People Share The Smallest Amount Of Power They’ve Seen Go To Someone’s Head

From Friend To Boss To Bully

“We were two dudes of equal rank, but he had time in service on me. We hung out a fair bit, but not like best friends. Just decent coworkers who got along. Due to his time in service, he got promoted and they transferred me to be in his department and he was my supervisor.

He immediately started writing me up for literally everything. 2 minutes late sitting down at the desk. 1 minute late coming back from lunch when the entire office went out together. I was even scolded for making a suggestion in a meeting and not ‘going through the chain of command.’ Eventually, there was just enough paperwork and they forced me out. I had orders to my dream base canceled. I had multiple requests for transfer denied when I tried to explain that it felt like he was creating a hostile work environment.

In the end, the squadron CO sat down with me and apologized to me that he couldn’t have stopped this sooner, but by the time it got to him, it was too late and his hands were tied. The flight CO was out of town at this time, but I heard from a friend that when he came back he was ripping everyone apart for their actions and never taking any of this to him. So yeah, I got kicked out of the military because I was one minute late. Go eff yourself, Sgt. Handley.”

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The Elevator Dictator

“Many years ago I was working for a company that installed custom kitchens. We did a job for a large European bank in a multistory commercial building. Everything had to be brought in and out through the freight elevator. No tradesmen were allowed on the passenger elevators. And, of course, being a union building, the freight elevator had an elevator operator. And this was the king of the building. He had total control over who came and went. And if you angered him, he wouldn’t stop on your floor. You could get into the building, but you could never leave because he just wouldn’t stop at that floor. And if course, because he was also a prick, my boss had to tick him off by banging on the elevator door. So we would have to wait for ages to go to lunch or leave for the day.”

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The Worst Kind Of Office Dictator

“I used to work in an office that was pretty laid back, the department head had a pretty chilled out secretary who’d ask what we wanted when doing office supply orders and stick in extra perks if anyone wanted something. The cabinet was left unlocked so we could help ourselves but no one took advantage of it.

She left and we had some fresh from college girl. Talk about the power going straight to her head. She locked the cabinet and would force managers to ask permission for a pen or folder and they’d have to prove why they needed something. She even went so far as to create requisition forms if we wanted a pack of post-it notes. She also then decided that it was up to her who had access to the senior manager due to the layout of the office. She’d try monitoring how long people went for bathroom breaks when she was at the bottom of the pecking order and get upset when told to eff off by guys in their 40s and 50s.

A total little Hitler and the nastiest piece of work I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck with.

Whilst there she got married and when she came back from honeymoon she complained about how no one from the department came to the wedding. I wonder why.”

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The Angry Bus Driver

“My university has a shuttle service that is operated by the city but it only loops around university grounds. If you are a student at the university, you get a monthly bus pass through the fees you pay to the university, but in order for it to be loaded to your transit card, you need to request it before using it. The tap system thing on the bus will make a certain sound if your card works and another if it doesn’t, so if you haven’t loaded your card it would make the same sound as when you had insufficient funds.

Most bus drivers let students on if the tap didn’t work since they knew that we all had the pass and that we just forgot to load it. Some were a bit stricter and made you show Student ID, but they always assumed we used the honor system and let us all on the bus.

One time, this one kid got on the bus and realized that he had forgotten to load his card and when it beeped he explained the situation to the bus driver, who responded, ‘it’s $2.75’ and the kid looked into his wallet and realized he only had bills but not enough change. He was respectful throughout but when he told the driver ‘I only have $1.50, but here’s my student ID,’ and the driver responded, ‘You can pay me $2.75 or I can call campus security and pay them instead.’ The kid had to get off the bus and walk 20 minutes in the freezing rain because this guy decided to use the slightest bit of power to force the poor kid off the bus.”

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Respect His Authoriteye

“I was a safety patrol officer in 4th and 5th grade. Our job was essentially to stand in the middle of the hall before school, tell kids not to run, and tell them to walk on the third tile from the right. The only other duty was to raise and lower the flags. I took this to mean that I was a beat cop charged with keeping law and order, as I saw fit.

