Whaddaya hear, whaddaya say? Welcome to episode 7 of the Career Consigliere podcast, your no frills, no BS forum for navigating the corporate job scene. Jimmy with you, for what we hope to be a highly informative and engaging half an hour, or so! We spent the last few episodes beating the living hell out of how to write a resume. I know I’m shot from that, so I thought today we’d mix it up a little bit and throw in something that I KNOW all of my favorite corporatopians can relate to. Today, we’re going to hear about real people out there in the corporate world who literally work for the real-life Michael Scott! No, not Steve Carell in the flesh, but for bosses who either watched a little too much of “The Office” over the years, or are just THAT unbelievably socially off-kilter. We’ll explore some very funny examples of things that really happened, and leave you with some advice for what to do if you ever find yourself working for a character like this. So if you’re ready podcast land, letttsssss get it!
So for anyone listening who doesn’t know about Michael Scott, let’s explain quick. It’s a reference to the famous sitcom “The Office”, one of cable TV’s most successful endeavors in the last 20 years, and ironically one of its last. The Office peaked right before the streaming apps really started dominating the entertainment landscape. On the show, the legendary Steve Carell plays a character named Michael Scott. He’s the Boss at Dunder Mifflin, a fictitious paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The show itself is known as a “Mockumentary”, where you alternate between watching reality-TV style scenes play out live, and then watching short interviews with the characters from the scenes who give sarcastic commentary about what’s going on.
Michael Scott is the king of awkward situations. He tries very hard to be large and in charge, but he also really wants to fit in and win the approval of his team members. He’s also about as socially calibrated as a broken clock while doing all this, so needless to say, some of the shenanigans he pulls are uncomfortable and embarrassing as all hell to watch, even from the safety of your own couch. If you’ve never seen the show, hit up YouTube and watch 10 minutes of ANY episode, and you’ll see what I mean very quickly.
And as a quick sidebar, a lot of you might not know this about me, but I actually lived in Scranton during the height of the show’s popularity. I did my Bachelors’ degree at a university up in that area, and hung around working my first “real” job for a few years after......fish out of water, you think? But even though I lived right there during the peak of the show, believe it or not, to this day, I’ve never seen an entire episode start to finish. Tons of clips, shorts, bits and pieces, but never sat and watched a full episode all the way through. Yes, I know that’s heresy for someone running a podcast on corporate life, but nonetheless there’s your fun fact for the day. So now that you have a flavor of who this “Michael Scott” character is, let’s look at some Michael Scott-esque things that real bosses did. Everything we’re going to talk about here comes from a BuzzFeed article written earlier this month.
First up, renegade ribbon cutter! This employee reports “We held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new hospital unit. In the middle of the ceremony, my boss walked up from the audience, took the giant scissors from the chairman, and cut the ribbon himself”. Ha! Even if you’ve never been to a ribbon cutting ceremony, you’ve surely seen them in movies, on TV, you know what they’re all about. A very important person is given an impractically large pair of scissors and uses them to cut a ribbon to ceremoniously launch whatever new and exciting thing is being unveiled. Trust me, the person holding the scissors has them for a reason – they were usually instrumental to the project, or are otherwise very highly respected in the organization. So, some random schmo walking up and hijacking the scissors to do the honors himself is a HUGE faux pas. The article doesn’t elaborate any further on this, but who knows: maybe there was a lot of joking going on in the room and the boss man felt comfortable taking the lead on this. But still, you ruined the 2 seconds of time that the ceremony is all about. Shame on you sir, whoever you are.
We’re just getting started, people. Next we have a pantsless old man! The traumatized employee tells us, “Long ago, my 80-year-old boss pulled me into his office. “Paul” he said, I’ve noticed that your shirts come untucked, and that looks unprofessional. I apologized. He then said, I want you to start tucking your shirts into your underwear, go ahead and try it now. I told him, you know I have 15 women who report to me, I can’t undo my pants in the office. His response? Sure you can! Right before he dropped his OWN pants, revealing a pair of Spiderman underwear.
What REALLY surprises me here is the things people will do simply because their boss said so. Put me in that same situation, I’d be so perplexed at what I was being asked to do that I couldn’t possibly take it seriously – I’d probably wind up leaving the office in a confused daze. It sounds like the subject in this story was a guy, and every guy’s shirts come untucked – it’s a problem as old as time. The solution? Tighten your belt a notch – does the trick every time! At 80 years old, I think the glory days are over for this guy’s boss are long gone and he was probably just looking for an excuse to drop trou with someone else present, who wasn’t his urologist........scary stuff. We never find out what happened to the witness on this one, but I think we can assume he got the hell out of dodge before things REALLY took a turn for the worse.
Here’s another one: “At my wedding reception, my boss came up and told me I was spending too much time talking to one person and that I needed to work the room more.” Oh boy.....the amateur psychologist in me really wants to break this one down. My best guess is that the boss probably didn’t know anyone else at the wedding, probably felt real uncomfortable, and since he’s used to being “in charge” of our groom the rest of the time, he forgot where he was and morphed into unsolicited mentor mode. Highly inappropriate, especially on a dude’s wedding day, but if the boss here is anything like Michael Scott it didn’t come from a bad place.
I have a feeling a lot of us can probably relate to this next one: “My boss wanted a pomegranate for lunch. They were out of season, but that didn’t stop him from sending me on a quest to every grocery store in town in search of a pomegranate. The produce guys all laughed at me, and I never found one. When I got back to the office, he was eating a sandwich and seemed to have forgotten that he’d even sent me”. You guys ever been in a situation like this? When the boss tells you something is mission critical, makes it seem like everyone’s gonna die if said thing doesn’t happen yesterday, and sends you on a wild goose chase? Really makes you feel like a doof when you realize it really wasn’t that big a deal.
