What's the worst thing your boss has ever done?

As an offshoot of the other thread here, what's the worst thing your boss has ever done?

One that jumps to mind for me is the time our SE was supposed to cover a major local sporting event but instead watched it on TV at home, then wrote a column about being there and the atmosphere and how loud the crowd was.

 

This happened before I started working at the paper, but the editor who hired me got caught plagarizing her editorials. She wrote her own lead for several grafs, then used the AP's editorials for the rest of the story without giving any credit. I didn't know this when I was hired, but the higher-ups tried to keep it quiet and let her resign when she got another job. The news leaked, and she had to 'resign' rather abruptly.

 

Tried to make me fire a reporter immediately when she gave two weeks' notice. They found out she was going to our competitor.

Needless to say, I didn't.

 

An AME at one of my stops was fired for cheating on contests. I read about it two days after I walked out the door for the last time as the SE there.

 

My wife and I both worked for a family-owned chain of small weeklies and one five-day daily early in our careers. I was sports editor for the daily and the weekly that my wife served as editor for. We made great strides with the weekly and the first year won a number of awards at the state press association contest. The next year, the publisher tried to keep us from winning because his family thought it was embarrassing that the "flagship" paper never won any.

So he replaced many of our feature entries with business "features" that all newspapers of this size do to sell ads. He simply through away several other entries--several from a part-time freelance photographer who really lived for these awards. We were surprised when some of our best stuff didn't win anything. Then I got the judging critiques and saw that most of it was never entered. Somehow we still won the award for best overall small weekly in the state. But we could have done even better without his "help."

I knew we were both leaving in the near future, so I confronted him right there in the banquet room after the ceremony and he said he thought the business features were worthy of entering. Either he was lying or he was infinitely dumber than I gave him credit for. I'll let you decide which.

 

Before I got to one of my stops, the former SE I replaced had "lifted" a few paragraphs from a game story about a state basketball playoff game from another paper in the same county. It was the reason, he was let go.

 

Give my job to someone else while I was on a deployment, thus leaving me unemployed when I returned.

 

No brainer.

The first ME I worked for was about to go on a cruise, and decided he needed to get properly bronzed, so he started going to a tanning salon. The guy was Hispanic and needed to tan about as much as George Hamilton does, but that's apparently beside the point.

Anyway, he goes tanning and decides to write a five-part "special interest" series of columns...using HIMSELF as a model. The first of these "columns" had been placed on the front page, but fortunately the publisher happened to see a proof and went ballistic. The ME settled on moving the piece inside and referring to it in a skybox on the front.

I was on vacation when these ran, but this was the story I got in the newsroom when I came back. Said ME even went to the one tanning salon that DIDN'T advertise with us, pissing off the one that DID and causing them to cancel their ads. Publisher fired the ME six weeks later, and supposedly told him that the day he wanted to run a column about tanning on the front page was the day the publisher decided to look for a new editor.

 

Ummm, isn't that kind of -- ya know -- illegal?

 

My thought, too. Don't they have to have some job for you?