For some reason, we had elections to determine ranks (had basically no effect on anything). I was one of two lieutenants, outranked only by the Captain, who was my best friend. Therefore, I bossed all the other safety patrol officers around and told them what to do.

The worst was the way I treated other students. Sometimes I would see students running down the hall, and would go chasing after them. One time, this kid kept running past me, so I rounded up a bunch of other safety patrol officers, intercepted him in the cafeteria, grabbed him, and dragged him by force back to his classroom. I have no idea how no one stopped us. The teacher yelled at us to let him go when we got to the classroom, but we didn’t really get in trouble.

Another time, I broke up a candy trafficking ring. As I was standing in the hallway, I kept seeing kids that had candy (which I don’t think was actually against the rules) and I set about trying to ‘arrest’ the source. I cornered a couple of younger kids and threatened them, saying that they would get in trouble unless they told me where they got the candy. After some coercion, I got the name of the kid and found out he was selling/trading candy in the bathroom in the third-grade hall. Armed with this information, I rounded up some backup, and we busted into the bathroom like the SWAT team and I yelled ‘Freeze!’ In reality, we probably just walked in, but I felt like the SWAT team. The kid tried to stand up to us, but he was outnumbered, so we confiscated all the candy he had. I threw what I took from him in the trash because I was so excited. The other safety patrol guys though, they wanted to take the rest of the candy for themselves. I let it happen, but I ordered them not to eat any until they got home.

Suffice to say, I let almost 0 power go to my head. I promise I wasn’t usually a prick, I was a pretty nice kid overall.”

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Not A Good Director

“I became President of a college club that did musicals. It wasn’t even the theatre department, it was literally 30 people who just wanted to do musicals even though they weren’t theatre students. This one guy ran the group into the ground and insulted almost everyone at auditions. He cast the shows so it was starring his girlfriend and him, and they weren’t that great.

Also If he knew you were self-conscious about something, he’d literally cast you in a role that had to do with that, just because he could. During that time I was having some issues with food and body image and even though I was stick thin, I felt like I was obese and had talked to the group before about it after I passed out one day due to lack of food. Almost everyone in the club was supportive and cut down on the comments about weight. For a show, he cast me as Edna Turnblad from Hairspray- a character that is supposed to be quite large and is normally played by a man (I am female). It seems a bit silly now, but I was enraged, especially since I wouldn’t actually sing, the whole purpose of joining a musical group. I wasn’t the only one; people got cast in roles they didn’t audition for and would upset them to play. By the end of it, of the 30 people cast, they were left with 8.”

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This One Time, At Band Camp…

“In my high school band, the way it worked was one senior became drum major while a junior became the assist drum major then stepped up to drum major their next year. When I was a junior I became the assistant drum major and the actual drum major was a pretty good friend of mine.

She wanted to be more involved than the people who were before her and she started off doing pretty good, but then started snapping at all of us for the smallest things. I remember explaining the music to a girl who was a fellow flute player because she just wasn’t getting it and the Drum Major started chastising me for talking while our director was helping another section. One girl farted and her friend next to her started giggling and both girls got a talking to from the Drum Major. At one point, we were allowed a 5-minute water break and she kept getting upset that people were having fun just goofing off during the break. She was really just looking for reasons to yell at people.

Our director finally had to sit down and tell her that she was being too much. She backed off after that luckily. And by the way, this wasn’t a super large band where the director relied on the drum major to help keep an eye on everyone. There were only 20 of us with no color guard, so it was really just a title to put on a college application and for the headdress you got to wear at homecoming.

I wanted to do better than her, but the school got rid of the band in an effort to save money so I never got my chance to be major.”

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She Was As Loud As She Was Obnoxious

“My young co-worker was fresh out of grad school when we hired her. She got a promotion fairly quickly, which was great for her but she took it WAY too far. She started calling herself a ‘director,’ which is not her actual title and went around telling everyone she was going to be a manager. I found out later this was not true either, she asked her new boss if she could have her own direct reports and he said no, but apparently she just assumed because she got a promotion, she would get her own team.

