Boss Demanded To See Every Email They Wrote, So They Drove Her Nuts With All The Details

Matthew Gilligan

4 months ago

Shutterstock/Reddit

Hey, if your boss demands to see EVERY SINGLE THING you’re doing, well, all you can do is let ’em have it!

That’s what this worker did and they told Reddit users all about it.

Check out what went down!

Every email? You got it boss!

“For some reason my boss very very much, and unlike any other boss before and after, disliked me.

I am somebody who wants to understand everything so that I can work well, organise myself, and prioritise better. She did not like people who are this way. She was more of a chaotic spirit and that is generally fine. But business is business and I need the info I need to do what I do.

They knew what was best for the workflow.

I had a bunch of projects, some bigger and some smaller but because this was a large international company, many things had to be communicated through email because of timezones. It just made it easier to work smoothly.

Obviously, having several projects with stakeholders all over the planet, I wrote a lot of emails (duh). I have a very clear and detailed way of writing business emails, which so far everybody had liked because there were never questions left to ask.

In the rare occasions that questions were left, I was more than happy to explain or go into more depth. No issue there, but it really didn’t happen much.

But there was as problem…

This manager however always had questions. The reason for this was that she had absolutely no grasp on the subject matter and made no effort to understand the projects or explanations.

She generally didn’t understand the field of work for which she was managing unfortunately. And again, everybody else in my team, everybody who would just be in such an email chain for visibility, but not directly involved, would understand. I really need to drive this home to avoid misunderstandings before I move on.

I was not the only person in the team that she would pick on but I was the one she picked on so much more that other people noticed it.

Well one day we had one of those 121 meetings and she told me that “everybody always” had questions and I need to write emails clearer, nothing made sense, etc blah, blah, blah. She went on about it for about 25 of the 30 minutes.

I tried to probe with questions to find out more because no questions had ever reached me and people there tended to ask me lots of questions so there wasn’t an issue with people not asking if they had a question. My probing was completely ignored, no examples were given, it was just another rant of hers.

She ended the meeting by demanding that from now on, every time I was wanted to send an email, I was to let her check the email before I would be permitted to send it out.

If you say so!

Malicious compliance so extremely engaged. You can imagine what happened next, I suppose.

Starting immediately, every time I wrote an email, any email – to anybody – for any reason, I would have her come to my desk and read it. She never found anything to correct other than write a different greeting – very literally just that.

I continued whether she was in a meeting, busy, talking to somebody, etc, no email was sent from my computer unless she would come over physically to come check. Once or twice she did not come over, trying to ignore me, and I made a screenshot and sent it to her through the chat to check.

That method worked!

It took her two days until she came back to me, clearly more than slightly annoyed, and told me I did not have to make her check all my emails anymore.

And by the way, she continued to ask questions in email threads I started, even when the answer was already in the email, and people started getting more and more annoyed with it because she still clearly made no effort to understand the projects we, as her team, were working on, and very especially my projects.

I ended up quitting after 2 years of her bullying.”

Let’s see what people had to say about this on Reddit.

This reader shared their thoughts.