Imagine having a job you love at a small company, but your supervisor is the most annoying person ever. Would you keep the job, start looking for work elsewhere, or find a way to report the supervisor?

In this story, one employee is in this situation. Right now, the office is so small that there are only three people there, her, her supervisor and one other coworker who is a long-time friend and former coworker of the supervisor.

What really annoys her the most about the supervisor is how much she talks, and not just about work related things. She talks about herself so very much including things that she doesn’t care about or want to know. It’s not like they’re friends. This is her boss!

The situation was even worse during a business meeting, and now this employee is left wondering if there’s anything she can do about her boss’s lack of boundaries.

Keep reading for all the details.

Supervisor has terrible boundaries with subordinates.. including me

I’m so disheartened that my supervisor at my new job has such poor boundaries with us (me and my coworkers). I just want a reliable, knowledgeable, professional leader in the workplace. Is that so hard to find??

It’s a new branch of an established company so there’s three of us right now, including her, with two others starting this month.

Here’s some context about her supervisor and  coworker.

My coworker, let’s call him John, right now has been “best friends” with her for 6+ years, they worked together in their previous workplace. They hang out outside of work, meet each other’s significant others/have a shared friend group, gossip often, make plans together.

From water cooler stories, she has befriended many subordinates in the past in this way while still working together.

She loves to gossip and seems to hold on to petty comments/moments as if we were in high school.

Through her unwarranted self-disclosure, I somehow know specific details about her family trauma, her medical ailments, her friends, her food preferences, what her house looks like, how she used to be a cheerleader in HS but since then she’s gained a LOT of weight and has type 2 diabetes now, her drinking habits (she’s a SUD counselor btw).

The boss seems to like to hear herself speak.

I never asked about any of that.

She seems to not tolerate silence and fills it with stuff about her.

Once we were in group supervision combined with another location, and it was my turn to speak.

I started to explain a group I ran that went very successfully and she CUT ME OFF mid-sentence without acknowledgment or apology telling a story about a successful group SHE ran.

She’s pretty frustrated.

There have been many small moments where I feel she is threatened by me in some way.

I’m very disappointed that I have to navigate the relationship like this.

More of a rant than anything.. any advice about this?

I’d lean towards quitting in this situation. This supervisor sounds unbearable.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who was facing serious accusations before retirement, but luckily had security footage that proved his innocence.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this situation.

This person had a similar experience.

Another person suggests being more assertive.

Here’s a vote for getting out.

Another person suggests thinking of it as a learning experience.

It sounds very annoying to have a supervisor who is constantly oversharing about her life. From the comments, it seems that there are a couple good options here such as being more assertive and setting boundaries or simply learning from the experience.

It might be helpful to just accept that this is the way this supervisor is and to try to ignore half of what she says when it really has nothing to do with work. Her oversharing is her problem, and OP can decide not to let it bother her. If she only nods and smiles and doesn’t act overly interested or ask follow-up questions, maybe the supervisor would stop talking…or maybe not.

Being cut off in the meeting for the supervisor to interject her own experience would be the most frustrating part. In that case, maybe she needs to find a way to politely reinsert herself into the conversation to finish saying what she was saying. Of course, if she doesn’t do that, everyone in the meeting will probably understand that the supervisor was a bit of a bulldozer.

Some people don’t know when to be quiet.