I hate my boss, part one
Jan. 18th, 2014 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetOkay, let's make this official: I hate my boss.
[Content Note: Trans*phobia, sexism, bullying, controlling behavior]
1) My boss is a bad communicator. She doesn't use specifics very well, and she frequently uses different words to mean the same thing that shouldn't mean the same thing.
Example the first: I recall the Cookie Staycation event (back in December, and I still never ever want to make another large batch of cookies again (but there is no escaping that for a professional baker)) where she wanted me to convert our "high volume" recipes to "volume" recipes for the event attendees to take home with them. I had to pick apart what she meant from the flying "volumes": to go from weight and huge measurements and yields to cups/teaspoons/etc and smaller yields that the average person would be prepared to make at home.
Example the second: The other day, I had failed to properly clean the sides of a pan of apple crisp. My boss explained to me twice, in a very convoluted way, how to clean the sides of the pan now that it was baked, while mixing in the instructions for how to clean the sides of the pan before it was baked (for future crisps). Horribly confused, I asked her whether she actually wanted me to clean this particular pan, today, and she proceeded to explain to me again how to clean the pan.
2) My boss is a control freak. Everything must be to her exact specifications, or it isn't good enough. That's why we're suddenly switching out most of our "from scratch" recipes for mixes and convenience and semi-convenience goods.
The things we're continuing to make from scratch? Most of them she's replaced with her own recipes, which are very poorly edited and frequently leave out when to add the vanilla at the very least. While Chef Smith was wise enough to train us to use and read bad recipes, I was rather hoping we wouldn't have to be dealing with them in the same building, from a mirror hierarchy.
She's also got a fair number of recipes that have spices and so forth "to taste". Our students aren't going to know what to do with that. Frequently, I don't know what to do with that. I'm a baker, not a cook! I don't necessarily know what these recipes are going to taste like until they're baked, because they're not always safe to taste beforehand. I have an easily disturbed digestive system, and since by law I'm not allowed to handle food when I've got diarrhea, I'd rather not get diarrhea.
See also: "Just add a shot/dash of [ingredient]." A fair number of our students aren't of legal drinking age in these parts, and I drink only rarely and never have at a bar. As liquid measures go, I'm not sure that's as appropriate or as universal as she seems to think it is.
3) She frequently contradicts herself. A couple weeks ago, I was mixing brioche dough when she came in to stand over my shoulder (see: control freak). I was adding the remaining dry ingredients and eggs in parts, when butted in and insisted that I add all the remaining dry ingredients immediately. She then took over and added the remaining dry ingredients herself. When all the dry ingredients were mixed in, she told me it was time to scrape the bowl. When I reached for a bowl scraper, she scolded me and told me that I should always scrape this particular dough by hand. She also told me that I could do the scraping, because, and I want you to note this, "you're already wearing gloves." I scraped the bowl to the best of my ability, and my boss okay'd it. I reached to make one final shove of the dough away from the paddle, and my glove got stuck in the dough. When I managed to pull my hand out, it was minus two of the glove fingers and a chunk of the connecting material. "See," she said, "this is why you never use gloves to mix dough!"
I'm serious. Right after she told me to do the scraping myself because I was already wearing gloves, implying that she would have put on gloves to do the scraping herself, she tells me NEVER to wear gloves when scraping.
We couldn't be sure we found all of the glove material, so we had to throw away all of the dough. We couldn't even compost it, because the glove is synthetic material. And this was brioche dough. It's some huge percent butter. (The Marie Antoinette "quote" about letting the poor eat cake because they can't afford bread? Yeah. That "real" "quote" was actually referring to brioche. Think about the cost of butter for a minute, and it'll make a lot more sense than cake.)
4) She doesn't know what she's doing. Right after the dough/glove incident detailed above (which probably would have been evidence enough for this point on its own), I had to make more brioche. We still needed it, after all. My boss has made a big deal of us asking for help if we ever think we need it, and what I took from the above incident was that I clearly needed to find out exactly how she wanted brioche made and therefore needed her input. Only apparently when she says "I'll help you," she means "I'll show you," because as soon as I had everything measured out and had asked her for help, she took over the entire process, leaving me to watch.