I started working with her after her promotion, letting her know I’d like to expand my skill set and learn some of the things she was doing. She agreed to it, and I was excited to start working with her. Then she would SCREAM at me every single time I made a mistake for the first time, and wouldn’t even give me time to try and fix it before screaming at me. She would call me over and over until I answered, even though I was also working on another project at the time, had meetings for that project and couldn’t always be at her beck and call. One time she called me 3 times in under a minute while I was in another meeting, all from different numbers, then messaged me on Skype telling me to call her immediately. The emergency was to tell me to ask my co-worker when our Sharepoint site was migrating to a new domain (our company had just gotten bought out and we were migrating to the new company’s domains and emails).

She would also scream at everyone else that worked with her, and thought she was way more important than she actually was. I stopped working with her shortly after I started, telling my boss it was not what I thought it would be and she managed to put me on another project. I have no idea how that girl is doing now, but hopefully, she’s better now.”

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She Went So Mad With Power, She Snapped

“A co-worker and I were both in consideration for a co-manager position at a retail store and I worked my tail off trying to get the promotion. Because co-worker was better friends with one of the managers she got the promotion and was given the responsibility of handling work schedules, break time, etc.

She immediately ignored any and all time off requests, even ones that had been made weeks/months before she came on board and started changing around work schedules to accommodate her friends that preferred working the mid-day shifts so they didn’t have to work early or stay late. Eventually, another co-manager quit and they put all the additional work on her instead of hiring someone else, it got too much for her to handle and she just stopped coming to work one day and never returned.”

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The Entitled Coach

“I’m from a town of less than a thousand people. The high school was so small a few years after I graduated, they closed it down and merged with the next town over, still relatively small at about 40,000. That is just to set the stage.

The basketball teams that started in junior high were really good. For many years they had zero losses. There was this girl, I’ll call her Diane, that was 2 grades above me that played. We had been in the same small grade school for most of the time. I knew her, she knew me. She was my peer.

My basketball coach decided he wasn’t going to coach my senior year of high school. Guess who was hired? Diane.

I swear, this woman thought she was Phil Jackson or something. I’ve never seen anything like the transformation that happened. She screamed. She blamed my little sister for losing a JV game when she had nothing to do with it. The JV sucked. Varsity sucked. But I was good and had enjoyed the game my whole life.

The final straw for my hatred of Diane was the day my grandma died. My sister and I were headed home with a friend when my mom was driving the other way. We knew it wasn’t good. Grandma had been sick. We find out she just died. But we had to get home to get our uniforms and head back to catch the bus for a game. Obviously, we were distressed.

We get back to the bus, I tell Diane in confidence that my grandma died and asked if we could delay the three-point contest to decide who could shoot at regionals until Monday. Diane rolled her eyes and announced to everyone that our grandma just died, so we’ll have to wait to do the content when we get back, in a really snooty voice.

A few other things happened, but the most fun was at the end of the season when I received all-conference (we sucked as a team, but I was a pretty good player so I was proud), I said something like, ‘hey Diane!’ She looked at me, angry, and said, ‘my name is coach.’ I said ‘absolutely not.’ Didn’t tell her to eff off, but I wanted to so badly.

So yeah. A peer taking a coaching job at a school of 91 kids decided she was a god.”

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HIs Own Brother Became Annoying

“I work in a trash yard. My jobs is a linesman. Basically, I’m in a metal cabin on the top of a big metal shed. All the rubbish from the skips and bins come up on a conveyer belt and we pick and recycle through it. The layout is basically the first two people pick out the wood, the second two cardboard, the next paper, and the last scrap metal. Other bays on the wall are for other recyclables like glass and rubble. It’s the entry job in the company and you know everyone else that works there is above you, you are at the bottom of the pile.

