1090: More Workplace Fails and Bad Boss Tales | Feedback Friday

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Welcome to Feedback Friday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.
As always, I'm here with Feedback Friday producer, the community service officer directing traffic beneath this broken traffic light of life conundra, Gabriel Mizrahi. And I got my white gloves on and everything.
That's right. Going way too hard with the hand motion.
Why do they do that? I guess it has to be visible. Why do they do that? Traffic cops are so extra with the hands.
They are, but it's probably kind of intense. Also, you don't want to get hit by a car, so you got to wave around.
I don't know. You know what it reminds me of? I don't buy it for the record.
You don't buy it? No. I think that they're just eating up the stage time, and they were like failed mimes or something.
Failed mimes. I'm going to enjoy this.
They can't just wave somebody through. They have to make this like huge...
Theater kid from high school turned law enforcement. Yeah.
I know. I don't need this prestidigitation.
Just tell me where to make a left and let me get on with my life. I don't understand.
You know, this reminds me of those North Korea traffic ladies. You've seen those, right? When we were there.
Of course. Yeah.
What's weird about them, not only is it that they don't have traffic lights, that's strange, of course, but the fact that they use these, these ladies that stand on those little podiums in the middle of the intersection, what's weirdest about that is not the uniforms, the makeup, the whole thing. What's weirdest about that is they do all of the motions, even when there's like three cars in a mile and there's no cars in the intersection.
So they're still doing it like as if there's just a full load of cars. It makes absolutely no sense.
Just take a break until a vehicle pulls up. There's 20 cars in Pyongyang that have gasoline.
I mean, that's kind of like the bartender we met in that remote hotel way in the north or whatever. That was weird.
We walked in, there was nobody in the bar, but she's just behind the bar, like on duty waiting for somebody to come in and order a drink. That was super bizarre because do you remember how tired and exhausted she was where when you didn't order something, she would just shut off like a robot and look at the wall.
And then when you ordered something, she would just like perk up a little bit and make a drink. Yeah, it was so weird.
I was like, are you malnourished or tired? Are you just having a day? It was such a bizarre. That was so weird.
I remember one of the traffic guards we saw in the Capitol was so beautiful. She was like uncomfortably attractive.
And one of the guys, one of the guys on our tour was like, who is that? And I was like, bro, I don't know who she is. Why are you asking me? It's the crown jewel of Pyongyang.
I don't know what to tell you. Weirdly beautiful person who's directing traffic for nobody, which is the most North Korea thing I've ever seen.
It truly is. I wonder if they recruit specifically good looking women for that job because they're highly visible, especially in the touristy areas.
Not touristy areas. Let me catch myself.
There's no such thing in North Korea, but in a capital where tourists might actually see them. And everyone takes photos of them.
So that could be part of it. Yeah, they're iconic.
And so they probably choose that for a reason. All right.
Well, on the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker.
And during the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, war correspondents, neuroscientists, investigative journalists, national security advisors. This week, we had Victor Vescovo on diving to the deepest parts of each of the seven oceans.
He designed submarines and crazy exploration vehicles, and it was an episode all about the general spirit of adventurism. Such an interesting guy.
He was in the military, ends up getting a PhD in something like air power in Eastern Europe, and then he starts a hedge fund, makes a bunch of money doing that over the years, then uses that money to climb the highest mountains and dive to the deepest parts of the ocean. It's just a fascinating conversation with somebody who's got kind of like a Jules Verne OG Explorer guy vibe.
It's really something. He's really something.
On Fridays, though, we share stories, take listener letters, offer advice, play obnoxious soundbites, and compare Gabe to various pieces of essential infrastructure. We're doing something a little bit different from our usual Feedback Friday today.
We're taking another round of bad boss slash ridiculous colleague stories. You guys sent us a ton of crazy workplace stories the last time we did this, and we couldn't take them all, so we decided to do a bit of a part two, since y'all seem to enjoy part one so much.
And on that note, given our theme today, I want to kick off here by sharing a little piece of advice for anybody considering a new project, job, opportunity, whatever. Before you dive in and commit to something, always ask or think about what is the day-to-day actually like? Because a lot of opportunities, they really do seem exciting, but they actually give you less of the life that you really want to live.
For example, being a writer might sound fun, and I'm sure it is, especially if you're James Clear, Mark Manson, Ryan Holiday type of person, and it becomes even more fun when you're thinking about release parties and book signings and fan mail, but the reality is routine, writer's block, rejection, followed by years of grind and promotion, if you're lucky enough to even get that far. Designing furniture is another one.
Sure, sounds sexy, it sounds glamorous. There's a reason every romantic interest in Hallmark movies does that, has that career.
But it involves a ton of physical labor. You've gotta coordinate logistics.
You've gotta deal with difficult clients. You've gotta source materials.
In other words, everything that isn't the sexy, fun phase of sketching something in a cafe in your little book and making it a reality. Every job has the 15% maybe of glamour or excitement or fulfillment.
The other 85% is usually pretty routine and banal and sometimes quite taxing. Project management, admin, grinding, stumbling in the dark, dealing with fear and rejection, whatever it is.
So when you're assessing a new opportunity, your job is to pierce through the fantasy or the exterior or the sales pitch and find out what it is really like. This is part of your due diligence and your homework, not just if you're choosing something, a creative thing on your own.
Also, when you were getting a job or getting into a career, there's a kind of a little bit of a, it's a joke, but not really, that most people who went to law school really should have just been a summer intern at a local law firm and they never would have gone to law school. Because most of us, we had no idea what a day-to-day for an attorney looked like.
And the people that did, most of them chose not to go to law school because they were like, oh, this is pretty ugly and heinous. Another way to get insight is to informally interview people at whatever job or in that field, make it safe for them to tell you the truth, as well as doing your own homework, reading about the reality of the situation.
And if you can't do that, you can at least remind yourself that it will not be all high fives and rah-rah and creative satisfaction 24-7, because no job, not even hobbies, are that. All right, Gabe, what is the first thing out of the mailbag? Hey, Jordan and Gabe.
Years ago, I was hired to be fresh blood for a brokerage firm branch office that had not exactly evolved with the 21st century. It was predominantly run by men, and the assistants were exclusively women in their late 50s to 60s.
One of my coworkers was a woman we'll call Dolores, the self-appointed office manager. Self-appointed.
Dolores, great choice. 10 out of 10 on the name.
I'm already getting a picture of who this person is. She was a mob wife type in her 60s, had had four molars removed, and loved hot dogs.
Okay. And her only social life was her grandchildren and an online word game where she'd often meet men to date.
Wow, what a description. I'm picturing Carmela Soprano with a bottle of Heinz in her desk drawer and like a Wordle subscription.
Yeah, so instead of a bottle of whiskey, she just busts out her favorite of the 57 flavors for her hot dog, her daily hot dog. What a character.
That's my backup relish. She divulged all of this information to me within the first seven minutes of meeting her.
Okay. Well, okay.
Interesting data point there already. When people open up way too quickly, look, there's nothing wrong with appropriate vulnerability, of course.
But when you tell the new person at the office, yeah, so I meet men through words with friends and also I don't have any molars. That's a little weird.
I'm sorry. What did you just say? Did you just say molars? Yeah.
Molars? Yeah. Molars.
Molars, dude. I've never heard anyone say molars before.
What are you talking? Is this a Michigan thing? Maybe. Now I feel self-conscious about it.
Oh, I love this moment. What a love.
This is great. Oh, how the tables have the molars have been pulled.
Okay. Why don't you solder that into your memory? I just did.
And you didn't even have to tell me. And by the way, speaking of soldering, I got a very lovely message from our editor, Jace, telling me that I did not pronounce it wrong in England.
They say soldering. So fine.
Well, when we start doing the show in England, you'll be right. But until then you're wrong.
You're still wrong. Frantically books digital nomad visa for the UK.
Anyway, I feel like nine times out of 10, these are rapid oversharers. They're just, they're a little nuts, these people.
Yeah. As opposed to the two podcasters who spend eight minutes dissecting how to say the word molar.
Molar. At first, Dolores was my pal and was set up as my mentor.
Oh God, or is it mentor? I'm going to go with mentor. No, I'm in my head about it.
You know what? Just let it. Mentor.
However you want. Let's pretend that didn't happen.
Once I learned the ropes though, I didn't need her as much or at all. In her view, my excelling was a slap to the face.
Well, there you go. Insta besties, insta enemies.
A tale as old as time. I knew I sealed my fate when I caught a clerical error on some of her paperwork, which would have had huge financial repercussions.
When I brought it to her attention, she took ititivity and paranoia. Red flag number two.
Yep. Maybe typical for a mob boy from the 1960s, but you know what's weird? She brought it to her.
She didn't go to the boss and was like, Dolores messed this up. Good point.
She brought it to her attention where no one else had to know, and she still wasn't smart or her EQ was still so low, she thought, oh, she must be out to get my job. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
How insecure do you have to be to take somebody doing you a favor as a threat? Exactly. I distanced myself from Dolores and kept it as professional as I could in an extremely small, gossipy office.
She would speak poorly about me to the other assistants, attempt to blacklist me from the more important projects, and was all around unpleasant. I let my management team know, and they basically told me Dolores would be retiring soon and asked if I could just deal with it until she left.
Besides, everyone already knew what she said about me wasn't true. I mean, I kinda get it, but also way to dodge a necessary conversation.
Cool management, bro. Just wait it out.
She's gonna be gone soon. Then, one week, Dolores seemed to turn over a new leaf.
She was friendly, conversational, and even chummy towards me. She then quickly gushed to me about a man she met through the apps.
Yeah, Okay. Speaking of tales old as time, but which apps, dating apps or like Scrabble Go? Why do you care? That's so funny.
I don't know. I'm hoping that's a real game.
For some reason, I want to know if she met a guy on Bumble or on some New York Times brain teaser. Literally doesn't matter at all.
Carry on. No, it doesn't, but that is a good...
I don't know if she plays the New York Times brain teasers. It might be more like Candy Crush with like a side of vocab.
Yeah. He was an architect in his 60s, successful and extremely good looking.
Like, way too good looking. The disparity between Dolores and her new dude was immense.
When she told me he had a British accent, all my alarm bells went off. Yeah, We've seen this movie before.
Jeez. She was feeling herself though.
She started wearing makeup, taking care of herself and even wearing little kitten heels all in anticipation. Jordan, you wear those when we were here, didn't you? Kitten heels.
I was going to ask you what those actually are. I think that's those low heels on the shoot.
It's not like a spike heel, but it's kind of like a cute, I don't actually know, but I think it's too late now. You can't pretend you don't know now.
It's definitely not a heel where they just stick a sticker of a kitten on it that I know for sure. Women's kitten heels, Google image search.
Oh, they have the tiny little, little spike in the back, but you're right. It's lower.
It's not like a low one, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

