What's the *weirdest* work situation you've ever been in?
We're talking bad bosses, revisiting some old favorites in food and drink, and cranking up the music as Friday rolls in.
A few days ago, I was speaking with a close personal acquaintance about an experience they’d had at work that day. I won’t get into all the details of it—we’ll just say it involved a boss proudly sharing a video featuring an AI-generated employee and asking for it to be used as client-facing marketing materials—but it was a doozy, and it got me to thinking:
What's the *weirdest* work situation you've ever been in?
I’m not necessarily even asking about the worst work situation you’ve had. It’s entirely possible they’re one and the same, but there are also terrible bosses who aren’t the least bit interesting. I want to know about the weird ones, the ones that had you thinking “what the hell was that?” even years or decades later.
For me? It was a job I had for a brief period more than a decade ago, when I was a young architect working in New York City.
I’d ignored a number of red flags in taking this particular job, including a colleague at the job I left it for saying “oh, you’re going to work for [my new boss’s name]? Good luck.” I was blinded by a healthy bump in salary, and was confident it would work out for me.
It didn’t take long to realize that I had, indeed, made a grevious error.
My new boss turned out to be a boorish, domineering lout of a person, someone who managed through fear and aggression and actively stoked resentment between members of their project team. Within weeks, I knew that the warnings had been right, but I was afraid of being seen as a “job-hopper” and was determined to buckle down and make the best of the situation.
At the time, my wife worked for a small Broadway ticket sales agency. When my boss found out about this, their eyes lit up. As it turned out, their college-aged daughter was desperate to get into the theater industry, and would I be willing to make an introduction and maybe get her a job interview?
Of course, I recognized the impropriety of this situation right away. At the same time, my wife and I realized that ingratiating myself with this boss in any way might help alleviate my terrible working conditions. They couldn’t guarantee anything, but an internship was possible, so she and her boss arranged an interview with my boss’s kid.
What could the harm be, really?
Then… the kid no-call no-showed the interview.
Now, for most people, no-call-no-showing an interview is the end of the road for that particular professional relationship. Most people don’t have coercion on their side, though, so the kid got a mulligan. Understanding the peril that our financial situation was now in—we weren’t too far out of the Great Recession and architecture jobs were still scarce—my wife reached out to attempt to reschedule an interview. The kid eventually responded with a feeble apology, but dragged her feet on follow-up messages. After a few days, she still hadn’t agreed to a new meeting time.
It was at this point that my boss—AS WE WERE SITTING DOWN FOR A CLIENT MEETING—asked me, with malice on their breath, “what’s going on with this interview, my daughter said they won’t schedule anything?” I—truthfully but as tactfully as I could—said “well, they’ve been trying to reschedule something, but she didn’t show up for the first one…”
Was that a mistake? Maybe. At that point the mistakes were compounding. The boss blew up at me, berating me for “getting involved in their personal life” and how this was none of my business and long story short I quit very shortly thereafter1.
On the first day of my new job, three different people I’d never met came up to me unprompted to say a variation of “you worked for [boss’s name]? I hate that [choose your expletive]!”
It wasn’t just me, it turned out!
(This job has not appeared on any resume of mine beyond the one I used in getting that new job. Officially, canonically, it never happened.)
That’s my story. What’s yours?
I know at least one of you has something that’s going to make my story look normal and boring, and I’m eager to hear it.
While you unpack your job-related trauma, I’ll remind you that at least it’s Friday.
Today, I offer up a tasty retro appetizer, revisit a one-bottle cocktail, crank some great new protest music, and more!
You can take this week and shove it—I ain’t workin’ here no more.
It’s the best snack that shares a name with a defunct blog
Last week was the Kentucky Derby—you might’ve noticed, last Friday’s newsletter was about 1,000 words longer than normal—and it was a good time around these parts. First of all, I won big: an hour or so before post time, the NBC coverage showed eventual winner Sovereignty looking churlish and feisty in his stall, and so my wife and I placed a $10 bet on him to win, one that paid out handsomely.2
More important, though, we went to a neighbor’s Derby part-slash-crawfish boil, and I got to show off the shoes I bought from Friend of the Program Zach Rau a couple years ago.
(My nine-year-old son dug into the crawfish without prodding and ate a bunch of them. I couldn’t be prouder.)
Anyways, the event was a potluck, and we brought over my much-loved Derby Bars.
I’d also intended to bring an appetizer, and while I didn’t get around to making it in time, I had already bought the ingredients, so I threw it together the day after. It’s a mish-mash of a couple mid-century delights—first, a pastry-and-cream-cheese ‘pizza’ that my mother-in-law usually makes with vegetables on top, and second, a recipe I picked up from a friend via his mother: Jezebel Sauce, an old-school southern mixture of pineapple preserves, apple jelly and horseradish3.
Together, they make for a charming addition to any potluck spread.