For the last 3 years I’ve worked for a control freak. He micro-manages to the smallest detail. (I spent a weekend trying to find 200 yellow notebooks because he insisted that they all be in company colors.) We always struggled to get the slightest headway on anything because he had to create a complicated process to manage the simplest tasks. One of them was our sick line. We were on a deadline to report absenteeism for our region. It’s a call center with 3000+ employees all over our state. He insisted in maintaining control over the Google voice account and personally reviewing each message. It took hours. This usually meant I spent my lunch eating at my desk creating a report while most of the office was out at a restaurant. We argued about it, but he wouldn’t budge.

He announced that he found a new job, and I ended up moving up into his position and he had to train me for a month. One of the first things I did was assign the sick line to a small group of workers who would do the report as they listened to the calls.

On the night before his first day at his new job, I un-snoozed the calls to the line, so they rang his personal cell phone, as he set it up. Instead of employees getting a voicemail to leave a message for their manager.. they woke up a very grumpy man who had to be at his first day of work at 6:00am. I got a really nasty email from him. I smiled like a criminal all day long.