All in anticipation of her new beau coming back from Greece once his mega hotel construction

project wrapped.

Oh, God.

Oh, man.

I knew I couldn't say anything because she'd think I just didn't want her to be happy or

that she couldn't land a hot guy.

So instead, I'd ask open-ended questions, hoping she would connect the dots. Nice.
Well done. That's a tricky dance right there, especially when the person doesn't like you, doesn't trust you, and doesn't want to hear what you have to say.
Well, the dots never connected, and the catfish scam took off from there. Still feeling sorry and nervous for this woman, I finally expressed my concerns to a male co-worker.
When I asked him to be frank with Dolores, he told me, as long as she isn't sending the guy money, let her have her fantasy. Well, the fantasy ended when the week this British supermodel turned architect hotel mogul was going to fly to the States, he ended up in the hospital.
A nurse reached out to inform Dolores that she was this guy's power of attorney. Yeah, because that's how nurses, that nurses are also power of attorney in hospitals.
And they needed a wire of $23,000 in order to perform life-saving surgery. Okay.
So I think you might be a little confused. Dolores, the nurse reached out not to say, hi, I'm a nurse and I'm this guy's power of attorney.
She reached out to be like, hey, Dolores, this stranger that you've never met and talked to once on the phone, you're his power of attorney. Makes more sense.
And also, he needs $23,000, which you don't need a power of attorney. Like, none of it makes any sense.
It's just all stupid. That's hilarious.
I don't know why I assumed that the nurse was his power of attorney, but yeah, this makes even less sense. It's just a cheesy romance scam that you really have to have three neurons maximum to fall for.
At that point, she couldn't lie to herself any longer and admitted to everyone, including herself, that the jig was up. That's actually faster than I would have thought.
Good for her. I'm glad she didn't get scammed, even if she is the office busybody.
She confessed she knew it was a scam, but she just wanted to feel important and loved. Ooh, that's pathetic, but yeah.
I had an empathy towards Dolores that didn't exist before. It had to be hard being alone.
And all any of us really want is to feel loved. Well, fair point.
And it's really nice that you could have that empathy for her. But yeah, this is exactly the vulnerability that these scammers exploit.
And it is so sad. Although how somebody can know it's a scam and keep it up just because they want to feel loved is very weird to me because then you're playing a lot.
You're basically scamming yourself. That happens a lot with these scams.
That's also what she's saying, right? But who knows if she really knew it was a scam. Maybe she just said that to save face because when she realized it, she realized it was so late that she should have realized it earlier.
Yeah. Like, I'm not that dumb.
I'm just lonely. And I write company, which is, I don't know.
Maybe that's better. I don't, I don't know.
I don't know. Hard to say.
I'm happy to say she never sent the money. Although I feel like she must've sent him something along the way because this guy was around for months and I'm not sure how many love scammers are in it for the long game.
Well, you'd be surprised. It is hard to say, but you're probably right.
Scammers don't like to hang around if they're not getting anywhere. It seems like before asking for $23,000, they would have tested the waters with $500 or something like that.
So they look for easy targets. And when those targets dry up, they just move on.
Unfortunately, Dolores became almost intolerable after all this. She went back to hating me.
And my only respite was when COVID hit and our office shut down. When she heard I had landed a promotion within the company, she only said, that's good.
You weren't happy here. Gee, wonder why? Signed, cringing at the scavenger bachelor who went after my petty office manager.
And because her judgment wasn't spectacular, with debt, he tried to saddle her, even though I tried to cross-examine her. Wow.
Poor Dolores, huh? What a piece of work. You know, potential plot twist, that male coworker's like, you're asking too many questions.
I'm messaging her on this app to keep her from driving all of us crazy. And you want me to warn her? Yeah.
Why are you complaining, dude? She's being nice now. Why are you complaining? Yeah, exactly.
You know what this person could have slash should have done has been like, this is a scam. My next steps are clear.
Go on Google Images and find another handsome person. Start talking to Dolores by using words with friends or whatever,

just so every day isn't a bloody nightmare in the office.

Imagine catfishing somebody not to get money out of them,

but just to make them tolerable in the kitchenette.

What a sort of unrewarding scam that is.

What is your angle?

I really just wanted to go one day without you belittling me for absolutely no reason. So that's why I'm sending you pictures from a dude who's an underwear model.
It's interesting. We've talked about how to support people who are the victims of scams, especially romance scams, but that gets a lot more complicated when there are people at your office and they have some sort of power over you or in the place where you work.
It can be hard to intervene when bruising someone's ego might actually create blowback for you. And when you're not super close with them and you don't feel a lot of loyalty toward them, but then you feel bad for them because you're a decent person, that is a, that's a hard spot to be in.
Your approach was absolutely the right one though. Ask a lot of questions, plant the seeds for them to realize what's happening, give them some room to figure it out.
I think you handled it well. The other thing that jumps out at me about this story

is that people who are mean to you at work

are almost always just miserable in their personal lives.

Of course.

Of course.

No one who's happy even bothers

to make someone else's life hell at work.

Why would you go through the trouble?

Or why would you view everyone as competition

when they're actually trying to save you?

Yeah, that too.

Dolores just sounds so insecure,

as we talked about, on top of being unhappy. And I have to think that that also played into her susceptibility to a scam like this.
For sure. Yeah.
Why else would you fall for something like this? She literally said, I just want to feel important and loved, which is pathetic. That's so sad.
And sad. To your point, Gabe, that's a strange thing to admit to someone, because if you're self-aware enough to know that you fell victim to a scam because you just wanted to feel important and loved, wouldn't you then want to figure out, you know, why you wanted to feel important and loved to the point of blindness? Well, there's no iPhone app for that, Jordan.
You know, that's going to take actual work. I mean, there is an app.
It's called BetterHelp, but maybe I'm overestimating Dolores here. This is a great co-worker story.
Poor, confused, thirsty Dolores. Carmela Soprano with a hole in her heart and an addiction to crossword puzzles.
A hole in her heart and apparently four in her head too. The hole in her heart though, that's six across.
Yeah, that's a 28-toothed woman in a 32-toothed world. Poor thing.
I hope she's doing okay wherever she is. She's probably sitting near a hot dog cart by a children's park.
Or like in the chair in a Chilean back alley dentist's office. One of those two places.
It's one of those two places for sure, yeah. But seriously, this is a good reminder that everyone's going through something.
And while you never have to put up with cruel treatment, it does help to remember that it's rarely about you. More importantly, I hope you're doing well.
Sounds like you moved on and up and are living a Dolores free life,

which is something worth celebrating.

