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Premature evacuation
Alice Singleton, a former licensing project manager at Tribune Media Services, was laid off by her answering machine. She came home to a message from an “outplacement services firm,” which told her, “They had been hired by the Tribune to help [me]…find a new job,” she says. A blindsided Singleton discovered that a typo was responsible for her unceremonious dismissal: Her boss had intended to lay her off a week later.

Stay classy
One weekend, a Chicago architect’s supervisor “asked everyone to come in…to do some major office cleaning and help put together and install new furniture (tables, desks, chairs, etc.—fancy stuff, mind you).” The following Monday, he “let half of his architectural staff go.” Very shrewd, supervisor: What a way to get free manual labor.

The devil makes you dry-clean his Prada
A Logan Square woman served as a personal assistant to a man who possessed what she calls “a serious ‘Naomi Campbell’ temper.” “After two years of figuring out his quirks,” she says, “he asked me if I was happy working for him. Not waiting for an answer, he continued with, ‘Because I’m not going to change any time soon, and by the way, this other woman wants your job. So are you staying or do you want to quit?’ The best part? Before I went to work for him, we were actually friends.”

I wish I could quit my crazy boss
After Ruth Welte, now a TOC editor, gave a supervisor four weeks’ notice, he ordered her “to clean out [her] office and go home” instead of joining her colleagues at a holiday lunch. “He had to pay me for the month’s written notice I’d given and for the weeks of vacation he’d never let me take, so I stayed home and collected paychecks while fielding confused sympathy calls from former coworkers,” Welte says. When the “loose cannon” was fired himself one year later, Welte’s former employer asked her “for a written statement about his abuses, so they’d have evidence in case he sued them—and they changed the locks on the building,” she gloats.

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