’d eat you first.”
So yeah, that was a great way for teenage me to be introduced to the workforce.
I love when I start threads about petty gripes in my privileged life and then someone says something that just goes so far beyond anything I’ve experienced…
Sorry lol. Maybe I should have told the story about the boss who was militantly against the idea the moon landings happened and almost fired me over it instead.
My dad worked for years in a kitchen with a boss who refused to wash his hands (ever) because he was concerned about how soap was creating super bugs. I don’t know what this boss did when the pandemic started but I guarantee that it didn’t involve masking or vaccines.
That is fucking disgusting and dangerous as hell
Correct, BUT depending on when that was, I can imagine how the boss came to that wrong conclusion: inappropriate use of antibiotics has lead to drug resistant bacteria, and then antibacterial soaps came on the market despite being an inappropriate use of triclosan, and even after the FDA made companies stop using that, the whole ‘antibacterial’ idea had consumers looking for that despite the possible long-term risks. See this Cleveland Clinic piece and its links and/or Scientific American as a secondary source as I am not sure FDA articles still link to solid information. So my guess is Mr. Bossman over-applied the superbug situation to ALL soaps and washing rather than cases of misuse, and did not understand how regular soaps work: destruction at the molecular level – like fire – that is unlikely to have room for developing a resistance. tl;dr:
- soap & water = good!
- antibacterial soap & water = ?? (clean hands, sure, but maybe superbugs, too, as per above links)
I’ve seen many such cases. Less often in kitchens. Cause regardless of your feelings there are safety regulations and on top of that, most of us genuinely dont wanna make anyone sick. You just arent allowed to handle raw meat and then veggies without washing your hands
Just petite bourgeois things.
There really does seem to be some causal link between the petit bourgoise and being absolutely fucking unhinged.
The other day I walked past an energy company sales rep talking to her supervisor, he was starting to go off on some flat-earth spiel.
I bet this kind of shit is incredibly common.
These are the people that love AI
ChatGPT: “Hmmm. Yeah you do make some good points about the ice wall! Let’s explore that more.”
Anyone who nepo’d their way into a position of power is like this I swear. They know no one can challenge them, but they’re also dumb as bricks and insecure about it, so conspiracy theories appeal to them and make them feel smart, and they push them onto their underlings because they know their underlings can’t push back on them without risking their job.
The best manager is one that only reluctantly fires people to make the C-suite’s line go up. So no.
They can be friendly and not make your life hell but at the end of the day they will fire you if told to. Doesn’t matter what your condition is, you could have a newborn and a cancer diagnosis and they’d fire you.
yeah without a union or co-op the best you can hope they’re never told to cull people for fun.
The two bosses I have had that have been decent were both guys that were deeply annoyed by everything boss-duty related and left bossery to go be regular grunts again after a few years.
My current boss was (obvious conflicts in class interests aside) pretty alright pre AI brainrot.
It’s not only that he now treats AI as the solution to everything, he also degraded on basic communication skills.
My bosses have been pretty okay.
With the exception of the boss who was also the owner of the business, he was a fucking nightmare. He ended up initiating a lawsuit against me a couple of years after I had left, claiming some malpractice during an install. It never went anywhere; it died after a couple of communications between our lawyers (which of course ended costing me a fair chunk of change in legal bills). You can probably imagine what this dude was like - a veneer of personability over an absolutely psychotic interior.
i struggle to think of a boss-owner ive had that wasn’t bad at it. most were scum of the universe, but even the “best” (transparent, worked harder/longer than everyone, paid what they said immediately, knowledgable/talented/shared info, fed us meals all the time, and very safety oriented and protective) had a fucked up temper. im a quick study and easy going, so really nobody has cause to lose it on me, but this guy would lose his shit on everyone. guy had problems. once i learned what i wanted and found something else, i was gone. i talked to him some years later at a thing and i kept it friendly, as always, and it was clear he had a lot of regrets, but i don’t have much pity for people who take their shit out on the powerless. i don’t hate the guy, but i wouldn’t wanna hang either.
ive run some projects and managed people before. i don’t care for that side of things, the buffer between owners and workers. i don’t play for the owners team, and i think they know it. at most id consider a role being a player-coach team-lead type, but i don’t buffer gripes. part of team building is having a team willing and capable of pushing back on directives from above, and management roles are frequently set up to be pain sponges for owners.
if i was ever an “owner” i would construct the enterprise to only have me as an employee-operator or a co-equal partnership where me and someone i trust do our things but can cover each other and eventually part ways with a buy out / even split.
the power dynamics are just too fucked up and easily taken for granted. and i lack the capacity for coming up with some cooperative mechanism for a larger org.
i lack the capacity for coming up with some cooperative mechanism for a larger org.
Worker cooperative
yes im familiar with the terms, but terms aren’t the mechanisms, the legal instruments, the contract language, the state and federal tax filings, the income statements, etc.
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My current boss is the first that wasn’t a piece of shit.
I worked for a guy for nearly 12 years who I would consider a “good boss”
He put in work to keep the company going, paid us good bonuses and was all around pretty chill
Still a boss, don’t get me wrong, but we’re actually gonna hang out on Friday with some of the old crew
12 years and you still think he was a “good boss” means he was doing something right. I can’t imagine working with someone that long without something coming to surface that made me reevaluate my opinion of them downwards
yeah, i feel very fortunate to have been there. During the pandemic when work dried up he asked us plainly: in order to keep the company going, I can either pay you half wages until work picks up again or I can lay you off for you to collect unemployment. The fact that he let us decide was unexpected.
I feel like most of my managers have been relatively decent. When i was younger I had a manager in retail that would breath down my neck about “the script” especially the stupid credit cards, but since that job my managers have tended to be pretty pleasant and forgiving when I’d make mistakes. I don’t think they’re my friends but I’m grateful it hasn’t been worse.
My current one isn’t terrible and is probably the “best” I’ll get in that I’m left alone for the most part. It also helps it’s remote and that I only share like 5% of my personality and otherwise keep to myself. After some previous bad experiences with bosses/co-workers, I never actually am myself at work anymore, just this sort of shell automaton that will sometimes let a small sliver of personality slip out - just enough to keep me likeable and left alone.
Closest I’ve got is a boss who was great until he got promoted to be my boss’s boss, then sucked shit.
I’ve had a 2 out of 7 ‘decent’ boss rate. Two others, including my current one, routinely used verbal abuse and flouted employment law to get their way. The other three were basically checked out and oblivious to reality. The decent ones spoke to me regularly, we understood each others’ lives, and proactively got involved if they could help.
Sadly, both of the good ones were not really made welcome by their peers, and so neither lasted long.
I’ve also seen the transformation from nice and thoughtful to being an awful person. Management is a culture that rewards meaningless obsequiousness and punishes respect for the workers, even though those who do the latter get a better job done, they don’t tend to sufficiently please their betters and so get shunned out. So I have seen people change their mind to adapt to those new ‘requirements’.