You know what costs less than $23,000

and will actually make you happy?

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All right, back to Feedback Friday.

Okay, what's next?

Hey guys, I worked as a chef

after I graduated from high school.

I went from being a dishwasher

to assistant kitchen manager inside of a year,

and six months after that,

I became the head kitchen manager.

Wow, impressive, nicely done.

After a year of running the place,

I was hired at another restaurant.

The chef there took me on and everything was great.

Have a good job if he was already trusting me with these extra things. Also, after running a previous kitchen and seeing how much more business we were doing, I expected the tips to be quite a bit more significant.
The chef handled all of the tips, dividing them among the other cooks as he deemed adequate for the shifts and hours worked, which was pretty standard practice. Oh boy, I see where this is going.
But there were a few times when another cook and I, at the same level, with the same experience, shifts, and hours,

got different tips. One time I got $50 more than him, another time he got $100 more than me.

I confronted our chef about this one day and he said, oh, I'm sorry, I must have miscounted. Won't happen again.
He then pulled out a decent sized wad of cash from his pocket and made up the $100 difference. That isn't shady whatsoever.
Cool accounting bro. Just busts out a rack and peels off a couple Benji's like, yeah, this should fix it.
Hey, don't spend it all in one place. Could this guy be any less subtle about what's going on here? Come on.
At that point, I knew something was up. I was speaking with one of the cash girls in the office a few days later and noticed that the one table where he always counted the money was also the only table in the restaurant that none of the security cameras could see.
I brought it up with the general manager, but he said that he controlled the front of house business and the chef controlled the back of house. So he couldn't really do anything about it.
Yeah, pretty sure that's not true. The manager is probably getting a taste of all this.
It's so corrupt. A few months later, other co-workers started noticing the chef parked in the parking lot really early in the morning and allegedly saw sex workers getting out of his car, then saw him stumbling in looking disheveled and hungover.
It later came out that he was addicted to cocaine, gambling, and hookers. Ah yes, the holy trifecta.
All paid for by the hard-earned tips he was stealing from you guys, right? What a mess. In the end, I decided to leave.
I didn't want to work in that environment anymore. A couple months after I left, one of my old co-workers called me one morning to tell me that the chef had been caught stealing $10,000 from the safe upstairs in the office, and he had been arrested and taken to jail.
Wow. So he must have been in way over his head, man.
Probably owed money to some loan sharks or some underground casinos or something like that. Meanwhile, he's putting garnishes on people's tilapia every night.
That's actually kind of terrifying. No one ever heard from him again.
Ooh. So he might've skipped town.
Maybe, or maybe sleeping with the fishes. I'm loving this like late nineties Italian.
This is great. Yeah.
This is all I got. You know, I was kind of bummed.
My last ad pivot wasn't as funny. So I feel like I'm trying too hard now to make up for it.
It's not, I don't know if it's working. The following month when the new chef took over, everyone's tips in the kitchen went from an average of $200 every two weeks to around 600 to $800 every two weeks.
Oh my gosh. We were one of the busiest restaurants in the chain.
My suspicions were right. He was skimming thousands of dollars off of every cook's tips to feed his drug and gambling habits.
We had around 50 to 65 cooks working full and part-time, so the amount of cash this guy was taking was huge. We also found out that his salary from the restaurant was upwards of $120,000 a year, not including the several hundred dollars a month in food and booze that he was allowed to have.
Signed, knew something was fishy when our restaurant was so busy, and after seeing stuff that wasn't pretty, I got out of there in a jiffy, which meant that, sadly, I wasn't privy to him doing a little sniffy sniffy, but that doesn't mean I wasn't itching to find out if he really was iffy. Oh, okay.
So this is going to be a Gabe going ham in the sign-offs kind of week? Is that what's going on? I feel like I need to match the energy of the letters today. That's what's happening.
I feel that. You're getting upstaged by these absolute maniac bosses, and you've got to keep up.
And like Dolores, I'm feeling very insecure about it. That's right.
That's what that is. Man, what a grift, I am now I'm sure the general manager was getting a cut of that.
How else could he look the other way? This is wild. I'm also curious which restaurant has 65 chefs and cooks.
Dude, they were working at like Houston's or something. One of those big chains, I think.
That's must be what it is. It's gotta be.
That's I'm trying to even imagine how many people can work at once. I mean, it's just must be a massive kitchen.
It's a big operation. The only thing I can really say about this story is good on you for confronting this guy when something was off.
That takes some cojones and was absolutely appropriate. Of course, it didn't fix the issue.
It just made things somewhat right for you and your colleague that week, but kudos to you. The fact that the GM didn't do anything about it, even if there were a world where it wasn't under his control, I think that's unconscionable.
If I were in your shoes, I would have kicked it up to the owner. Because you know that person would have been pissed to find out the chef was almost certainly stealing from his staff and that the GM refused to do anything about it.
And as it turned out, he was stealing from the restaurant too. So I can't imagine the owner not taking action if they got wind of this.
Oh, for sure. What I'm taking away from the story, is how much damage an addiction like this can do.
We've taken so many stories over the years about people who have hurt their families, their friends, their peers, their employers because of their addiction. You remember during that really moving story we took a couple of years back from the guy, such a sweet guy, really a gem of a human being.
And he stole from his own parents when he worked for their company, when he was in his addiction. Yes.
So heartbreaking. This chef was obviously a criminal, not a good boss, but he also was out of control.
And to your point, Jordan, he was probably scared and desperate, or maybe he was just feeding his addiction and this was the only way he knew how, but either way, stealing seemed like the only option possibly to stay alive. I don't know, it freaks me out.

It's just a good reminder that when you do not address an addiction,

it can ruin your life and it can hurt a lot of people,

including really good people like our friend here, along the way.

Of course, the stakes are incredibly high.

Everyone pays some kind of price for being around an addict,

which is why so many people have to pull back, draw hard boundaries,

because it can be too chaotic and painful to have a lot of contact with somebody like this. This is a wild story, man.
I do wonder what happened to this guy. If he's buried in the woods outside Schenectady or whatever, or if he's hiding out Walter White-style flipping burgers in New Hampshire.
Who knows? What a world, man. I mean, he went to jail and no one ever heard from him again.
That's a little bizarre. You can reach us Friday at jordanharbinger.com.
Keep your emails concise. Try to use a descriptive subject line that makes our job a whole lot easier.
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Okay, what's next? Hi, Jordan and Gabe. I'm a department manager at a supermarket, and back in the day, I had a janitor who worked under me at night.
He was in his 60s and had a Homer Simpson build. One weekend, he called me because the compressor for the freezers was down.
I came in, and to my surprise, he was pushing the floor scrubber around in just his underwear and nothing else. That's a great image.
Peter Griffin buffing the linoleum floors at Albertsons. Needless to say, I told him to put some clothes on.
Well, sure. You can't buff in the buff.
What you doing, pal? No, you cannot. Pretty sure that's 12 different health code violations in the supermarket as well, especially if you are anywhere near the deli section.
That is not okay. His only answer was, it gets hot in here, though.
Amazing. So this guy was like, it's toasting here.
I'm just going to strip down to my fruit of the looms. I got to be comfortable.
Another time, the same janitor out of nowhere told me, cocaine isn't as bad for you as people say. It's a bit like coffee.
So maybe that had something to do with him stripping when nobody was in the store. I mean, it does tend to get hot when you're absolutely blasted on cocaine.
From what I've been told, even if you're standing inches away from a stack of frozen Stover's lasagna. What a weird place to have the cocaine sweats.
I love that he uses the Sigmund Freud defense. Hey, cocaine's not so bad.
It's basically just espresso you put in your nose. I mean, some people do say that, but I don't know anyone who robbed the safe at their work because they were addicted to macchiatos.
Yeah, the chef from the last question wouldn't be skimming tips if he was addicted to flat whites. So he goes on, thankfully, he no longer works for my store, but that doesn't change how bizarre a situation it was.

No, no, it does not.

Signed, a boss who contemplated sick leave

after walking in on a guy in his skivvies.

I mean, what can I add to the story?

Just a chef's kiss of a visual.

Yeah.

That's right.

The only thing that would make this better

is if the janitor was singing when our friend walked in.

Like, Risky Business.

Remember that scene?

