A Bad Boss I Had Last Summer

Dear Readers,

You’ve had a bad boss before, right? Seems like most people who have had a few jobs have had some bosses who have crept out from the fiery portion of the netherworld. Well, this past summer, I had a really bad boss at Camp Raymond Boy Scout Camp, where I worked in the kitchen.

This boss was so bad, in fact, that I decided to do something drastic – I decided to write a letter.

I was planning on sending it to one of my former managers (the boss above my bad boss) at Sodexho, which is a large food service company. But for some reason I never finished or sent the letter. I guess I just got tired of thinking about working in the kitchen at Camp Raymond. I was ready to move on with my life.

Anyway, here’s the unfinished letter I wrote this past August. Names have been changed. Enjoy.

Dear Sodexho Manager,

Hi, this is Telemoonfa. How are you doing? I’m doing fine. I got my last checks in the mail the other day. Thanks for sending them.

I’m writing to tell you about a few things that happened at Camp Raymond this year that you, as the manager of the camps, ought to know about. Most of it has to do with Moe. Here’s a list of bad things Moe did:

1) He cut everybody’s hours during Fourth of July week when there were fewer scouts there, but then decided to keep hours cut the following week.

2) Several times, he would call me over to his desk, hand me a pen and say, “Hey, sign this.” I read part of it, and it turned about to be a safety form that I probably should have read in its entirety. But I got the feeling that Moe would rather have me just sign it quickly so I wasn’t getting paid to read safety materials on the clock.

3) The whole time I was there, I only had one safety meeting about twenty minutes long. That was a sharp decrease in the number of meetings from the previous summer.

4) During the first week I was there, Silver Axe week, Moe had us get up at 5:30 am on a Saturday for a surprise. The Sodexho staff was tired and cold, but we went in to the kitchen, waited around for about forty five minutes, not knowing what was going on, and then Moe took us out in front of the whole Silver Axe group of leaders and boys, and they clapped at us for a minute. That was it. That was the surprise. None of the staff was on the clock for the forty-five minutes or hour that this “surprise” took.

5) The first two weeks, Silver Axe and staff week, Moe did not communicate clearly to us about what our hours were. It seemed like he wanted us to hang around the campsite until he needed us to do something, and then he would call us into work for an hour or two. I would have preferred to know my schedule a week or at least a few days in advance. That way I wouldn’t feel like I had to hang around the campsite, waiting for Moe to come get me. Also, I came to work, all the way from Flagstaff, on Monday July 7th because I was scheduled, and he said “You’re off today.” He had my phone number; I wish he had called me over the weekend to tell me not to come in on Monday.

6) Moe did some things himself that he could have had his employees do. He cut the fruit for breakfast every day, instead of having somebody else do it, giving himself more hours than his employees, who usually got 30 to 35 hours a week. He also checked in the Sysco truck every time it came in. Last summer, he delegated checking in the truck, thus giving his employees more hours.

7) Moe hid his own timecard. We never knew when he was on the clock and when he was off the clock, but he seemed to be in the kitchen all the time.

8) One afternoon, Jasper, one of the employees there this summer, had a friend from Flagstaff pick him up. The friend was staying around the camp for a little bit, and Jasper asked Moe if his friend could eat a little something, and Moe refused.

9) Moe shorted the Boy Scouts on portions. The Sodexho recipes said to give people a larger portion of eggs, a larger portion of ham, a larger portion of cake, but Moe cut corners. One time, when we had enchiladas for lunch, he watered down the enchilada sauce significantly.

10) Moe wouldn’t let me use the camp phone, the phone in the kitchen, because that was the only landline phone line in the camp and it needed to be free for the Boy Scout Staff to use. But Moe was on that phone constantly.

11) Moe had a tendency to micro-manage

12) Moe had a tendency to yell.

13) Moe told us hardly ever to sweep, mop, wash dishes, break down cardboard boxes, and other things like that, because he wanted the Kitchen Patrol scouts to do that stuff. He was getting free labor out of the kitchen patrol.

14) He never told us to stay a little later to finish cleaning or to finish what we were doing, but told us to clock out early constantly.

15) Last summer, he bought the Sodexho staff lots of goodies, like ice cream treats and little bags of chips, but this summer the number of goodies decreased dramatically.

[Here’s where the letter starts getting wacky. Remember that this is an unfinished letter.]

16) It’s all about filthy lucre, making money, surely Sodexho is not so righteous a company as to not give bonuses to managers for cutting corners, exploiting employees, etc.

Once there was a power outage, and we all thought we were still working so we hung around the kitchen. Moe informed us a half an hour or forty-five minutes later that we had been off the clock for a while.

Hector had to call you about 15 minute breaks.

You get my point. Moe’s not the best manager in the world. He was very concerned about money.

That letter was really whiny, I know. But I bet you would whine too if it happened to you. Moe has a few redeeming qualities, though. He’s an interesting guy. I laugh about the whole Camp Raymond situation now.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

(By the way, for those of you who think that our soul-less capitalistic society made Moe the bad manager that he was… you’re kind of right, I admit… but only kind of! For remember, dear reader, that capitalism itself is not the enemy. Amoral, unrestrained capitalism is the enemy! Capitalism-as-Savior is the enemy!)

Ha ha ha ha ha. I’m still laughing at the whole Camp Raymond situation!

Really, though, somebody ought to do something about all those bad managers out there.

But hey, at least I don’t work at a place where I get flogged. Sailors used to get flogged a lot back in the day.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa