...who used the phrase "attention to detail is PARAMOUNT" on a six-times-daily basis. She was from Norn Iron, and I still often find myself doing an impression of her saying "attaynshun" and "PAARAMOINT" whenever those words come up at home.

Anyway, the job was a contract thing, developing an online procedures manual for a software company. VERY exciting. It was of PAARAMOINT importance that I pay attaynshun to things like the EXACT (to the individual pixel) width of the frames we were using (this was back when people still used frames on websites).

I would get a full, book-a-room, sit-down bollocking if it was one pixel too big or small. Seriously. And there was a never ending catalogue of this stuff.

I don't mind a bit of attaynshun to dayteel, me, but that was ridiculous.

was a business manager for a major multinational Her (female) boss criticised her for her nail polish not matching her jumper. She didnt stay long after that.

.....I used to have to submit internal memos for inspection.
Took up hours of time not serving the general public.
I left.

... now gladly defunct, used to have to use green ink when signing official documents.

That's just plain creepy.

Apparently I had not used the correct shade of 'company blue' in my bullet points. I maintained that it wasn't a good use of my time to select exactly the right shade, and that they were welcome to alter it if they wanted.

This blew into a long email exchange about departmental responsibilities, in which I bloody-mindedly refused to change it myself. Wasted a lot of time & energy over it, but you can't let the buggers win.

had a quiet word when we stayed over and I inadvertently used the towel she'd actually put out for the GLW. Mine, it transpired, was the blue one.

I would suggest that you have an individual that is dealing with you in a manner bordering harassment! If it continued I'd do something about it!

I had a boss who, at my annual appraisal, told me off for not upsetting people. We agreed I had met and often exceeded my targets but he thought if this had been done whilst maintaining good relationships with colleagues and getting things done harmoniously there must be something wrong. Wanker. Actually he was French, so connard.

Also ask your boss to show you how it's done; does she use a special stapler, or does she have a favourite? Is the choice of staples crucial to doing a good job? Should you and she agree a personal objective about stapler-use improvement? Is paper thickness an issue? Who holds the staple excellence benchmark? Are there exampler of stapler-use best practice? Is there a guidance manual for using a stapler. Do you need to wear any protective clothing and goggles? What are the benefits of using staples as compared with using an India tag? Suggest you aim for a paperless office which would remove the need to have staplers at all and thus save resources, particularly your own valuable time.

She should get the message by the second or third question.

but when I was at film school, one screenwriting professor insisted that each scene should end with a CUT TO:, the other - of course - insisted that CUT TO: was almost always surplus to requirements. The latter would methodically cross out all unnecessary CUT TOs. The former would stubbornly insert them when they were absent. For one of them this seemed to be the extent of his screenwriting, which is pretty sad.

for a meeting with a potential client to accompany coffee.
Cretinous, hateful boss (can you tell we didn't get on?)found out after the meeting and flew into a rage as I hadn't consulted him. Remaining biscuits were taken from the kitchen and thrown in the bin 'so that nobody in the office would benefit from them'.
What a tosspot. Incidently, we won the contract and therefore I succeeded in making the odious creep even richer.

A document which tells us, in enormous detail, just how instruments should be cleaned, sterilized and stored. Important, yes, but not to the extent of page after page of flowcharts and illustrations of the correct way to hold a scrubbing brush.

I once had to fix 8 panels to an exhibition stand using velcro. The panels were 8 sections of one image. The stand's structure meant that the panels had to be stuck up with a gap between each panel. Unfortunately, the exhibition stand was neither square nor plum. It was wonky, but it was the kind of wonkiness you only see when you try and stick panels to it. The gaps between the panels were therefore not evenly spaced. They too were wonky. By about a quarter of a centimetre. The kind of margin of error you only see if you're looking for it.

My boss arrived an hour before show-time, snorted in disgust at the panels and proceeded to bollock me for my wonky gaps. I explained and demonstrated why there were wonky gaps. This involved showing him how the exhibition stand wobbled from side-to-side and how it didn't stand square to the wall behind or indeed to the floor.

