Some bosses forget the difference between managing and meddling.

What would you do if your manager interrupted every phone call, hijacked your conversations, and kept piling on requests that had nothing to do with your actual job? Would you oblige to make their life easier? Or would you find a sneaky way to remind them you’re not their secretary?

In the following story, one employee finds themselves in this very situation and teaches the boss a lesson she won’t forget. Here’s how it all went down.

I had to teach my boss that even though she is my boss I am not her secretary.

I have a good boss, but sometimes you have to teach them a thing or two.

My boss is becoming the ***** from micromanaging ****. Where I used to be able to do my job, I can no longer do it without constant interruptions of micromanagement.

The boss has an office near mine. If I handle a business call, she listens and tries to control the call from her office. It is impossible for people to do more than one thing at a time. I can not listen to two people at a time when one is on the phone.

This puts him in an awkward spot.

One conversation depends on verbal skills only, and the other is messed up trying to use verbal and nonverbal.

The customer should be served, not the boss. I sort of dealt with this pretty well and cleverly.

When I am on the phone with someone and eavesdropping, my boss starts to try to control a simple phone call with, “No, don’t do that, do ______, who is that?, ask them _______, tell them _______”

I become polite, cover the phone, and say to my boss, “I have this handled.”

Apparently, the boss doesn’t learn.

If the boss persists with the micromanagement crap, I then cover the phone and say, “Mr. Customer, can you please hold a moment? It is too loud and busy here to understand your needs. If it is okay with you, I am going to transfer you to my boss’s private office.”

The boss then says, “No, can’t you see I don’t have time for that call?”

I transfer the call at that moment and walk away. The boss handles the call which they wanted to do in the first place.

The next time my boss interrupts me on a call, I cover the phone, say, “Can you hold one second?” and politely ask, ” Do you want this one?” I look at the boss and wait until their attention goes back to the desk, at which point I handle the call.

He broke her of that habit, but she found a new one.

Now that I have broken that mind-numbing habit, the boss has moved to different interruptions to my workflow. She is clever, but I am more so.

“Can you copy files from XXXX and scan them to me?” I hear this over and over. Now, you do things for your boss, but when they run their own small business on company time, they tend to take you on as an unwilling partner, asking you to do things they don’t have time for, but then you don’t have time for your job.

Most of our documents are PDF and our company will not provide us the ability to edit stuff……..so………when……..I can’t get my job done, I wait till the boss wants a document scanned for them.

Not only is the file unusable, but she has extra steps to take now.

I wait for a one-pager that I know they want to use electronically. I retrieve the file, 50% of the time is in the boss’s office, I pull the page they want, and I then scan it. But the end of the document goes in the scanner first, so the document will go to the boss UPSIDE DOWN and not be usable by them.

I then announced, “I am going on break. Would you please return the document to the file?”

They get the file they can’t use and I am not there for them to ask me to rescan.

Bonus Revenge: The boss has to go to the scanner to rescan her document. Once she handles it, she is obligated by company culture to return it to the file, so I comply with her micromanagement demands, and she ends up doing what she should have done in the first place.

Yikes! Bosses like that are the worst.

Let’s check out how the folks over at Reddit relate to this story.

This is actually a good question.

The story gave this person flashbacks.

Here’s someone who handles it directly.

Good thing no one noticed.

That will teach her! It’s always great to hear employees push back against micromanagers.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.