Getting yelled at by my boss for “not saying Good Morning” to him.
You read the title correctly, this absolutely happened to me at my last job, & now that I’m about to start a new job, I feel like I can share this story.
Before that, though, a mini-story to set up the backstory of just how much of a colossal, malicious, piece of demon shit that my old boss was. I won’t say where I was working at, just know that I was an armed security officer, & from the moment I started to practically the time I finally left, we were ridiculously short staffed; to the point that I was doing 6 day work weeks, working anywhere between mid-50’s to high 60’s hrs a week for damn near the majority of the time that I worked there, & management was the main reason for that. Management always drug their feet on trying to get new hires in, usually telling people at interviews that they’d hear something back within 2 months; & then if somehow they had a class of 3 or so people wait till then, they would go through 2 weeks of orientation & get hazed by management the entire time, & be all “well I guess no one wants to work” when only 1 person makes it through orientation, then gets thrown in the meat grinder with the rest of us.
About a year or so ago, I was doing a driving patrol around the property that I was tasked with keeping an eye on. At this point in time, I was on night shift & it was almost the end of the month, & for the whole month, I was averaging nearly 60+ hrs a week. I had only had 3 off days total leading up to this incident, & that week I had done four 12 hr shifts. Needless to say, I was chronically exhausted, & midway through my drive, I started feeling myself drift off. I pulled over, got out of the car, did some squats, jumping jacks, walked, etc just to get myself more awake. Once I felt better, I got back in the car & started my patrol again. Maybe 15 or so minutes later, I remember finishing my patrol at one of the areas & was heading to the next one. I remember driving there, one hand on the wheel & the other holding my radio about to call my next check in. The next thing I knew, I was waking up to the security vehicle driving off into a ditch & the airbags deploying. I just braced & rode it out until the car stopped. Once the vehicle stopped, I was able to get out of the car to assess myself. Besides being shaken up & having a few cuts on my hands from the airbags deploying, I was ok. Honestly a real miracle, because it was a concrete ditch I had driven into, & it could’ve been a lot worse. After I retrieved my radio from the vehicle, I called my supervisor. He came out to check me over, then probably 20 min or so, the police came out to take a report, along with my boss & the manager below him. Not only did neither of them ask me if I was ok or did I need to go to the hospital, but my boss just stood there with the most angriest look on his face that I had ever seen. Once everything was said & done, the company decided to shove it under the rug & I was only given a verbal counseling, a safety driving course mostly by PowerPoint, & a drug test. I found out later from my union President that my boss gave more of a shit about that vehicle being totaled instead of his employee that could’ve seriously injured himself or worse, & based on the lack of empathy I received that night, it’s not hard for me to believe that.
Which brings me to the title of this post: probably 5 or so months after this incident, I was at the end of an actual 8 hr shift. To be fair, I had done three 12’s in a row, so I was still working a shitload of hours & still mostly exhausted. I drove the security vehicle back to where we dropped off our equipment & clocked out. I got out & started walking towards the building, ran into a 1st shift officer coming in for his shift, & while we walked together, my boss came out of the building & started walking towards the parking lot. He said morning to us, & we acknowledged him back. As I was walking, I heard behind me, “Good Morning, Mr. *my name*,” but a bit more stern. At this point, it was pretty cold outside, so I was wearing a neck gaiter to keep my face warm. I assumed he didn’t hear me the first time because of that, so I half turned & said, “morning” back to him & then started walking away. At that point, I heard my boss yell, “HEY! I SAID ‘GOOD MORNING’ TO YOU!.” So I whirled around & yelled back “I SAID ‘MORNING’ TO YOU!” He bowed his chest up & got in my face with this angry look on his face, but I stood my ground & glared back at him. After a few seconds, he backed off & said “you need to watch your tone, Mr. *my name*,” then turned & started walking away. I responded with, “you’ve lost your damn mind if you think this is my fault,” but he kept walking away. The 1st shift officer that was with me asked if I was ok, & I was, but I was seething with anger at that point. I went into the building, & immediately found my union President & filed a grievance against my boss, one of many that had been filed against him when the union first got to my job a couple years before I had started there.