I can share a very similar Michael Scott-esque story of my own here: in my very first job, I worked for a restaurant/ice cream shop joint It was a busy Saturday in July, prime season in that business, and everybody and their 12 cousins were ordering banana splits that day, so we ran through all the bananas in less than an hour. We really didn’t keep a lot on -hand either – bananas were tricky. They didn’t last long, and there was really no good way to store them, so we only ever kept 2-3 bunches on hand at a time. Luckily we had a big supermarket directly across the parking lot, so my boss sent me on a super important mission to go buy bananas and save the day.
I remember power walking across the parking lot, knowing that Mr. Boss man probably had a stopwatch timing every second I was on the clock and NOT in the building. But I was also the youngest one there and was always trying to prove myself and gain respect from my colleagues, some 20-30 years my senior, so I was also happy that ME, of al people, was given such a critical task for that day. I couldn’t wait to walk back in, bananas in hand, and get the wave of adulation and praise from everyone back at the ranch who was surely awaiting my return in anxious anticipation. Except that’s not how it went: when I got back, the first thing I noticed was about 60 mostly green bananas sitting on top of the microwave (very compliant with DOH standards, by the way).
Turns out the big boss man had originally sent one of the dishwashers on the banana run about 45 minutes earlier, but I guess the dude was dragging ass and not making any moves, so that’s when good-ol’ Jimmy got tapped on the shoulder. This dishwasher guy was about the biggest creep you’ll ever meet – the kind of guy you see walking down the sidewalk carrying 12 bags of groceries because he has some weird paranoia about taking the bus.......or maybe because he’s got warrants on him and tries to avoid contact with municipal employees – who knows. Anyway, now that you can picture this guy, all 330 pounds of him, you can understand why he wouldn’t jump right up when asked to go on a supermarket run during his shift. I guess he finally got motivated to make the trip when he realized he could smoke 3 cigarettes and half a blunt in the time it would take him to go there and back, and that’s when he made his move.
I could talk for hours about this boss I had. Absolutely unforgettable individual. Thinking back on it, he was a middle aged dude whose life clearly hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped, and he took every opportunity to bully and harass just about everybody in the place: older, younger, guy, girl, it really didn’t matter (he was slightly nicer to the girls, but not by much) And he was maniacal about it – he had a way of insulting and undermining you in such an artful and intelligent way that you were left feeling like you’d somehow wronged humanity and were going to bankrupt the corporation for putting too much hot fudge on a 5 year old’s sundae. I was in high school when I worked there, and to this day, several decades later, I’ve STILL never come across a leader quite as diabolical as him. He must have liked me, because he wrote me an absolute GEM, a pulitzer prize winner of a college recommendation letter, but you’d never know it if you observed us interacting for even 30 seconds. But, I suppose it’s people and experiences like this that really build character: put it this way – all my friends whose first job was an unpaid internship in their junior year of college couldn’t DREAM of starting a podcast to advise people in the workplace. I guess turmoil has its payoff, LOL.
Now I realize these examples, while wild and outrageous, really aren’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things (the old dude with the underwear could have been, but I don’t think our subject made too big a deal out of it.....probably spared the poor bastard a whole world of legal trouble too). But, if you’re listening to this show, you’ve been around long enough to have had bosses that have put you in crazy situations like this. So to get back to reality, what do you do when Michael Scott strikes in real life? Let’s answer that with today’s.......Consigliere call to action.
Call to action:
- Ribbon cutter: on this one, if you’re ever witness an outrage like that, just stand there, look pretty, say nothing, and never talk about it again. Sometimes bosses tend to over-assert themselves, and this is a great example of that.
- Spider man underwear: just because your boss tells you to do something, doesn’t mean you should. You boss’s authority over you is limited to work. When it comes to personal matters, especially revealing undergarments, they’re WAY out of bounds.
- Wedding reception: be careful blurring the lines between work and personal time. If you really have a good relationship with your boss, then yeah inviting them to private social events can definitely be a polite, respectful gesture. But if they have a tendency to break the social code and start acting like the boss OUTSIDE the office, maybe think twice. You don’t need someone critiquing you on your big day.
- Jimmy’s banana story: I’m really not sure what could have been done to prevent this, just an unfortunate turn of events and bad timing. But, if you’re ever asked to perform a random task that it seems like it might be outside the bounds of your job description, don’t be afraid to challenge your boss on it. A 15-year-old working at an ice cream shop doesn’t really have a leg to stand on, but those of you out there in the corporate world have enough experience and SHOULD have enough self-respect to know where the lines are. If you’re consistently asked to do unorthodox things, then you might be in the wrong job.
Sadly folks, that’s all the time we have for today. But have no fears, and shed no tears, because I’ll be back with a new episode every week. As they say in the industry: no listeners, no show, so do me a favor, and stay loyal! If you find value in my content, please leave me a nice review, tell all your friends, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Beyond the confines of your headphones, speakers, TV screen, or any other crazy contraption with the ability to stream audio, I also provide one-on-one career assistance, so visit my website at career-consigliere.net to learn more about me, book me for one-on-one coaching, join my email list, or explore some of the other career services I offer. And to all of you out there in podcast land, remember this: Who’s the boss in your career? You, nobody else.