While the dough was mixing, she went on and on about how the great chefs could tell if something was mixed well enough just by looking at it, and if you mixed things just right you didn't actually need to scrape the bowl, and she was one such chef and could tell just by looking that she wouldn't need to scrape this particular batch of brioche. We obviously wouldn't be telling the students this, or doing this in front of them, but there were no students in attendance at the time, so it was okay! Also, did she mention that she could tell just by looking that the brioche was properly mixed, being a great chef?
The dough was mixed and she left me on my own to pour it on sheet pans to chill for later cutting. (She would later tell me off for not properly flouring the sheet pans the dough went on, but being as she didn't even stay to watch and advise me for that part, I'm putting that on her.) When I got down near the bottom of the bowl, I discovered something very interesting: Discolored streaks of dough, indicating that not all of the dough had been properly mixed and the bottom could have used a thorough scraping.
I had to throw that part out, but showed those of my coworkers who were present the evidence before I scraped out the mixing bowl. One of them was adamant that I show our boss in order to prove some sort of point (that she doesn't know what she's talking about), but I stayed firm on not doing so. There was no way it would have helped anything. Our boss wouldn't have taken it as a lesson that she needed to actually do things the right way; she would have taken it as a personal attack and come down on all of us for the rest of the day. We had learned what we needed to anyway: Always scrape the bowl, even when you don't think you need to. Perhaps even especially then.
5) She's a trans*phobic bigot. Admittedly, one of my coworkers isn't much better, but I at least have faith that my coworker has the ability to learn, should she be presented with enough information. I have a feeling my boss has brick walls for ears.
Twice now my boss has had conversations with this particular coworker about two people of their individual acquaintance who crossdress. One is a doctor, the other is a police officer. They go on and on about how scandalous this is, and how shocked they are that someone with such a reputable job would do such a thing, and who would trust such a person with such an important job? "Who would go to a doctor that crossdresses?" my boss has asked.
I've done my best to enforce the concept that if it doesn't hurt anyone then I don't see how it's a problem, and that I for one would be more than willing to go to a doctor that crossdresses (probably not the most ringing endorsement, since I don't exactly have what they would probably consider "conventional" interests/personality in the first place), but as far as I can tell it hasn't helped.
This wasn't nearly as bad as the first conversation, wherein my boss also told us about two of her former coworkers at a casino some years back: a man and a woman who were married with children and had decided to transition. She went on and on about how this was going to ruin their childrens' psyche, and consistently misgendered the people involved (she kept talking about how the "woman" wanted to use the mens' bathroom), and coworker mostly agreed with her about how horrible it was for the kids and so forth. I did my best to pull out some Trans* 101, but neither of them was particularly interested in listening when they could instead deride.
This was in the context of other "weird, wacky" casino stories she was telling, about people who were actually dangerous, or people who were mentally ill. The fact that she keeps all three of those groups in the same mental folder is seriously gross, I can't even.
6) She's also sexist. Between the Cookie Staycation and the Brioche Incident, there was a mini Cookie Staycation for a specific group that was visiting the hotel. The lead cook in the bakery (second in rank to the pastry chef, AKA my boss) is also a geek, and someone with whom I get along quite well. She made a suggestion that my boss didn't take well. My boss made her cry, and then rounded the rest of us up for a ten minute lecture about respect and how it's a two-way street and therefore we need to respect her, probably forty percent of which was projection and the other sixty percent was about how just because we were all women didn't mean we had to let emotions rule the bakery, and she didn't know if it was because the restaurant staff is mostly men (though it's clear she thought it was) but they never had this sort of problem, etc etc etc.
There was another more recent incident where she displayed similar sexist attitudes, but I don't recall all the details of that one, only that it was more of the same.
7) She has no idea about numbers. Lately, our boss has been coming down on all of us about the amount of waste we produce. We can't be producing this much waste! That's our next raise that's going in the compost! That sort of thing. What she seems willfully ignorant of is how much of that waste is produced at her instruction.
