ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 31, 1996 TAG: 9609030024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: Associated Press
NOTE: Below
They don't hide under rocks, but they do lurk in office closets. Their eating habits are bad, their social skills worse. If it wasn't for hard feelings, they'd have no feelings at all.
They are America's most evil bosses, cited by their employees in a national hunt for the country's worst executive. Author Jim Miller, chronicler of stomach-turning supervisors for the past four years, is again searching coast to coast for Beelzebub in a business suit.
Early returns show there are no shortage of potential ``winners?''
There's ``Horrible Hilda,'' who requires an avalanche of adjectives for her ineptitude - a ``contemptible, vindictive, malicious, incompetent, nasty slob,'' writes one of her employees.
Want specifics? Hilda ``made an employee, who recently had open heart surgery, carry a 20-pound bag of cat litter up steep stairs.'' And her table manners? ``You can always tell what she had for lunch,'' the worker continues, ``because she's wearing it down the front of her blouse.''
There's the cost-conscious restaurant manager who recycles ``used jellies, butter patties, empty syrup jugs, old dinner rolls and other food items out of the garbage,'' one of his workers writes.
Bonus: ``He conveniently `forgets' to give the waiters their tips.''
Mr. Paranoid, a bad boss ``who managed by irritation,'' routinely searched employees' desks and trash cans, monitored their phone calls and hid in a supply closet to overhear workers' conversations, another writer moans.
And there's this front-runner: The boss who lost it on the morning a worker was hospitalized for major surgery. A scheduled replacement failed to show up for work; the boss called the hospital to berate the ailing employee.
``The boss demanded that he get his clothes on and come back to the office immediately,'' this entry explains. ``The boss was screaming and throwing a fit over the phone, until the hospital personnel hung up on him.''
This is Miller's fourth annual contest to peg the nation's No.1 bad boss. The veteran businessman has compiled some of the best (and worst) entries from the past in a new book, ``Best Boss, Worst Boss'' (Summit, $22.95).
The book, his second on tips for good management skills, recently made The New York Times list of best-selling business books. As part of his annual hunt, he tries to determine the nation's best boss, too - a pursuit nowhere near as entertaining as the hunt for nasty bosses.
Bad bosses seem to dominate, too - last year's negative entries outpaced the positives by a 7-1 margin.
The 1995 winner was a Midwestern sales manager who allegedly ordered employees to get back to work when they tried to help a co-worker who had suffered a heart attack. Also, fearing a drop in productivity, he waited until the end of a workday to announce that a missing employee had been found dead.
This year's contest opened in mid-July and runs through Sept. 30.
Having a rotten boss can pay off: The winner collects an expenses-paid, one-week trip for two to Kauai, Hawaii.
And just to show life is unfair: So does the employee with the best boss.
Entry forms are available by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to 1996 Best Boss/Worst Boss Contest, P.O. Box 200907, Arlington, Texas 76006.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 linesby CNB