Oh, yeah, just lip-syncing Bob Seger

by the Butterball Turkeys. That would be nice.
Exactly. Backlit by those heat lamps on the roasted chickens.
I wish I had half this janitor's confidence, dude. My life would be very different.
This guy's insane. You know how you can get it? Tell me.
Cocaine. Oh, there you go.
It's a little bit like coffee. I mean, it's basically the same thing.
That's what I need. I need a raise, Jordan.
You need a raise. I'm going to start stealing from your sponsors.
That's right. Sometimes I agonize over which button down shirt to wear on camera.
And then there's this guy doing manual labor in his tighty whities after calling his boss to come to the store. That's the funniest part.
Knowing he's going to walk in. Knowing that his boss would find him in his...
Right. Why? I don't...
The balls on this guy. That's a level of DGAF that I personally aspire to.

Wow.

Yeah, you're right.

The yayo helps.

I think so.

I think it does.

I think that might be the secret to his success.

All right, next up.

Hello, Jordan and Gabe.

Years ago, I worked for an Ohio newspaper covering the legal system.

The boss was a psycho who had an affair with one of the reporters and management did not care.

In one of my stories, I wrote about a secretary who testified that she found banking records in someone's desk that she thought were fraudulent. My editor changed it to say that she found wads of cash in a filing cabinet.
I was the only reporter in town who covered this story, so my boss pulled this straight out of his ass. I called him out on this at a staff meeting, which really embarrassed him and put a target on my back a mile wide.
I wonder why he did that. Was he just sensationalizing the story? It's a weird choice.
Sounds like it, or maybe, I mean, it was bad enough, but maybe he had it out for this company. He wanted the story to sound worse.
I don't know. Either way, and I'm sorry to keep repeating myself, but yeah, cool journalism, bro.
Just make stuff up. Wildly unethical.
This is a proper newspaper. This isn't some kind of like tabloidy blog being run from Kuala Lumpur with like zero oversight, where you can just say whatever with impunity.
This is not good. So he goes on.
Days later, he accused me of missing an important judicial ruling that happened on my day off. When I pointed out that I wasn't working on the day that opinion was issued and someone else was filling in for me at the courthouse, he said that was quote unquote, no excuse.
He said I should have written about the judge's ruling before it was even issued. As a former lawyer, Jordan, you would understand that no one has access to court rulings until they are released by the clerk's office.
No. Yeah, I got it.
I might've been an average lawyer, but I do know that courthouses don't give sneak peeks, especially to journalists. So this guy is a total loon.
Cool understanding of how time works, bro, I guess. Yes.
So he goes on. Exactly.
I tried explaining this to my boss, but he said that was no excuse and wouldn't listen. He claimed that they had covered judicial opinions before they were issued in the past, but couldn't offer a single example to back up this claim.
After that, he told me to cover two trials at the same time and not miss a word of testimony in either one. I pointed out that I couldn't be in two places at the same time, and he said, that's no excuse.
Fortunately, one of the other reporters volunteered to cover one of the trials for me. I love this no excuse thing.
I want you to cover two different trials. One's in Ohio, one's in Kentucky.
Okay, but I can't bend space time to make that happen. That's no excuse.
No excuse. Yeah.
Astral project yourself into the courtroom or you're not a real reporter. Exactly.
What are you, you're supposed to doctor strange this shit or you're fired? This guy's, yeah, he's literally nuts.

Okay, so then what happened?

The reporters hated this guy so much that we had an hours-long staff meeting to try and sort things out.

This meeting caused me to miss several hours of an important trial I was covering.

I explained this to the boss beforehand, and he said he wouldn't blame me for missing some of the testimony because the staff meeting was mandatory.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

So when you're missing a trial because you guys have to discuss how insane he is, he's fine with that. But when you miss it because you can't defy the laws of physics, you're bad at your job.
You're fired. Yeah.
Two days later, he chewed me out for missing a key part of the trial. I told him that missing part of the trial was his idea, that he said he wouldn't blame me for it.
He responded by storming out of the room. One day, he called me into a meeting and noted that two weeks before, I had written a story about a years-long legal case that was finally coming to a close, but I didn't write a follow-up story about how the case ended.
I told him that I hadn't written about the final results because the case hadn't closed yet. We were still waiting for the final ruling from the judge.
Oh, God. The editor replied, oh, I didn't know that.
Well, you're fired anyway. Years later, this guy held a high-profile job in politics and government, but he had to resign under a cloud of ethical violations and trying to cover up a sexual harassment scandal.
Of course he did. Wow.
He's now teaching somewhere. Yeah.
And now he's pulling the same BS with fifth graders. Oh yeah, for sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey Billy, where's that book report you owe me? Um, you haven't assigned it yet? No excuses.
Signed an erstwhile hack who took a ton of flack from a guy who was whack and finally had to clap back when he went on the attack because I just couldn't crack a way to report back from two incompatible tracks. Man, Gabe, this one scares me because this guy sounds legitimately unhinged.
It's one thing when your boss is a dick or out of control or he's wrestling with an addiction, but when your boss lives in a completely different reality, that's a little terrifying. No, you can't reason with somebody like this.
They should have fired this guy as soon as they found out he made up a detail in a story and possibly when he was having an affair with somebody on staff, although maybe that's a gray area. But the making of facts in a story in a newspaper, that is unconscionable as an editor.
They fire people for that in this profession. They should anyway.
Yeah, for sure. Someone was asleep at the wheel or he was being protected by somebody higher up.
Another interesting theme I'm hearing on today's episode, bosses looking the other way when it comes to bad behavior. It's not okay.
Either that or maybe it's slim pickings when it comes to finding an editor for a local newspaper. I know small newspapers are really struggling to stay alive these days, but I got to think they could do better.
Maybe, but he did say this was years ago, so they have even less of an excuse. Plus,

they were big enough to cover trials. This wasn't like, you know,

new community garden opening in Pleasantville. This sounds like a fairly legit operation.

I'm just remembering that the last time we did a Bad Bosses episode,

we took a letter from another reporter at a local newspaper who was harassed by her alcoholic boss. Do you remember that?