My boss has a habit of grossly overestimating how much people will actually eat or want to eat at our events. I'm not sure if it's a product of her casino background or if she's just that worried that there won't be enough food, but if we don't over-produce for an event, we're clearly not doing it right.
...Well, that's not entirely fair of me. It's mostly the "big" events that she makes us over-produce for, but there's enough of those that we end up with serious waste. It's not just that food goes unused, it's that after we send it out once we can't send it out again, so any extra? Can't even go out to a different event. We end up sending most of it down to the hotel's "family meal" (the hotel employees get two free meals a day, which is a seriously nice perk, I've gotta say), or throwing it out. Remember, she's the one cracking down on us about waste.
I'm going to have to put a To Be Continued on this post; there's at least two or three more items for me to get to (emotional auditing, the way she speaks more at us that to us, the way she keeps making everyone cry), but I am tired of thinking about her for now and need a mental break before I go back to work tomorrow, which I am not exactly looking forward to. Maybe I'll write part two if I wake up again between now and then. If not, though, maybe tomorrow afternoon. Or maybe Monday, since I don't work then. We'll see.
Edit: Content note updated to include more accurate info.
[Content Note: Trans*phobia, sexism, bullying, controlling behavior]
1) My boss is a bad communicator. She doesn't use specifics very well, and she frequently uses different words to mean the same thing that shouldn't mean the same thing.
Example the first: I recall the Cookie Staycation event (back in December, and I still never ever want to make another large batch of cookies again (but there is no escaping that for a professional baker)) where she wanted me to convert our "high volume" recipes to "volume" recipes for the event attendees to take home with them. I had to pick apart what she meant from the flying "volumes": to go from weight and huge measurements and yields to cups/teaspoons/etc and smaller yields that the average person would be prepared to make at home.
Example the second: The other day, I had failed to properly clean the sides of a pan of apple crisp. My boss explained to me twice, in a very convoluted way, how to clean the sides of the pan now that it was baked, while mixing in the instructions for how to clean the sides of the pan before it was baked (for future crisps). Horribly confused, I asked her whether she actually wanted me to clean this particular pan, today, and she proceeded to explain to me again how to clean the pan.
2) My boss is a control freak. Everything must be to her exact specifications, or it isn't good enough. That's why we're suddenly switching out most of our "from scratch" recipes for mixes and convenience and semi-convenience goods.
The things we're continuing to make from scratch? Most of them she's replaced with her own recipes, which are very poorly edited and frequently leave out when to add the vanilla at the very least. While Chef Smith was wise enough to train us to use and read bad recipes, I was rather hoping we wouldn't have to be dealing with them in the same building, from a mirror hierarchy.
She's also got a fair number of recipes that have spices and so forth "to taste". Our students aren't going to know what to do with that. Frequently, I don't know what to do with that. I'm a baker, not a cook! I don't necessarily know what these recipes are going to taste like until they're baked, because they're not always safe to taste beforehand. I have an easily disturbed digestive system, and since by law I'm not allowed to handle food when I've got diarrhea, I'd rather not get diarrhea.
See also: "Just add a shot/dash of [ingredient]." A fair number of our students aren't of legal drinking age in these parts, and I drink only rarely and never have at a bar. As liquid measures go, I'm not sure that's as appropriate or as universal as she seems to think it is.
3) She frequently contradicts herself. A couple weeks ago, I was mixing brioche dough when she came in to stand over my shoulder (see: control freak). I was adding the remaining dry ingredients and eggs in parts, when butted in and insisted that I add all the remaining dry ingredients immediately. She then took over and added the remaining dry ingredients herself. When all the dry ingredients were mixed in, she told me it was time to scrape the bowl. When I reached for a bowl scraper, she scolded me and told me that I should always scrape this particular dough by hand. She also told me that I could do the scraping, because, and I want you to note this, "you're already wearing gloves." I scraped the bowl to the best of my ability, and my boss okay'd it. I reached to make one final shove of the dough away from the paddle, and my glove got stuck in the dough. When I managed to pull my hand out, it was minus two of the glove fingers and a chunk of the connecting material. "See," she said, "this is why you never use gloves to mix dough!"
