I’ve had only one disastrously bad boss. I was recruited from a pastry job in Texas to go work in a tiny pastry shop in Juneau, AK. I thought it would be an interesting adventure at the very least, so I agreed after just talking to the guy on the phone.
Turned out that the whole town hated this guy. He routinely insulted customers and threw some out of the shop if they dared complain about the goods (and there was plenty to complain about). Shortly after moving in, one of my new neighbors said, “Can I ask you a question? How can you work with that son of a bitch?” He was a long distance runner, and at a local marathon one of the volunteers manning a water stand handed him a cup of kerosene as he ran by. A former employee, a karate brown belt, had attempted to kill him.
So I found myself working as his sole assistant in the tiny, dank basement kitchen. He (an American) spoke to me (also an American) only in French. Kafkaesque is the best way to describe it. The only thing that preserved my sanity was being able to purge my psyche on long walks in the nearby forests and mountains after hours. I lasted 5 months, and that was only because Juneau is such a magnificent place in the warmer months.
This was about 25 years ago now, but my morbid curiosity prompts me to wonder what became of him. The shop is no longer there as far as I can tell, and I can find no mention of him anywhere on the web. In my darker moments, I can imagine a pitchfork-wielding mob of grizzled locals dragging him off into the abandoned gold mines east of town and walling him in. It would have been so easy.