5) Micro Manager

This has to be one of the worst. A guy pouring over your every move. His hot and stale breath drifting into each of your facial crevices. Very unpleasant indeed. You know you can do your job, but you also know you can’t be trusted to make zero errors and work hard all of the time. After all, you get paid about 50p a day so why would you want to work hard all of the time? That wouldn’t be fair.

So how best to deal with this beast of the bad breath? This is a pretty simple one actually, you play them at their own game. If he’s standing behind you whilst you write an email, ask him whether you should use a full stop or a semi-colon, ask him when you should use another paragraph, what font size you should use. Should I put ‘yours faithfully’ or ‘yours sincerely’? Etc etc etc.

And then, if he’s off for a day do virtually no work at all, just half complete things and send him a trough of emails asking about basic and minute details, write in the emails that you couldn’t complete any work because he wasn’t there to make sure you did it right. When he returns he will have 100’s of emails to deal with which will jazz him right off.

This can go in a number of directions, he may simply transfer you to another department – win; maybe he’ll realise he’s being massively annoying – unlikely; or maybe he’ll say that you should know what you’re doing without his help, in which case you can say “well, I did think I knew what I was doing until you constantly second guessed me.” Surely the penny will drop?

I hope that in some kind of tiny minute way that has helped you. If it hasn’t, tough.