Two days after I had filed the grievance, my boss called me & the union President in for a “meeting” to discuss what had happened. In reality, he was trying to intimidate me into dropping the grievance. During the whole “meeting,” my boss scoffed & never acknowledged nearly anything I had said during the duration. I told him how incredibly unprofessional it was to yell at someone because you thought they didn’t wish you a good morning, that half the time when I checked people in I barely got acknowledged, let alone a “good morning” back, & if I had acted the way he did to someone, he would understandably think I had lost my mind & I would get fired; so if it’s not ok for me to yell at someone because they didn’t say good morning to me, what makes him think it’s completely ok to yell at your employee for the same thing? How him yelling at another employee for something so petty as “he didn’t say ‘good morning’ to me” was creating a hostile work environment. To which he tried to gaslight me & say that “hostile work environment is a bit much for this situation.” If yelling at employees for something so asinine as that isn’t a hostile work environment, then I don’t know what is. He tried to say that when he talks to us, he expects us to stop & listen & give him the respect he’s deserved, to which I replied with, “respect isn’t deserved, it’s earned,” & that’s when he started getting angry. He never really apologized for his outburst, other than saying “well, I’m sorry that you feel that way.” To which I said, “respectfully, sir, I don’t accept your apology,” to which he replied with, “well, it doesn’t really matter if you accept it or not,” to which I replied, “that’s exactly why I don’t accept it, because you don’t really mean it.” He scoffed at that, & tried to wrap it up by saying, “well, it’s all behind us, anyways.” I informed him that I was still going through with my grievance process, & at point, I thought he had a vein pop out of the side of his head. He replied, “well if that’s how it is, then you can go now,” at which point I got kicked out of the “meeting.”
At first, I didn’t think anything was going to come of it, especially after talking to the company & they told me all the normal PR bullshit of “we understand your concerns” & “we’re going to have a talk with your boss & see how we can improve moving forward” & all that other bullshit. I made it my mission to try & avoid my boss, but then 2 months later, he gets fired. It caught all of us off guard. It definitely wasn’t my grievance that got him fired, but I think it was a combination of “too many grievances & too much OT from not having enough officers” type deal. They tried to say he “retired,” but if you retire from somewhere, then why are you banned from the property & all of your personal belongings are still in your office? He got dragged out of that office kicking & screaming, & I couldn’t have been more happier when it happened. Unfortunately, the manager below him took over, & things never improved for the whole duration that I was at this job.
So where does that leave me? Thankfully, after 2-3 different jobs interviews where I got ghosted afterwards, I finally got a new job & left from that nightmare. The funny thing? A couple of days after I got offered the new job, the manager that took over was also fired, for not only continuing the whole “dragging their feet on hiring new people & running the skeleton crew into the ground” routine; but also lying about it on the books & saying we had plenty of officers, which never made sense to me, because all anyone would have to do is look at the payroll & look at timesheets & see exactly how many we had & the monumental amount of OT we were doing. The job wasn’t too hard & most of the officers were good people to work with (there were definitely a few that weren’t worth the boots they walked in), it was pure mismanagement & a toxic work environment brought on by management that made working there so mentally draining. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the union being there & doing their damndest to keep management at bay, I don’t think I would’ve stayed as long as I did. Our union definitely worked about as much OT as the rest of us did when it came to juggling complaints & staying on top of management to leave us the fuck alone & stop acting like we’re fully staffed with a line of people waiting to get in at the first vacant spot, instead of a skeleton crew on the brink of losing it with barely any interviews to help fill spots in that haven’t been filled in years. I know it’s a bit of a long read, but it’s something that I wanted to get off my chest, & now that I’m gone, I finally felt like I was able to. I appreciate any of y’all who made it to the end. Heres to hoping that my new job won’t nearly be as bad as what I’ve been dealing with🤞🏻
TLDR: my old boss is a colossal pile of demon shit that didn’t care about my well-being when I wrecked the company car due to being overworked & gave more of a fuck about the car then his employee, then proceeded to yell at me a few months later when he thought I didn’t wish him a “good morning.” Fortunately, karma finally swung around & hit him like the sack of shit he is, & I couldn’t be more happier.