I worked for this company for 5 years and overall it wasn’t awful, but the work was stressful, as was my boss due to his temper and fluctuating personal situation impacting work. I had good pay, nice co-workers, nice benefits, but the stress and desire to up my skills and check out other things that interested me were ultimately the reason I left. Oh, yeah, and the stress his temper caused me! He also continually made promises of ways we could make more money, would implement the work, and then not pull through…. Which is obviously another factor here. That definitely didn’t sit well with me.
My old boss had this way of melding personal with business – I guess because he owned the business? Either way, I gave him my notice, HONORED IT, and he had a nice dinner with the whole crew my last day (small company so there were like 7 of us). Since then I’ve gotten a lot of business type emails that I’ve forwarded on, or in the case of clients, have redirected them directly to him. I was an integral part of the business and didn’t want him to suffer due to missing something, plus what’s a minute of my time to copy and paste a message I have saved in my drafts, right?
At one point I forwarded an email and asked if he’d like to grab lunch – his anger set it and his emails became very professional. You could feel the attitude, it was that apparent.
Fast forward to yesterday and he found out one of his employees (who is a friend of mine) is helping me with something for my mom because my dad recently died. The dude BLEW UP. Full on yelling at my friend. Told my friend he can’t use his equipment, can’t do it on company time, etc. etc. My friend fired back – he’s helping us in his free time and using our and his tools. Told the old boss he is my friend and it’s crazy that he thinks because I don’t work for him that we can’t be friends. He also told him that he should be thankful for what I’ve helped accomplish, instead of being butt hurt that I left. Also asked him if he would get a new job if he were able to make more with less stress…. Old boss said yes.
My friend said it looked like a lightbulb went off, he watched the aha! moment. He gave a nice offer to help my mom a bit as well, so I sent a thank you email and ensured I let him know why my friend was helping… tugging at heart strings haha.
I knew he was mad, but the blow up was crazy. So thankful my friend called him on his shit.