Yeah. Was this Teabags and the Coffee Guy? Teabags and the Coffee Guy.
Hate to see you leave, but I love to watch you go. Hey, that guy.
That's the one. And there's that accent again.
Yeah. That guy was being protected by the publisher of the paper.
So I wonder if the same thing was happening here. And by the way, we should have said this.
Our last Bad Bosses story, if you guys haven't heard it, it was really fun. It was episode 998, if you want to check it out.
It could be that he's being protected. So man, local newspapers, they got to be hotbeds for dysfunction.
Apparently. I wonder if other listeners have experience with that.
I'm curious to know. You do hear about crazy older industries like print publishing.
They're just full of weird folks. Dinosaurs and regressive policies and strange people.
Yeah, maybe. Yes.
Yeah. I don't know why, but they seem to be that way.
It's like the movie. Did you see the movie Zodiac? No.
It's about the Zodiac killer. It's about the guy who cracked the case or mostly cracked the case.
And they all work at the Sacramento Bee, which back then, I think the Sacramento Bee was probably a very legit paper. It probably still is pretty legit, but those local newspapers, yeah, they collect interesting personalities.
Maybe this guy was part of that. Came with the furniture.
Yeah, came with the furniture. Great way to phrase it.
Anyway, my takeaway from this story is when your boss isn't just difficult, but literally nuts, there's no reasoning with them. You got to either let every terrible thing they do roll off your back because they're off their rocker, or you got to make management understand that a literal crazy person is at the wheel.
There's no gray area here. It's not like, oh, my boss is tough and he screams at me sometimes.
This is my boss believes I can physically be in two places at the same time, that I can bend the rules of space time. He's out of his tree.
Do something about it. And if management won't, then you bounce because you're never going to get any backing.
If this won't cause them to take your side, then nothing will. Or you stage a coup with the other reporters or something because you can't work under a straight up crazy person.
You just can't do it. All right.
Now it's time for recommendation of the week. So my recommendation of the week is Gmail keyboard shortcuts.
Do you use these, Gabriel? I feel like. Oh, yeah.
Huge part of my life. Game changer.
So I didn't really know that these existed until a couple of years ago. And every person I show them to, they just go gaga for this because it's something you kind of think like, oh, maybe it exists or you forget that it exists or you didn't have any idea in the first place.
They save you a ton of time. You'd be shocked at how much faster it is than clicking around to the next thing and clicking the buttons.
Just these keyboard shortcuts, you can process hundreds of emails in a short period of time. Look, think about it this way.
You can respond to your insane boss's demands even faster. Do you have a favorite one, a favorite shortcut? Jeez, I've got a few.
I mean, I use a special client for Gmail called Superhuman. So that has even more keyboard shortcuts, but I know that everybody has Gmail.
So I think my favorites are the ones that remind you if somebody doesn't answer your email within a certain period of time. Oh, nice.
That's a good one. Yeah.
Yeah. My favorite is R is reply, A is reply all and shift pound is delete.
And you can just blast through email like that in no time. I remember, and I have to be focused to do this, doing the click method, just the normal method.
I think it took me all morning to get through about a hundred emails, you know, maybe four hours. I got through a hundred emails in one hour using keyboard shortcuts.
So it's something like three to 400% faster. So cool.
And I know people are like, oh, I got to memorize all this stuff. It takes a few minutes.
You know, the first half an hour, it's a little slow. And then for the rest of your life using email, it's lightning fast.
It just becomes muscle memory at that point. It's great.
Exactly. Also, in case y'all didn't know, there's a subreddit for our show.
If you want to jump into discussions with other listeners about specific episodes, episodes you like, episodes you don't like, or if you want to share additional thoughts, learn more from other people in the show, fam, come check it out. A lot of cool conversations happening over there on Reddit in the Jordan Harbinger subreddit.
Okay, what's next? Hi, Jordan and Gabe. In my career, I've encountered various leaders, but none as paradoxically brilliant, yet destructive, as my former boss, Helga.
She possessed an intellect that overshadowed everyone around her, and her confidence in her superior knowledge was palpable. But Helga failed to realize that brilliance loses its luster when it diminishes others rather than uplifting them.
Well said. Helga managed a team of managers, including me.
My partner and I supervised a vibrant team of 15 bright and energetic people. But despite our expertise, Helga incessantly critiqued our work, demanding constant redos without clear justification.
Her explanations, which were steeped in esoteric jargon, often left us more perplexed than enlightened. Even my attempts at clarification were met with responses that only spiraled into deeper confusion.
Something I've learned over the years, when people are super vague or they use a ton of buzzwords, and then when you ask them to clarify, they just leave you even more confused, they're almost always, not always, but almost always, just full of shit. They're usually confused themselves, or they're afraid of committing to a plan or a point of view, so they just deliberately obfuscate things.
Totally. Nine times out of ten, I think the emperor has no clothes.
Or they're just trying to create confusion for some other reason. So he goes on, The tension peaked during stress-induced shaming sessions that Helga would call before the crack of dawn.
These gatherings were ostensibly for feedback, but they felt more like verbal beatdowns, where she lamented our inability to grasp her vision, which she believed others were too inept to understand. Ugh, so unpleasant.
Starting to get strong narcissist vibes from Helga as well. A particularly searing memory was when, after organizing a successful planning session with our team and partners at a local university, I returned to Helga to report our progress.
She had been invited to join the session but declined, saying she was too busy, although her peers from other departments participated. Initially, she seemed pleased as I began outlining the plan we had developed, but her demeanor darkened as I continued.
She interrupted to denounce the entire strategy, claiming it had strayed too far from her quote-unquote perfect plan. The perfect plan that she was too busy to show up to, defend, or present in the first place? That perfect plan? The next morning, she dismantled our efforts and insisted we persuade our team to adopt her overnight revisions as their own, a directive that felt both unethical and demoralizing.
Yeah, so underneath the bluster and the narcissism is a ton of insecurity, as per usual.

Yeah, once again, always the case, isn't it?

Yep, always.

Just appreciating how that theme shows up again and again.

Insecurity, it's not just a weakness, it's a real vulnerability.

Whether you're threatened by other people's good ideas, you're falling for a romance scam

on Wordle, and it can create a ton of dysfunction in the workplace. Even when we achieved great results, Helga never acknowledged our successes.
She always found a way to critique our efforts, always ensuring we knew she could do our jobs better. Ugh, Kim Jong Helga over here.
I can't with this lady. Yeah, I'm over people like this.
What good is your intelligence if you're going to use it this way? Eventually, my peer and I, driven to the brink, approached Helga's boss, Chad, to express our concerns. We explained that while we were eager and committed to our roles, Helga's constant replanning and her tendency to sabotage our relationships were hindering our progress.
Chad listened, but frustratingly, nothing seemed to change. It was only years later that we learned that Helga's conduct was well known and there were ongoing efforts to terminate her employment, but she had cleverly initiated lengthy investigation processes that delayed her termination, prolonging our team's suffering.
Wow. So she knew how to work all the angles and apparently had no shame in doing it.
You know what? That's what scares me about these people, man. The true narcissists, the people who are like low-key sociopathic, they're not constrained by the same embarrassment that keeps normal people in check, you know?

You see that all the time in online videos, right? Where people are just doing things in public where you go, how do you—

What's wrong with your brain?

What is wrong with you? These people, they don't fold the way a normal personality does. And then you've got to work for them for another six months or a year before the company can fire them because they're so batshit crazy.
They don't care if the whole company knows they're the literal worst. It's wild.
This experience solidified my decision to seek new opportunities and leave the stifling atmosphere Helga created. Fortunately, a business restructuring in 2020 allowed me to transfer to a different department under a leader who truly inspired and challenged me.
Under her mentorship, I've thrived, ascending through various roles over four years. Man, I'm so happy to hear that.
Incredible what a good boss can do for a person. And on the other side, Gabriel, look how one toxic boss can get rid of essentially a whole department of talented people.
No one wants to work with them. It's like having a cancerous cell.
Reflecting on all this, I recognize that Helga taught me invaluable lessons on how not to lead. Despite the hardship, I emerged with a clearer vision of the leader I aspire to be, one who supports, challenges, and respects their team, leveraging intelligence as a tool for collective upliftment, not personal aggrandizement.
100%. Beautifully put.
Yeah, I love that that's what you took away from this experience. You are exactly the kind of person who should be a leader, in my opinion.
So he wraps up, hope you've never worked for a Helga. Well, I work with a Jordan, so that's a close second.
Yeah, Gelga. Most people don't realize this show is good because I hold daily shaming sessions at 4.45 a.m.
where I chew out Gabriel and the rest of the team for not grasping my vision. Which I'm too inept to understand anyway.
Exactly. Doesn't stop me from cutting you down, though, does it? Does it, Gabe? No, can confirm.
You don't get this level of quality without making your co-hosts suffer on a daily basis. The Gelga management method.
I live by it. It works.
Signed, still appreciating the amazing delta between my new boss and Helga. Well, once again, I don't have much to add here.
I mean, I did all the talking during the letter. I think our friend here put it brilliantly.
It's a real Helga move. That's right.
Such a Helga move. You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you don't know how to inspire people, how to support them, how to be open to other ideas that you'd never come up with, what good is that intelligence? If you're too insecure to let other people thrive, what is the point of being a leader? In my view, a hallmark of a good leader is not believing they're the only one who has the best ideas or that they need to control every aspect of their department.
Yeah, or that the whole point of their leadership is just their own enhancement and promotion. Exactly.
Yeah, my other takeaway from the story is when a leader doesn't make things clearer,

when they actively make things harder

or more confusing or more complicated than they need to be,

that is just a huge red flag.

Good leaders, they don't add obstacles.

They remove obstacles

and they don't leave their subordinates

confused or disempowered.

They arm them with the information and responsibility

they need to get things done.

So any leader who helges stuff

is just not a leader in my view.

Thank you. or disempowered, they arm them with the information and responsibility they need to get things done.
So any leader who Helga's stuff is just not a leader, in my view. And you either got to act despite them or give them some direct feedback so that they can get better or take it up with their superior or look for another job.
And sadly, looking for another job is often the only way to escape these kinds of people. Especially if they have political capital in the company or like Helga, they've somehow engineered things to protect themselves.
Then it's really hard to affect change. My big takeaway from all this, the one constant upside to having a terrible boss, you are learning firsthand what not to do when you're in a position to manage people.
It's great. Yes, it's always the silver lining to these situations.
It's hard to know how leadership impacts people until you've been one of the people impacted. Totally agree.
But I will say it takes a certain kind of person to look at it that way. Yeah, I think you're right.
Some people work under a Helga. They just get angry.
They get demoralized or they're indifferent or whatever. And some people go, OK, I got to do things differently.
I got to be the anti-Helga. Right.
I want to learn from this person. Learning from people who suck is kind of a superpower.
It does, yeah. So I applaud our friend here for doing that.
Like I said, he sounds awesome. I'm sure wherever he is now, he's crushing it and he's making a lot of people do their best work.
So kudos to you and well done on moving on and handling all of this in the right spirit. And now some brilliant ad copy crafted by yours truly that I couldn't possibly outsource because nobody else here is smart enough to grasp my vision.
We'll be right back. If you liked this episode of Feedback Friday and you found our advice valuable, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.
All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Our AI chatbot can also surface codes for you, jordanharbinger.com slash AI.
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Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. All right, back to Feedback Friday.
Okay, next up. Hi, Jordan and Gabe.
I worked as a therapist in an addiction treatment center that was run on nepotism and ridden with sexism and stunning racism. The owner was CEO and his son-in-law was COO.
The CEO was in recovery, started this company, and was heavily involved in the recovery community. The COO was handling operations, which basically meant handling finances.
The COO definitely showed signs of narcissistic personality disorder and was slightly paranoid. My first week, he said that he liked an open workplace and wanted me to be able to come to him for anything.
What ensued was a lot of gaslighting, manipulation, and inappropriate comments. He would do weird things like touch the back of my co-worker's leg with a cold water bottle, turn my other co-worker's necklace around without asking,

and tell people that he wouldn't care if his wife went on a date with another guy.

