Former boss at my previous job. First software dev job after college, so I was super worried about not fitting in and not being productive. This was a tiny company, and we had long outgrown our physical space. So my boss had this enormous U desk in his office, and I wound up sitting on the opposite side of his desk, wedged into a space so narrow I had to sit the chair sideways to fit between the desk and the wall.
This guy was from Yemen, and there were some obvious cultural differences. For instance, he didn’t know how old his kids were, and seemed shocked that anyone would expect him to know. he was married, but never brought his wife around to any of the functions, or even spoke of her. Which… that alone is no big deal to me. I don’t talk about my private life at work much either, but there was more.
We had a female UI designer we hired on contract from time to time. Last time I ever saw her, he insisted that she sit at his desk to work, in his chair. Once she was sitting in his chair, he found a thousand excuses to have to “squeeze by” her, and every time of course he had to put his hands on her for some reason. She eventually just stood up and told him to stop. He didn’t stop, he kept needing to get something out of his desk, get to his phone, check his palm pilot, etc. I was sitting right there, super uncomfortable.
Did I mention the company was small? It was small. So we needed a new web server. So he tales the responsibility of doing the shopping for it, part by part. We were literally building our web servers out of generic back-page closeout budget parts. This is a whole chapter’s worth of stories on it’s own. But most notably was that in his attempt to price things out, he found a business online with a female salesperson. He called her… AT LEAST thirty times a day. Over and over. Every thing he could think of, he just wanted to see if they could get him a good price on a hard drive, a monitor, a video card, a USB hub. Over and over. And every time, the conversation ended with him being highly inappropriate. Asking shit like “What do you look like? I bet you’re beautiful. Blonde hair? Red? I love redheads. What are you wearing?”
Eventually that vendor would no longer take his calls. Once they started hanging up on him, he was like “DAMN! The bitch won’t talk to me. I was trying to sweet talk her.”
What?
One day he had to run to Lowes at lunch for some reason. When he got back, he started calling Lowes, being very fucking weird. I guess he thought I wasn’t paying attention? He’d call Lowes, ask to speak to someone in the window’s department. If the wrong person answered, he’d just hang up and call back in 15 minutes. If the right person answered, he’d turn around and speak quietly into the phone so I couldn’t hear him.
Dude was a serious creep. The kind of guy I would not let my wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter, mother, aunt, niece, or any other female I cared about be around him alone.