When you work for someone else, you generally have to do what they tell you since they are the boss.

What would you do if your boss gave you very specific instructions, but then when you followed them, they made her look really bad to an important client?

That is what happened to the office assistant in this story, so she explained to the boss that she was just following her instructions, which ended up getting her fired.

Boss yells at me for following instructions and tells me to do the opposite next time… which backfires

About 20 years ago, I used to work as an office assistant at a small company where we would receive orders from clients and then we would assign the work to one of our freelancers who were well compensated and respectable professionals.

This is weird that she was both the boss and the freelancer.

My boss was such a professional herself and when possible, we would assign that work to her.

I accepted the minimum wage job, because she told me I could sometimes get tasks assigned as a freelancer with the nice freelancer compensation, that she would personally train me and that in less than a year, I would most likely be promoted to a regular freelancer and make very good money. This sounded like a great career path to my young and naïve ears.

Taking full responsibility of an order makes sense.

One of the things she had told me in the very beginning was that when you take over an order, you become like a project manager for that order. You need to make sure that the freelancer would finish the work on time as the work was usually time sensitive.

Additionally, she loved going on long lectures about how she is paying me (minimum wage) for me to use my brain and figure things out when necessary. These lectures were mainly a vehicle for her to stroke her own ego by explaining to her employees how our brains were not as smart as hers.

It makes sense to give an important order like this to the boss.

One day, our biggest corporate client had placed a large order that was due on a Monday by noon and we had assigned the task to my boss to do over the weekend.

It was Monday morning, time was ticking and my boss hadn’t arrived at the office. The client had called to see if we were going to provide the work soon as it was urgent.

Hopefully she is not in any type of trouble.

I tried calling my boss who didn’t pick up her mobile. I called half an hour later and texted her. No answer or reply while noon was fast approaching.

So, I called her landline at home. Her husband picked up, told me she wasn’t home and I explained very briefly why I was trying to get a hold of her.

The fact that she hadn’t checked in with the work seems like an emergency to me.

Less than an hour before noon, my boss called furious that I had been so insistent on getting a hold of her and that I had created a state of stress and emergency at her house. Her home number was for emergencies only and this wasn’t an emergency. “It’s not professional to call people when they are not at work!”

She told me she got everything under control and she was now sending the work to the client directly.

Maybe if she communicated better, she wouldn’t have called.

When she arrived at the office she gave me a big scolding in person and told me that I do need to hound other freelancers, but not her. It was her business and she got everything handled, she knew all the clients and they were clients because of her.

Ok, that is crystal clear.

She looked me in the eye and told me “If I take over a task, it’s not your task anymore, it’s my task! You don’t need to bother me with reminders. You just give me the instructions from the client and I’ll handle everything myself. From that point on, your job is done! I never ever miss deadlines! If the client calls, you tell them I’m on it and you don’t call me or text me about it!”

Fair enough. I apologized for the stress and repeated the new instructions back to her for confirmation. She was very happy with that and confirmed I had understood everything.

It would get old hearing that same old thing.

She once more gave me her favorite lecture about how she is paying me (minimum wage) for me to use my brain with a lot of condescending examples of how she always uses her brain unlike us normal workers. I could only nod along as if her narcissistic rant was actually teaching anybody anything.

About a month or so later, another client come in with an order, I accepted it, my boss was available to handle it, so I forwarded everything to her and I considered my work in regard to that order done as instructed.

She has nothing to worry about since she handed it off to her boss.

On the day of the deadline, I was on vacation and was hiking in a remote area with spotty cell coverage. The other office assistant called me and told me the client had called the office to check if the work was ready. I told my colleague that our boss was on it and that we didn’t need to worry as our boss was going to handle it and that my clear instructions were to tell the client our boss was personally on it, the task would be done by the deadline and explicitly not to call our boss to remind her of the deadline.

Its not a real vacation if you are taking calls.

Then since I was on vacation, I needed to conserve my battery, and everything at the office was handled, I switched off my phone. An approaching deadline that my boss had to meet was explicitly not an emergency.

Also I had recently realized that my boss had knowingly misled me about the carrier opportunities this job was affording me, so I wasn’t going to be on call on my rare day off.

Oh, look who messed up this time.

While I was hiking without a care in the world, my boss had managed to forget about the deadline. By the time she realized she had missed it, the office was closed. My boss had urgently finished the work, but it turned out she didn’t know the clients so well as she didn’t have their contact details.

As the order was in the office and my phone was off, she had to go there herself, fetch it and use the contact details to deliver the work late. This was particularly embarrassing as my colleague had informed the client our boss was personally doing the work for them.

Of course she will try to blame someone else.

When I came back to work, it was pandemonium. She screamed at me, but I simply pointed out that everything I had done was following her instructions. “Why did you do this?” “You told me to.” “Why didn’t you do that?” “You told me not to”. She was fuming, but she knew I was correct and I had acted exactly as instructed.

She also screamed at me for my phone being off, but I said I needed to conserve my batter for emergencies and this was clearly not an emergency and I’m not on call while on vacation anyway.

Malicious compliance for the win, right?

She just won’t let it go.

Well, narcissists never accept blame and she had an idea of how to shift the blame to me after all. “But you didn’t provide me with the client’s contact details with the order assignment! How could I have delivered them the work? It was your fault for not providing me with all the information.”

I pointed out that she told me she knew all the clients personally, but if she had used her brain like she is constantly telling us to, she could have easily noticed that the order instructions were on the client’s letterhead with all their contact details spelled out.

Oh, I bet she was livid.

On every single page! Bottom and top! Now that was a huge slap to her fragile ego and remembering her face in that moment still makes me smile.

Needless to say, I was fired. Of course, I didn’t mind. Don’t you just love happy endings!

In this case, it might have been worth getting fired just to get that boss to shut up for once.

I’m sure the people in the comments loved this story, let’s see what they had to say about it.

This commenter is exactly right.

The rules don’t apply to this boss.

I really like this quote.

This was my favorite part of the story.

Right? Like this will be a big loss.

How do people like this manage to get put in positions of power?

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.