He was having none of it. He took all the panels down and tried to stick them back up so that they were abutting. Unsurprisingly because the exhibition was not square or plum (have you spotted the main theme yet?) the panels would not join up correctly. It looked a lot worse than having wonky gaps, mainly because there were parts of the panels that would not stick properly due to the overlap across corners.

Having failed himself to correct the problem he accused me (loudly and with added swear words) of having "bent" the panels "out of shape" because of the way I had originally stuck them up. I took the panels down and laid them on the floor. They joined up nicely and neatly. I was therefore accused of putting the exhibition stand up incorrectly. I explained that I hadn't done that and that it was the show's contractor who had put the actual stand up. He asked me why I hadn't complained about it. I explained that I only realised the problem when I stuck the panels up a few minutes before he had arrived. I was then asked why I hadn't put them up earlier which would have meant I would have seen the problem sooner. I explained that the exhibition stand was still being put up when I had arrived.

At this point I was told to "f*ck off" so he could sort it out himself. I went off for a coffee and came back about 10 minutes before show-time. By this time 2 other senior managers had arrived. My boss had put the panels back up in the abutting position. They looked awful. A couple of minutes after I had returned one of them fell down and in the fall one of its corner's was damaged. One of the managers suggested that perhaps it would be better to re-stick the panels with a gap between them. At which point my boss (below the manager in rank) claimed that that had been his idea but that I'd stupidly stuck them up like this instead. I said nothing at this point and merely set about re-sticking the panels back up in the original position I had chosen at the outset.

Despite being made to look like an incompetent dick by my boss I had the last laugh. Before he arrived I used the company's video camera to film the exhibition stand with the panels set up in the original layout. I made sure the two managers saw the footage at the end of the day.

(In response to the OP: No-one - left or right-handed - should eat chips on a Sunday.

Potatoes on a Sunday should be roasted.)

This is making me feel incredibly fortunate and appreciative of my employers and colleagues past and present. Any little rubs we may have had now seem even more insignificant when lined up against the anal nutjobs that other people seem to be encountering. What beats me is, how did the said nutjobs get employed, not to mention promoted, in the first place?

...wherein an individual gets promoted to the level at which their incompetence can wreak most havoc, or something. No doubt there's a wikipedia entry.

But I'd be amazed if there weren't a greater percentage of idiots in middle management roles in the public sector than the private. In the private sector, these days, morons will lose money and threaten the whole organisation; in the public sector they just hang around forever while the blank cheques keep getting written.

Years ago I worked in the warehouse of Commodore Computers (remember the Vic20?) and they won a large contract with a catalogue company to supply this new thing called a "PC". They called the shots and we had to follow them to the letter. Because I had 2 O-levels and my hand writing was neat I was assigned to hand write a label for every frickin' box within a box of PC's. How many? Enough to fill a 40 foot lorry container - that's how many. A consignment took me hours. One day the entire consignment was delivered back. Some knob-snot at the catalogue company had opened a box and felt a label was put on wonky....

I would've stapled her ears to her neck!

As an office junior in the late eighties for a huge London based transport conglomerate, I was once told by our Industrial Relations manager that my blotter pad (yes, still used ink and blotters!) was not to be used as a device to write friends telephone numbers and Stone Roses lyrics on, but should only be used for blotting purposes as blotters didn't come cheap. Same guy smoked 20 Senior Service every day in his office. Told him that I didn't particularly like coming out of his office smelling like a seaman's mission. Next day, got called in to the Personnel Director's office and asked to explain my insolence. And woe betide anyone who put a document up to the typing pool with errors! The typing pool consisted solely of ladies of a certain age (blue rinse), still wedded to the 50's who simply did not tolerate slovenly documentation. Anyone summoned to the typing pool to explain their prose usually went terrified, shaking in their shoes about the tongue lashing about to be given. Some wag once wrote underneath the sign for the Typing Pool outside the room "Beware. Dragons live beyond this point". No-one owned up to that little number but a few of my younger colleagues, I'm sure I never saw again.