Okay. That sounds a lot like the workplace from question one, to be honest.
Wow.

He also made the most egregious comment to our black female admin by saying,

I could really go for some fried chicken and some chocolate milk while alone with her. Wow, that is uncomfortable.
That's not just racist. That's a cartoonishly dumb and racist.
Where did that come from? You have to be so misattuned to even think about making that joke. One day they fired another coworker on the spot without having closure with clients, which is unethical.
They found out she was looking into starting her own company and their response was, we need allies, not enemies. Man, the narcissism is strong today, Gabe.
Very strong. Narcy vibes top to bottom.
As soon as this happened, I realized my job was not safe. That is a smart thing to notice.
Way to connect those dots forward. That's hard to do.
Also, we were paid as 1099 contractors when really we should have been W-2 employees as we had required hours to be there. When I asked for a raise, I was told I needed to justify it, but I already knew I was making the least with more experience than my counterpart.
Also, we were paid with written checks. Shady.
The coworker they fired then started her own practice, and I rented office space from her to see clients on the side, which was always previously encouraged. I also got an invitation to go see a treatment center in another state.
I said I was going, and COO Sunnyboy was not okay with it, despite the company being all about networking. Ah, yes.
We're all about networking, unless you're networking within our industry after we created a toxic environment. That tracks.
As I was about to get on the plane, I got a call from my admin, and she said, he knows, he knows you're renting office space from her, and he's pissed. You need to get out.
Oh, snap. I was never so anxious in all my life.
I knew what I needed to do when I got back from this trip. I confronted him and said, I know you know about my side job and who I'm renting from.
He said that he didn't see how we could continue our working relationship when I'm working with people who are only sharing their warped side of a story and painting him as the bad guy. Again, this is like Dr.
Romany 101. Yeah, it's so cartoonishly narcissistic as well.
Yeah, silly. He then asked, do you trust me? No, I said.
Then this is you quitting. I said, this is you firing me.
Damn, strong play there. Good for you.
He would love nothing more than to be like, oh, she resigned so she doesn't get unemployment. Yeah, exactly.
He withheld my last paycheck. Of course.
I showed up to the office demanding it and he never gave it to me. I took them to small claims court and that got their attention.
I asked for $400 more than my normal pay, which was minuscule in hindsight.

Later, I started working for another small company that also had a strange culture, to say the least.

My one male co-worker there was well-respected in the field, and he and I were fairly close.

The admin from the previous company came with me to this one.

One day, a few hours after a virtual team meeting, she sent me a photo of the business's Facebook page where an outraged client had posted my co-worker's mugshot. He had been arrested that same day for soliciting prostitution.
Oh, that is so embarrassing. So embarrassing.
Ugh, on your company's Facebook page and you can't delete it, I guess. Man, he and the tip-stealing chef from question two must have been out getting

shwasted. Yeah, that's right.
These people are therapists, right? Well, it's funny you say that because she goes on to say, can't make this stuff up. The mental health field is something else.
It sure is. I guess prostitution is one of those crimes that cuts across all professions, even podcasting, or so I've heard.
Universally beloved. Even people with master's degrees can be drawn to it too, I guess.
So she wraps up, this madness was one for the books. I'm in my own private practice now and I'm thriving.
Signed, still reeling from the revealing and unappealing things these touchy-feely people were concealing when they claimed to be healing. You know, Gabe, when I hear about backstabbing at a regressive brokerage firm, or criminal behavior in a restaurant kitchen, or even nudity on the graveyard shift at a supermarket, I'm like, okay, that's wild, but I could see that.
That happens. But when you hear about therapists, people whose whole purpose is helping people, when you hear about clinicians bullying their staff and soliciting sex workers...
Yeah, it's like, what the actual f***? Yeah, it's just so hard to wrap my head around that. But maybe I'm being naive.
I know therapists are human beings too, of course. So maybe the mental health world is just as dysfunctional as any other industry.
But I guess it just shocks me. It seems like it shouldn't happen.
It shocks me as well because their training involves, or should involve anyway, a lot of introspection, self-work along the way. Like if you go through grad school to become a therapist, right?

And you find yourself, I don't know, cheating on your partner or frequenting sex workers

or railing lines during the day or whatever it is.

Yeah.

Wouldn't you want to address that?

That's what I'm saying.

Yes.

You'd think so.

But then I wonder maybe those dysfunctional behaviors are what draw a lot of people to

this field.

Like, you know how much I pay someone to just sit there and listen to me while I do lines and walk around my neighborhood? I should get into that business.

Yeah, then they just don't fix the problem. Look, that I understand.
You got to have some of it in

you in order to want to devote your life to it. But how are you going to treat a patient for an

addiction or a struggling marriage and then leave your office and go hire a sex worker or do