I'm serious. Right after she told me to do the scraping myself because I was already wearing gloves, implying that she would have put on gloves to do the scraping herself, she tells me NEVER to wear gloves when scraping.
We couldn't be sure we found all of the glove material, so we had to throw away all of the dough. We couldn't even compost it, because the glove is synthetic material. And this was brioche dough. It's some huge percent butter. (The Marie Antoinette "quote" about letting the poor eat cake because they can't afford bread? Yeah. That "real" "quote" was actually referring to brioche. Think about the cost of butter for a minute, and it'll make a lot more sense than cake.)
4) She doesn't know what she's doing. Right after the dough/glove incident detailed above (which probably would have been evidence enough for this point on its own), I had to make more brioche. We still needed it, after all. My boss has made a big deal of us asking for help if we ever think we need it, and what I took from the above incident was that I clearly needed to find out exactly how she wanted brioche made and therefore needed her input. Only apparently when she says "I'll help you," she means "I'll show you," because as soon as I had everything measured out and had asked her for help, she took over the entire process, leaving me to watch.
While the dough was mixing, she went on and on about how the great chefs could tell if something was mixed well enough just by looking at it, and if you mixed things just right you didn't actually need to scrape the bowl, and she was one such chef and could tell just by looking that she wouldn't need to scrape this particular batch of brioche. We obviously wouldn't be telling the students this, or doing this in front of them, but there were no students in attendance at the time, so it was okay! Also, did she mention that she could tell just by looking that the brioche was properly mixed, being a great chef?
The dough was mixed and she left me on my own to pour it on sheet pans to chill for later cutting. (She would later tell me off for not properly flouring the sheet pans the dough went on, but being as she didn't even stay to watch and advise me for that part, I'm putting that on her.) When I got down near the bottom of the bowl, I discovered something very interesting: Discolored streaks of dough, indicating that not all of the dough had been properly mixed and the bottom could have used a thorough scraping.
I had to throw that part out, but showed those of my coworkers who were present the evidence before I scraped out the mixing bowl. One of them was adamant that I show our boss in order to prove some sort of point (that she doesn't know what she's talking about), but I stayed firm on not doing so. There was no way it would have helped anything. Our boss wouldn't have taken it as a lesson that she needed to actually do things the right way; she would have taken it as a personal attack and come down on all of us for the rest of the day. We had learned what we needed to anyway: Always scrape the bowl, even when you don't think you need to. Perhaps even especially then.
5) She's a trans*phobic bigot. Admittedly, one of my coworkers isn't much better, but I at least have faith that my coworker has the ability to learn, should she be presented with enough information. I have a feeling my boss has brick walls for ears.
Twice now my boss has had conversations with this particular coworker about two people of their individual acquaintance who crossdress. One is a doctor, the other is a police officer. They go on and on about how scandalous this is, and how shocked they are that someone with such a reputable job would do such a thing, and who would trust such a person with such an important job? "Who would go to a doctor that crossdresses?" my boss has asked.
I've done my best to enforce the concept that if it doesn't hurt anyone then I don't see how it's a problem, and that I for one would be more than willing to go to a doctor that crossdresses (probably not the most ringing endorsement, since I don't exactly have what they would probably consider "conventional" interests/personality in the first place), but as far as I can tell it hasn't helped.
This wasn't nearly as bad as the first conversation, wherein my boss also told us about two of her former coworkers at a casino some years back: a man and a woman who were married with children and had decided to transition. She went on and on about how this was going to ruin their childrens' psyche, and consistently misgendered the people involved (she kept talking about how the "woman" wanted to use the mens' bathroom), and coworker mostly agreed with her about how horrible it was for the kids and so forth. I did my best to pull out some Trans* 101, but neither of them was particularly interested in listening when they could instead deride.