Ever seen the bit in Quadrophenia where a very hungover Jimmy was delivering and collecting the internal mail? THAT was my job!

On another tangent, with a couple of girls and lads from the office, we decided (as you can at the age of 19 with money in your pocket) on a whim to have a night out at the Hacienda. Train from Euston to Manchester and getting the milk train back at 5 in the morning from Piccadilly and straight into work. Same clothes, stinking, still rolling around from booze and chemicals that were better than your usual London rubbish. Fell asleep in the loo at around 11:00 woken at 4pm by my understanding direct manager Ann (spitting image of Neneh Cherry) who allowed by hide under my desk for the last 90 mins of the working day from prying eyes. Spent the journey home to west London that evening alighting from the Piccadilly line every other stop to vomit.

Those were the days my friend, I thought they'd never end....

I got taken aside by my manager and told off for swearing. I politely pointed out that my colleagues swore like stevodores. "They do middle class swearing, your working class swearing is upsetting them."

I had no idea whether to be enraged or grateful...

pastoral care to a client by email. After using the phrase: "it seems as though things are really hard for you at the moment", I was dressed down for using the word "hard" instead of "difficult". This was apparently in direct contravention of the house rule which prohibited the "h" word in this context because of its sexual connotations.

I can't be sure, of course, but I feel pretty sure that the woman I was writing to didn't see it that way.

EDIT: Oh, yeah; I've just remembered something else. The same tosser once gently recommended that I avoided using words that ended in "_oothe" when I was offering telephone counselling, because they could sound sexually provocative.

is very fond of telling us that "you need to keep your eyes on the ball!"
When he is in one of his moods (brought on by domestic trouble we believe) he loves nothing better than to let off some steam by finding the slightest mistake made and give the culprit a twenty minute lecture about it.
When no mistakes have been made he is not shy about inventing a brand new rule and lecturing you for not following this rule that you knew nothing about until that moment...
Thankfully he has started to work less lately, leaving the bossing around to his next in command, a much more resonable guy to deal with.
On the other hand, if you couldn't put all your frustrations into loathing your boss, you'd need to take up boxing in your spare time...

And I spend all my time telling my borderline obsessive-compulsive staff to stop fannying about lining up the pencils, putting instruments away in a specific order and unplugging absolutely everything at the end of the working day.

Nailed for faxing something, back in the 80s, the wrong way round.

I didn't get it face up. Nope. I had the top at the bottom.

I shall let them know.

When I worked in a call centre, I was once questioned by a repressed stormtrooper with a clipboard as to why my visit to the toilet had taken 7 minutes. I fixed her with my coldest glare and asked 'would you like to me to go into detail?'

once where my betters were increasingly enraged by my choosing to have a lunchtime snooze at my desk and laughing hysterically at Roger's profanisaurus. They never said anything until they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Honestly, how bloody petty is that.

I handed a customer a 1p coin as change that was showing signs of discolouration. This gent then piped up with "Could you change that for me please?". At this I burst out laughing before realizing from the frown on his face that he was serious. So I opened the till and gave him a nice new one.

Arsehole.

that have compared various criteria for promoting people in an organisation (things like age, qualifications and merit), which have both come to the conclusion that companies would be better off promoting people at random.

and only because of little pricks with a bit of power or empty lives or both.

One such tosser asked me to call someone to ask them to call him.
Why? WHY?

when first demonstrating my job to me, told me that I was being left-handed "just to confuse" her.

Using my best Roger Allam-styled smarmy voice, I explained, smilingly, that yes, when my left-handed father married my left-handed mother and created me, and I was sent to a school which - unlike my sister's experience nine years before me - didn't try to teach me out of being left-handed, it was all simply because they knew that one day I'd meet and work for somebody who would be confused by my doing things the opposite way around to her.

I must have given her my nicest smile as I was saying it, as we've got on fine since.