“One day, we had ‘kidnapping drills,’ where we ‘learned how to not be kidnapped.’
Notably, this was a regular, boring office in a regular, boring suburb.”
But what if you actually had a boss like him?
Well, you don’t have to wonder.
“We held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new hospital unit.
“One day, we had ‘kidnapping drills,’ where we ‘learned how to not be kidnapped.’
Notably, this was a regular, boring office in a regular, boring suburb.
There’s no reason why kidnapping would be on anybody’s radar.
Another time, he and several guys randomly broke into a push-up contest.
Again, this was a white-collar office with middle-aged dudes in khakis.”
“I had a principal who was Michael Scott-ish.
Students spent a total of six hours on standard school buses to eat at McDonald’s.
You headin' fo' the crib!'”
“Long ago, my 80-year-old boss pulled me into his office.
He then said, ‘I want you to start tucking your shirts into your underwear.
Go ahead and try it now.’
I told him, ‘Joel, you know I have 15 women who report to me.
I can’t undo my pants in the office.’
He also waged war on the Better Business Bureau over the negative reviews we received over said campaign.”
“He wanted a pomegranate for lunch.
Multiple produce guys laughed at me, but it was the easiest money I made.
No, I did not find a pomegranate in the end.
Once, he couldn’t remember the nationality of our Hispanic colleague.
She knew, like, five words of Spanish.”
“He held a meeting with our whole team minus one person to discuss said person being gay.
We all knew for over a year and never made a deal of it.”
“I worked for a woman as her assistant.
“I had a boss once who spent all morning locked in his office.
He asked me to come in after lunch and showed me a handmade graph.
He explained that it was a chart of all the sex he had ever had in his life.
‘See, here it’s blank until I joined the Army.
Then, I went to a hooker here.
I was on two tours but then got shot in the face.
I came back home, and you see how it just drops to almost nothing.'”
No one had ever called him that.”
Mind you, we were a furniture-making company.
Then, he thought I was having sex with his wife and had Number 2 follow me.
My boss finally confronted me when he found out I’d hugged his wife.”
“I used Michael Scott as a reference point for an old boss of mine.
She wanted to see if I was paying attention during meetings.
I put a large folder to cover the gap one day, and she freaked out.”
He also gave a speech for each person.
“My boss used to carry around a backpack full of hammers.
Then, he would autograph the hammer and give it to you as a gift.”
“My boss is certainly Michael Scott-esque.
During my interview, he tried telling me about the company’s four pillars but forgot one.
(He told me later it was knowledge.)
However, my favorite story is when we were prepping for a conference on a group call.
Everyone on the call just sat in confused silence.
“I had a boss like Michael Scott.
One time, he was considering selling the company to a Japanese company.
Orders did not go out that day.”
“When I was 21, my first boss in the US was like Michael Scott.
There are so many stories I could tell.
He’d call our coworker a baby lion because she was tiny with unruly hair.
He once threw a cricket at me from the very opposite end of the office floor.
He and another coworker kept such straight faces that I finally convinced myself the cricket flung itself at me.
I watched the cameras at the end of the day, only to see them do it.
I’m still traumatized.
Another time, he fell into a poison ivy bush and didnt know it.
He was so miserable for days.”
“My boss called an all-staff meeting to announce his divorce.
When he was finally terminated, he kept the corporate laptop and cell phone.
“He once disappeared for four days.
No call, no email.
He didn’t respond to any of our attempts to reach him.
Finally, someone drove out to his house to double-check he was alive.