recreational drugs and not feel like a total hypocrite? I mean, that's Feedback Friday territory, right? That's what I can't wrap my head around. I don't know.
I can't either. It's a good question.
Also, we also don't know the whole story. We don't know if he had a true sex addiction or whether this was a pattern.
I mean, look, maybe he got busted on some weird one-off thing. Who knows? Okay.
Maybe I'm being a little unfair, but also what are the odds of that? It's your first prostitute. You get busted.
If he got busted his one and only time hiring a sex worker, that would be really bad luck. Really bad luck.
So I'm speculating, obviously, but I'm guessing that was not the only time he did that. And I look, I have very few issues with sex work as long as everybody's safe and consenting and all that stuff, which is obviously a complicated topic.
What I find problematic is the idea that a therapist who maybe slash probably has a habit of frequent frequenting sex workers is then trying to treat patients for addiction and dysfunctional behavior. Maybe I'm just a total boy scout and a square and everybody be dysfunctional AF and hiring sex workers.
I don't know though. Maybe our friend here can enlighten us.
Also, these people work in the addiction treatment world. And I am starting to wonder if that part of the mental health industry is just a touch more dysfunctional than the others.
I'm thinking about the letter we took last week from the guy who wanted to work in the recovery world. And remember, he had a clinic dangle a job opportunity in front of him so they could just keep running his insurance.
And then when they turned it down- Oh, this guy's still in our facility. Yeah, I think he thinks he's gonna get a job.
But they're like, no, no, no, we're billing Medicaid. And then they kicked him out when they couldn't make money off of him.
So is this part of that industry just kind of shady? Who knows, man? Well, Gabe, you know that my mom's brother, the one I've talked about on the show a few times, he was supposedly an addiction counselor, and he was also a lifelong heroin addict. I didn't know that.
You never told me that, really. Yeah, it's just, you know, and he was an addiction counselor, at least after getting out of prison once he became the, I don't know.
Although now that I think he was such a bullshitter, I don't think any of us know for sure that any of that was true. Okay.
So maybe total lie, but also maybe he was fully on heroin while he was coaching people. That's crazy.
A hundred percent. I'm curious if anyone listening right now knows the answer to this.
If our friend here who wrote in knows, is there more bonker stuff happening in the addiction treatment industry than in the larger mental health field? Or are we just self-selecting for crazy-ish because it's Feedback Friday? I'm genuinely curious. Anyway, my takeaway from this is even professionals who are held to higher standards can act a fool.
And when that happens, you either got to call it out or you got to get the hell out. The advantage to working in licensed professions like mental health, medicine, law, industries that have clear ethical standards, is that you can report an ethics violation and the relevant bodies will investigate.
Like this thing about firing a clinician without giving their patients closure, that's an ethics violation. I've heard that before.
It's something you could let the board of psychology or whatever it is in your state know and they should take action. It doesn't mean they'll necessarily strip the person of their license, but they should at least look into it and maybe notify the person that that's not cool.
And in fields where people's lives and mental health are in the balance, that is so important. It's so important.
Those boards are doing a crucial job in that respect. My other takeaway from the story is that being territorial with your employees never pays off.
I completely agree. The moment you as a boss are getting uneasy about your employees, I don't know, getting to know other people in the field or developing perfectly legitimate side hustles or whatever it is, that's a moment to go, okay, why am I so uneasy about this? Is this actually unethical and competitive to me or am I trying to control my staff because I'm insecure? Yep.
there's that insecurity again. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, leaders like this are playing the short game.
They're not playing the long game, right? They're thinking, I need to keep people under my thumb and make sure they never leave me because if they leave me, then I lose. Instead of going, yeah, it's possible that some of our clinicians might eventually go to other centers or they might move into private practice or go into another specialty, but then our network grows, right? If we give them freedom, if we part ways with a lot of goodwill, maybe we refer patients back and forth, or maybe we collaborate on new initiatives or we share resources.
We can all win. I just don't understand why more people don't take that view, even a little bit.
Totally. But the thing with narcissistic leaders and insecure bosses and just petty people in general, they can't play that bigger game.
They only see the world through a very narrow prism. And that prism is, what does this mean for me? How do I look out for number one? If they're even thinking that consciously about it.
Right. I think a lot of these folks are just gaping wounds of insecurity and neediness.
And every little bump in the road is a catastrophe. Every degree of freedom is a risk or a potential risk, which is why they develop these very rigid ideas like, oh, we need allies, not enemies.
When really what they're saying is anyone who wants something different from what I want is threatening to me. Bingo.
Yeah. Yeah.
And is there for the enemy and doesn't deserve our curiosity or our support. And by the way, that black and white thinking, it's also kind of a hallmark of narcissism, I think, and also of just dysfunctional personalities in general.
Look, I do get it to some degree. You obviously want to retain your employees.
You don't want turnover to be super high. You have to protect your staff.
But it seems to me that there are two ways to do that. You either go full North Korea and you try to control them.
Right. Which never works.
Which never works, which just produces the opposite response. Or you create an environment where people do have the liberty to make moves or speak up when they're unhappy or influence the organization.
And then they probably stick around much longer because, you know, the workplace is healthy and supportive and high functioning and they have a stake in it. The analogy to countries is actually kind of a good one.
It's the exact same thing, because in both cases, if you're going to control people, you need them to fear you. But the difference is, in a free market economy anyway, people can just peace out if they feel controlled and threatened.
And they will, eventually, if they have any sort of other better opportunities. Anyway, I'm sorry you dealt with these a-holes.
They sound like awful leaders. We didn't even touch on the rampant sexism and racism at this place, which is absurd.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that, honestly, in the middle of all that.
Yeah, it's unconscionable. I'm glad you saw the light and you started your own practice and that you're thriving now.
That is super exciting. Well done.
All right. Next up.
Hey, Jordan and Gabe. I worked for a contractor for a few months as an office admin.
He was a walking Italian American stereotype and he embraced it. He carried himself like he was Tony Soprano, but he was more of a Michael Scott mixed with Tony Soprano.
It was nauseating. What a mashup.
Yeah. So just like a swaggering nincompoop.
Interesting. A gentle moron in a shiny sharkskin suit.
That's what she said. Hilarious.
So she goes on. Hindsight is 20-20, but there were red flags from the.
In my 20-minute interview with him, I learned about his dead parents, when, where, and how they died, how he lost almost a million dollars because of a former quote-unquote rogue employee, how he was moving from the very nice office we were having the interview in to his buddy's shop 20 minutes away. I thought it was weird he was sharing so much when we just met, but I chalked it up to him being an open person.
And honestly, I was desperate to leave my other job. Yeah, so two interesting things here already.
First, oversharing like that. Again, bit of a red flag, even if it is kind of innocent.
Dolores vibes, 100%. Strong Dolores vibes.
At a minimum, this kind of thing shows a lack of discernment and lack of boundaries, in my opinion. Second, the whole, oh, my rogue employee made me lose a million dollars thing.
That's also weird because A, something seriously wrong must have happened for you to lose a million dollars as a contractor. Huge.
And B, where were you in all that? What does that say about you to say nothing of the fact that it's totally unnecessary to be sharing that with a new hire? There's another interesting thing in here about being desperate to leave a job and how that can sometimes blind you to these red flags. It can make you want to brush them off a little too much.
Yep. Desperation, even just eagerness, it can really mess with your judgment.
There have been tons of studies about this. It's one of the things that can make people fall for scams, too.
When you want to believe something, your mind will help tell that story. It'll discount a lot of the concerning facts along the way.
Something I always have to keep in mind when I'm evaluating an opportunity, you have to correct for that bias when you're excited about something, whether it's a job or an asset or a person, especially a person. Right, yeah, because you can start to get sucked into the narrative that the person is wanting to.
You want to buy into the story that it's great because you have good reasons to get out of the old story. So he goes on, within the first week, I heard four different versions of the story of his parents' deaths.
Okay. So not only is he oversharing, he's telling everyone a different story.
So he's a liar. I realized he didn't have 80 employees, like he said in the interview, but just five poor schmucks on his payroll, one of which was me.
Three of us worked in a 10 by 6 space. Tony was in the office 10 hours a week max and would spend that time with his feet up on his desk talking on speaker with his golf buddies.
He also had extreme rage issues. One time he went from having a calm, normal conversation with an elderly lady about some repairs she needed to to screaming red-faced and telling her to go F herself in less than 30 seconds.
He would refer to his employees as retarded toddlers when they would make a mistake or ask a quote-unquote stupid question. He blamed everything that was going wrong on everyone else.
He could do no wrong. He was always right.
He constantly spoke about loyalty and devotion to his company, that he needed people who would die for his company. You're doing bathroom rentals on like two bedroom houses.
What are you talking about? Yeah. What are you talking about? Again, the narcissism and the you're either with us or against us thing.
I'm starting to think the moment you hear a boss say this kind of thing, just start dusting off ye olde resume. Jeez.
One time we were talking about ghost stories and he took out a little vial of holy water and started splashing it on himself mid-conversation. He then stood up and kissed the cross of this rosary that was on his wall.
I was raised Catholic, so I'm used to some woo-woo things, but this was so random it was hard to contain my laughter. Wow, that's a great detail.
I mean, look, he's allowed to believe whatever he believes. I'm not going to mock him for that, but there's something objectively hilarious about Michael Scott, Tony Soprano, screaming at old ladies on the phone to go f*** themselves and calling his staff retarded toddlers and then turning around and splashing himself with holy water in the office because somebody's talking about ghost stories.
But I feel like this guy in Dolores would actually hit it off. Yeah, she's a mob wife type.
He's a mob type wannabe. Exactly.
She's missing some teeth. He's missing some brain cells.
It might just work. How great would it be if we could introduce the villains in Feedback Friday letters to one another, just see if they hit it off.
Yep, we could get the chef from question two into the treatment center from two letters ago, see if they can help him kick his addiction to gambling and blow. I think you might be onto something here.
Yeah. Then they write into Feedback Friday and the villains become the heroes.
Oh, I would love this. This would be so fun.
Do you need more email in that inbox though? But how great would that be? Dear Jordan and Gabe, a few months ago, I met a woman in a pink pantsuit who was missing four molars. Sorry, molars.
Molars. Molars.
Yeah, exactly. She loved hot dogs.
The problem is she also loves Wordle. Right, which is a real bummer.
I'm more of an online poker guy. Exactly.
How are we going to make it work? So she goes on. He would make promises of promotions and raises.
He filled my head with dreams that were never going to come true. I stuck around for as long as I did because he was very complimentary of my work and seemed genuinely happy with what I was doing for him, recognition that I never got at any other job.
One day, he accused me and another employee of conspiring against him, then twisted my words right in front of me, minutes after I finished talking. That's when I started planning my escape.
I applied to a few places and got an interview and then an offer of almost double my salary at a huge company. Nice.
Well done. I put in my notice in front of the HR lady because I was afraid that Tony would explode.
I'm shocked there's an HR lady at this company, I'm not going to lie. There's five people and one of them is HR.
Exactly. But he didn't explode.
Instead, he said, okay, and left for the rest of the day. The next day, he ignored me all morning.
I had to ask him the same question three times before he would even acknowledge me. At the end of the day, when it was just me and him, he asked if we could talk.
He then went into this whole thing about how he loved me like a daughter, and he panicked when I quit because he didn't know how he would go forward without me. He had had the company for 17 years at this point.
I was there for four months. Side note, I don't know what's more disturbing, if that was just a tactic to pull on her heartstrings or if he actually meant that.
I'm sure it's a tactic. Come on.
Or he's like so unstable and like sensitive that I don't know. I don't know what this guy.
I explained that I was uncomfortable working for him. I listed the various things he said to customers and to employees and said I knew one day he would turn on me.
Wow, that takes courage. I don't know if I would have done that.
I would have just quit and gotten out of there. He kept cutting me off, saying I just don't understand him and I shouldn't make assumptions about him.
I decided I was not going to stick out my two weeks. The next morning, I wrote up an email reiterating everything I said to him that he didn't listen to, and sent it to him and HR, left my keys and company card on his desk, and bounced forever.
I blocked his number because I was afraid of him calling and ripping me a new one. For a week afterwards, I kept getting calls from an unknown number that would drop every time I picked up.
It was such a strange and stressful experience that I can laugh about it now, but it truly was an awful four months.