This was in the context of other "weird, wacky" casino stories she was telling, about people who were actually dangerous, or people who were mentally ill. The fact that she keeps all three of those groups in the same mental folder is seriously gross, I can't even.
6) She's also sexist. Between the Cookie Staycation and the Brioche Incident, there was a mini Cookie Staycation for a specific group that was visiting the hotel. The lead cook in the bakery (second in rank to the pastry chef, AKA my boss) is also a geek, and someone with whom I get along quite well. She made a suggestion that my boss didn't take well. My boss made her cry, and then rounded the rest of us up for a ten minute lecture about respect and how it's a two-way street and therefore we need to respect her, probably forty percent of which was projection and the other sixty percent was about how just because we were all women didn't mean we had to let emotions rule the bakery, and she didn't know if it was because the restaurant staff is mostly men (though it's clear she thought it was) but they never had this sort of problem, etc etc etc.
There was another more recent incident where she displayed similar sexist attitudes, but I don't recall all the details of that one, only that it was more of the same.
7) She has no idea about numbers. Lately, our boss has been coming down on all of us about the amount of waste we produce. We can't be producing this much waste! That's our next raise that's going in the compost! That sort of thing. What she seems willfully ignorant of is how much of that waste is produced at her instruction.
My boss has a habit of grossly overestimating how much people will actually eat or want to eat at our events. I'm not sure if it's a product of her casino background or if she's just that worried that there won't be enough food, but if we don't over-produce for an event, we're clearly not doing it right.
...Well, that's not entirely fair of me. It's mostly the "big" events that she makes us over-produce for, but there's enough of those that we end up with serious waste. It's not just that food goes unused, it's that after we send it out once we can't send it out again, so any extra? Can't even go out to a different event. We end up sending most of it down to the hotel's "family meal" (the hotel employees get two free meals a day, which is a seriously nice perk, I've gotta say), or throwing it out. Remember, she's the one cracking down on us about waste.
I'm going to have to put a To Be Continued on this post; there's at least two or three more items for me to get to (emotional auditing, the way she speaks more at us that to us, the way she keeps making everyone cry), but I am tired of thinking about her for now and need a mental break before I go back to work tomorrow, which I am not exactly looking forward to. Maybe I'll write part two if I wake up again between now and then. If not, though, maybe tomorrow afternoon. Or maybe Monday, since I don't work then. We'll see.
Edit: Content note updated to include more accurate info.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-19 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-19 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-20 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-20 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-19 06:02 pm (UTC)Your description of your boss is the definitive description of and office bully (or in this case a workplace bully). The gloves/bowl-scraping anecdote in particular reminded me of a boss I had who was an office bully.
I wish I had advice but I'm not familiar with all the details of your work situation and profession, who is or isn't above your boss, etc. Can I offer virtual hugs at least?
no subject
Date: 2014-01-19 11:16 pm (UTC)I hadn't thought to put that name to her behavior, but it definitely makes sense; before I was hired, she effectively drove two previous employees away through hostility. The hotel was basically desperate for employees at the time, and while I like to think Geeky Coworker and Teacher Coworker would've recommended me anyway, or at least been good references, I don't know that there would have been an opening for me if the previous employees hadn't left.
We've got a few people above my boss at least. I heard through the grapevine that just the other day there was a meeting at which the executive chef (one of my bosses bosses, and the person in charge of all the kitchens at work) and several of her other bosses learned that my boss had been replacing our old "from scratch" recipes with convenience and semi-convenience foods, and were quite taken aback. Our hotel is one of only two four-diamond hotels in the state (out of five, and five is basically the Ritz and similar), and in order to keep our fourth diamond, a certain amount of our food has to be made in house. I wasn't sure whether that meant "from scratch" or not, but couldn't imagine that my bosses trend would impact it well, and wasn't exactly happy to be leaving so much work to outside agencies anyway, so I admit to more than a little schadenfreude at learning the higher-ups' reaction.
Virtual hugs are most certainly welcome, and thank you!