We’ve all been there – you get a job, celebrate your success, and show up on day one only to find that you’re working for a lunatic who likes to hurl garbage cans at your head when a call gets dropped. We’ve all been there - at least once. It’s the age-old case of the horrible boss.
Not all bosses are tyrants (just like not all assistants are perfect), but Hollywood is notorious for its terrible, ridiculous, tyrannical bosses – see Swimming With Sharks, The Player, and Entourage, for a start. Ari Gold was lovable and hilarious on TV, but if you were working for him in real life you’d probably be in a straightjacket.
In honor of this week’s release of Horrible Bosses 2, we asked several former and current assistants about their own real-life horrible boss stories. They all spoke on condition of anonymity of course – you’ll see why when you read their sordid tales of humiliation, agony, and normal, workaday torture below.
“I worked at a small production company and one of my tasks was to organize my boss’ four-year old collection of Variety (and this was when it was still Daily Variety, in print) by date and file them all neatly – even though she never, ever looked at a single one of them once she’d read it. It was probably the least productive thing I’ve ever done.”
“I had a bag of pretzels thrown at my head when I was working as an agent’s assistant because I bought the ‘wrong’ shaped pretzel for one of his clients.”
“The same week Lloyd prevented Ari from throwing his rented computer out the window on an episode of Entourage, I had to do the same when my producer boss was in a rage over someone’s contract and wanted to toss his computer. I managed to save the computer and avoid being hit after he threw a tissue box. Later that day, he commented on how much he loved Entourage and that Ari Gold was his hero.”
“My producer boss would call me to his office by yelling ‘Jesus Christ Donna!’ It got to the point where it sounded like Jesus Christ was my first name.”
“I worked as the assistant to the Executive Producers of a TV show; one of the office rules was that negativity was never allowed. Unfortunately, during my tenure, my mother-in-law-to-be died and it was very unexpected. I came to work the next day and was brought into the office and was told that my ‘hello’ was not elevated enough. I asked to take time off for the funeral and was granted my request. The day of the funeral I got a call from the office where my boss called me ‘selfish’ for going to the funeral instead of helping her plan a vacation with her boyfriend and then proceeded to fire me for taking the time off to attend the funeral.”
“One boss I had never smiled and had zero sense of humor. One day she told our department she was taking us to happy hour, which shocked us all, but we thought maybe she was lightening up. We got to happy hour, got our drinks, and then she pulled out some papers and told us all we were going to take one of those ‘personality tests’ – so we basically spent the entire happy hour in silence, filling them out. Fun.”
“Months after our show wrapped, one of our crew members passed away. At the funeral service, the showrunner (my former boss) texted me, demanding to know why I hadn't reminded him of the funeral and that it was my fault that he now looked like a ‘dick.’ …I had emailed him twice in the week and sent a reminder.”
“I once had a (female) boss tell me that she prefers to have male assistants because ‘They’re just better.’ And I’m a female.”
“My seventy-two year old producer boss was away on a cruise and outside cell service when I received a call from his maid that his house had flooded. As the producer had put me in charge of his entire life, I had access to his homeowner’s policy and called them up and took care of it. Upon going over to oversee the damage, the plumber asked if I could remove everything from the bathroom cabinets. Front and center was a very sticky box holding what was described as a “tight Asian pu**y”. Not wanting my boss to know I had seen it and not wanting to pick it up, I found oven mitts and hid it in a toiletries bag. When he returned he didn’t thank me for saving his house but we also never spoke of the box.”
Do you have a story to share? Sound off in the comments below (you can change your name to protect the innocent). Warner Bros’ Horrible Bosses 2 opens November 26.