Throwaway account here. My boss has a history of sending condescending, insulting memos to the 30 or so of us. Nothing abusive, but certainly disrespectful. Today I caught him covering for his own fuck-up: The memo admonished us for continuing to follow instructions that had been given to us months ago, and that we'd never been told to stop. He sends out tons of memos and nearly all of them are bullshit, so it's possible he said something about it in one of those but I've searched and couldn't find it. An informal survey of my peers found they hadn't seen one, either.
Here's where it gets interesting: These instructions are detailed on a “cheat sheet” kept in Google Docs. Apparently we were supposed to stop following certain of these instructions over a month ago. But the document was updated to reflect this change only a couple days ago, and an insulting message was added to the top further berating us for following his previous instructions. I was able to verify that these changes were made only a couple days ago by checking out the revision history. Now I'm kicking myself for not screenshotting the revision history when I had the chance because when I came back to the Google Doc 10 minutes later, the revision history menu selection was grayed out. It seems I need edit privileges to see the revision history, and mine were revoked even as I was perusing the doc. Is it possible my boss was able to spy on me doing this? It seems like he'd have better things to do but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
What to do? My options:
1) Nothing. Probably the wisest. I can't afford to lose this job yet.
2) Email my boss explaining that I've been following these instructions until now because I'd never been told to stop and the cheat sheet wasn't updated until a couple days ago. Basically let him know in office-speak that I know what he did.
3) Anonymously email (hiding name and IP) my boss's boss about this. Insulting the staff and issuing retroactive instructions are not the way to lead effectively. My boss isn't particularly well respected, in part because of these antics, and from the frantic tone of his latest memo I must presume that his boss caught him fucking up by not updating the cheat sheet, and this is my boss's effort to cover his tracks. I highly doubt this would be enough to get him fired, but it would embarrass him, and the thought of that is too delicious to ignore. Obviously this could backfire on me if it's known that I was the only one looking in the revision history. And it isn't much of a secret that I despise him.
4) ?????