You think your boss is evil? Wait until you hear about these bosses
Bv Larry McShane
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - They don't hide under rocks, but they do lurk in office closets. Their eating habits are bad, their social skills worse. If it wasn't for hard feelings, they'd have no feelings at all.
They are America's most evil bosses, cited by their employees in a national hunt for the country's worst executive. Author Jim Miller, chronicler of stomach-turning supervisors for the past four years, is again searching coast to coast for Beelzebub in a business suit.
Early returns show there are no shortage of potential... "winners?"
There's "Horrible Hilda," who requires an avalanche of adjectives for her ineptitude — a "contemptible, vindictive, malicious, incompetent, nasty slob," writes one of her employees.
Want specifics? Hilda "made an employee, who recently had open heart surgery, carry a 20-pound bag of cat litter up steep stairs." And her table manners? "You can always tell what she had for lunch," the worker continues, "because she's wearing it down the front of her blouse."
There's the cost-conscious restaurant manager who recycles "used jellies, butter patties, empty
syrup jugs, old dinner rolls and other food items out of the garbage," one of his workers writes.
Bonus: "He conveniently 'forgets' to give the waiters their tips."
"The boss demanded that he get his clothes on and come back to the office immediately," this entry explains. "The boss was screaming and throwing a fit over the phone, until the hospital personnel hung up on him."
Mr. Paranoid, a bad boss "who managed by irritation," routinely searched employees' desk and trash cans, monitored their phone calls and hid in a supply closet to overhear workers' conversations, another writer moans.
This is Miller's fourth annual contest to peg the nation's No.1 bad boss. The veteran businessman has compiled some of the best and worst) entries from the past in a new book, "Best Boss, Worst Boss" Summit, $22.95).
And there's this front-runner. The boss who lost it on the morning a worker was hospitalized for major surgery.A scheduled replacement failed to show up for work;the boss called the hospital to berate the ailing employee.
The book, his second on tips for good management skills, recently made The New York Times
list of best-selling business books. As part of his annual hunt, he tries to determine the nation's best boss, too — a pursuit nowhere near as entertaining as the hunt for nasty bosses.
Bad bosses seem to dominate, too — last year's negative entries outpaced the positives by a 7-1 margin.
The 1995 winner was a Midwestern sales manager who allegedly ordered employees to get back to work when they tried to help a co-worker who had suffered a heart attack. Also, fearing a drop in productivity, he waited until the end of a workday to announce that a missing employee had been found dead.
This year's contest opened in mid-July and runs through Sept. 30.
Having a rotten boss can pay off: The winner collects an expenses-paid, one-week trip for two to Kauai, Hawaii.
And just to show life is unfair: So does the employee with the best boss.
Entry forms are available by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to 1996 Best Boss/Worst Boss Contest, P.O. Box 200907 Arlington, Texas, 76006.
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The Bath & Body Co. is in Bloom
Sometimes supermarket shelves are not the best places to find the most interesting products for facial or skin care.
Bloom Bath & Body Co., 704 Massachusetts St, sells products for the bath and home, including soap, shower gel cotton towels and robes.
"We aren't just a bath and body store, we are a lifestyle store. We have everything you need to relax, including a line of natural facial care products," Margot Wells, owner, said.
According to Wells, one of the store's specialities is a soap bar. The soap bar consists of 30 different fragrances of handmade soaps which are sold by the slice.
The store also makes 40 custom fragrances which can be mixed-and matched and added to unscented merchandise to fit a customer's tastes.
Story by Melody Ard
Photos by Geoff Krieger
Wells said that students were important to the store, as well as to the industry.
"Because body care is a relatively new business, college students are ideal to buy these types of products. We consider college students sophisticated customers because they are willing to pamper themselves," Wells said.
To help attract new customers, Bloom Bath & Body Co. offers new specials every two weeks. Many of those specials target college students, and representatives from the store occasionally hand out coupons on campus.
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