I still read that email sometimes and pat myself on the back for having the balls to send it.

Signed, still looking for the holy water to cleanse me of the only offer, where I was both the sworn enemy and the golden daughter.

I like that one, Gabe. That one was clean.

Thank you.

Got some double internal rhymes in there too.

Oh, you'd like that. Appreciate it.

I did not see holy water and golden daughter come. Really channeling your inner M&M today.

Do you really like it? Or are you just gassing me up the way this guy gassed up our friend for months? Damn it. You saw through my manipulation.
How dare you call me? You're like a son to me, Gabriel. This place can't run without you.
Pardon me while I type up an email, CC Jen on it. Dear Gelgun, Jen.
We have two employees and one of them is HR. Anyway, great job on getting out of this place, writing up that letter.
You should be proud of that. It's scary to stand up to a boss like this, even if he is kind of Michael Scott-ish.
I'm actually impressed it only took you four months to realize you had to get out. Kudos to you for that.
It's funny. This also reminds me of one of the letters we took on our last Bad Bosses episode.
The guy who ran a luxury car garage, and then he brought that young woman onto the team and basically love-bombed her until she came on full-time. You remember? Ah, yeah.
At which point he turned on her and she couldn't do anything right. Yep.
Interestingly, that guy also said he viewed that listener like a daughter and was like, come on board, join us. I want you to be part of this company for a long, long time.
Yeah, I remember that. So again, there's either something about these listeners or these bosses that triggers some father-daughter template or personalities like this, use the whole, I think of you as a daughter thing to keep them in their orbit because they have zero shame.
Exactly. That's what I was getting at earlier.
Like what's happening here? Maybe it's both, but even if they do feel fatherly toward them, that's even more reason to treat somebody well, right? Well, right. So that's what makes me think it's bullshit.
If you really think of me as a daughter, maybe don't manipulate me and cut me down all the time, bro. The other thing I find fascinating about the story, and it's connected to the thing I mentioned earlier about how being desperate to leave one situation can desensitize you to red flags.
She said she stuck around for as long as I did because he was very complimentary of my work

and seemed genuinely happy with what I was doing for him.

Right, recognition she said she never got at any other job.

Exactly, which I can totally understand.

Being validated at work is powerful, right?

And it's important.

But if you're starved for validation

or you're unusually susceptible to flattery

and those compliments do not align

with how you're being actually treated at work, that can keep you stuck in a bad situation because it can feel so good to be praised. Yes.
That's another thing to keep an eye on. I'm with you.
Being validated appropriately at work, that's a form of value that's necessary. It's a form of psychic compensation, to steal a term Scott Galloway used in our interview.
Oh man, I love that term when he used that. That was a good one.
Yeah, it's a good one. But if a boss is showering you with compliments in order to avoid paying you what you are worth, or if they're praising you one day and then being cruel to you the next day, that's a different thing.
Then you've got to wonder if the validation is even genuine or if it's just another tactic. Or even if it is genuine, you've got to ask if it's coming from somebody who's not treating you in a way that reflects their supposedly high esteem.
Like, okay, you like me, you're thrilled with my work. Wonderful.
But then why are you screaming at me? Or why are you accusing me of conspiring against you or not giving me a raise or whatever it is? When there's a disconnect between those two things, that's another good signal to pay attention to. But that's a good point.
Desperation can really seduce you into a questionable job and an imbalanced need for validation can keep you stuck in that job, too. So the other big

thing that jumped out at me about this one was when Tony Scott accused her. You mentioned this

of another employee conspiring against him. That paranoia that everyone's out to get me mentality,

those qualities, man, they just scream run to me. Yes.
I also find it so creepy that this guy

called her nonstop for a week from a private number after she blocked him. Ugh, so creepy, stressful.
Also, like, why? Just take the L, dude. She quit.
Time to bamboozle someone else or finally sign up for therapy, better help, and figure out why your business is plagued by so much drama. Hint, it's you.
Anyway, I'm thrilled you got out of there so quickly. I'm even more thrilled that you got an offer of almost double your salary at a huge company.
I think that's fantastic. I'm sure that speaks to just how valuable you are.
And I love that you have that email to look back on. That document is a testament to your confidence, your ability to protect yourself, and your courage in standing up to an objectively frightening personality.
And now that you know what to look for and what pressure points you have that might have made you susceptible to a personality like this in the first place, I doubt you'll end up working for somebody like him again. But listen, if you still have his email address, shoot that on over to Gabe.
It sounds like he wants to play matchmaker for Dolores with the help of our friend from question one. And you know, he's going to make that happen.
All four of us can parent trap these two into a relation. Is that parent trapping? No.
Is that, I guess not because they were never together, but I still like the metaphor. The metaphor being that we're all the kids of these two nut jobs and we just want to get the family back together so everybody can be happy and dysfunctional together.
That's a normal thing to want, right? There's nothing weird about that. No, that's nothing to look at here.
I want to thank all of you for suffering through these horrible jobs and putting up with these ridiculous bosses so we could learn from your stories this week. I know this episode was a little lighter than our usual fare, but I think there were some really valuable lessons in there.
Like don't hire coked up chefs or janitors or you will see some workplace nudity. That's what I'm taking away.
To be fair, if you're not hiring coked up chefs, you're going to have a hard time hiring chefs. That like eliminates like half 50% of the chefs.
You are going, the pool of applicants is going to be significantly diminished. I was going to say, beware the narcissists and uplift people rather than cut them down.
But sure, yeah, let's go with yours, Gabe. Don't hire cokeheads or you will see Homer Simpson and his tighty whities and or a dumpster fire of a chef robbing your safe at 2 a.m.
after getting a hand shandy in the parking lot. And on that note, go enjoy your own auditory hand shandy by going back and check out Victor Vescovo and our Ske Sunday.
If you haven't done so yet, the best things that have happened in my life and business have come through my network. That's the circle of people that I know, like, and trust.
I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself in our six minute networking course. The course is free.
I don't need your credit card number. There's nothing for sale.
It's not schmoozy or gross. And you can find it on the Thinkific platform at six minute networking.working.com.
The drills really take a couple minutes a day. Dig that well before you're thirsty, people.
Build relationships before you need them. Once again, sixminutenetworking.com.
Show notes and transcripts are on the website. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.
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Here's a sample of my interview with Guy Raz, who hosts NPR's How I Built This. He shares his number one secret to getting a great interview,

how asking difficult questions during the interview serves both the overall story and the guests being grilled, and it's kind of nice to just riff with somebody else in the business. Here's a quick bite.
I came to NPR as a 22-year-old intern. I was very lucky.
You know, I really wanted to be an overseas reporter, and the stars were sort of aligned in the right way where I got the job.

And I was totally terrified.

You know, I was sent to Berlin to be the correspondent for NPR. Don't mess this up.
Oh, yeah. And by the way, you're going to Bosnia tomorrow.
And that was how I began overseas as a foreign correspondent. Bearing witness to historical events, being somewhere where they're unfolding in front of your eyes in real time is thrilling.
It's absolutely extraordinary and fascinating. I mean, imagine if you were standing at the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989.
It's an extraordinary feeling to be in these places. And I was able to witness history unfold in front of my eyes many, many times.
If there's really a secret to interviewing people, this is my secret. If you really want to get a good interview from somebody, you need to honor their story.
You need to honor them. If they're coming to talk to you, and the way you honor them is you learn a lot about them.
You spend the time, you do the work. And if you do that, there's a better than 50% chance that they will appreciate that and respect that.
I mean, those wow moments, they're real. Because what I do in an interview is I completely leave the world that I'm in.
I completely leave the surroundings, everything, all the chaos, the noise, you know, Trump and politics. I just leave it.
It's out. It's all the noise.
COVID's gone. It's like when you see a movie.
I am just in that person's world.

For more, including the one teachable quality all entrepreneurs seem to have in common,

check out episode 404 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Guy Raz.