It’s a job that requires no qualifications, there are lads up there that can’t even read, so it’s really not a job that requires brains. Just a team of 8 lads picking stuff for 8 hours a day. The money isn’t bad, you do go home smelling, but after the first week, you get used to it. You find things to amuse yourself and others, putting on masks, hats, glasses. Throwing adult toys about, you know, one mans trash, etc…

So you get the picture, it’s grunt work. I work there with my brother and one day he gets a promotion. The Line Supervisor (the guy who tells us what bay we’re working on for the day, make sure we are working) makes him Under Supervisor, only because of 1) the previous US was unreliable and 2) the guy he wanted to make US turned it down. The job of the Under Supervisor is only to do the Supervisor’s job when he’s off. So no change apart from telling people where they are working when the Supervisor isn’t there and a few more bucks in their paycheck.

He changed immediately, telling the lads to check their PPE, making sure they have bins beside them, telling them to stop doing things we always do, yelling at people. Doing things that not even the Supervisor does. And all of a sudden he starts telling people he got the job because he’s awesome at the job, super fast and the most dedicated on the line.

He had a habit of sending people to the office for no reason. But it kept coming back to me, the lads complaining to me about it all because he’s my brother. What they didn’t realize is that I also had to put up with it at home too because I was living with him until I could get my own place.

So tensions were rising for weeks and even the supervisor had started getting angry with him. I had come up to the line one morning to find that he’s been using my apron. I say something and he denies it, gets angry and doesn’t stop complaining about me accusing him of stealing it. Throwing rubbish around and sulking, he then threatened to send me to the office for no reason (again he has no power to do that). The Supervisor had had enough by now, so he sends my brother to the office, and when he comes back up sulking again, what does the Supervisor do? Send him straight back down.

It felt like a huge weight had been lifted and knocked him back down to earth.

We still can’t believe how quickly it went to his head.”

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Chefs Have Egos

“Men in the kitchen once they get a little bit of experience!

Context; I am a woman (fairly quiet personality too) who has been working in a kitchen for a chain of pubs. I’ve been there since November last year and since then we’ve had several staff members come and go, a few of them are male and once they start to get a hang of the menu they seem to think they run the place.

I don’t know what this shift in mentality is but with the few folks this has happened with they have been bossy. My team leader is a lovely guy who will tell me to do something and I will do it, same with another male coworker who started a few weeks before I did. I don’t know if it’s because they started before me that I see them as being experienced or (in my team leader’s case) more experienced than me but I get along with them great and will do what they ask, they’re also polite when asking for something to be done.

But I’ve had issues with some male staff members who suddenly act like my boss on shift. An example – I had one go ‘wipe that’ to me. I ended up snapping and responding with, ‘please.’ The same coworker told me off for not echoing back to the coordinator that I was making a salad for a plate (I was distracted as I was showing a new staff member how to make it). He then tried to tell me how to make a salad like I didn’t know.”

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Nerds Get Angry

“I used to be in this one Discord server, which prided itself in being a good, wholesome community. So it had the server admin, who basically held absolute power, a set of moderators and a set of sub-moderators with less power.

The end result was that the admin making irresponsible decisions without consulting the mods, one mod ignoring the rules in favor of a friend, another mod, who happened to be an admin in his own server preaching about leadership and the rest of the mods had no power at all, basically.

To elaborate, first of all, the rulework was messy and unworkable. Just finding the rules was hard because the channel where the rules were posted in was filled with irrelevant, casual conversation from the mods.

The server admin was too shy in enforcing rules because he didn’t want to lose friends. He also didn’t want to consider his mods’ decisions, for the same reasons.

My favorite part, there’s this one moderator, who was friends with some guy on the server. That guy is a legitimate Nazi. No, he’s not right-leaning, he literally idolizes Hitler, sees black people as an actual plague, etc. He also:

-Harassed people

-Drove a depressed person to a suicide attempt.

-Attacked Jews for… well, being Jewish.

But all those incidents were pretty much swept under the rug thanks to this one moderator who was friends with him. He did eventually get banned. Twice. But he got unbanned afterward. Yes, both times.

The mods’ justification? Free speech.

The other mods have virtually no power to decide anything or enforce any rules because the admin is too scared of losing friends.

Another mod, who happened to lead a server of his own, and was a member of my own server, took the act of being a Discord server owner a bit too seriously.

You see, I lead my servers more strictly. Rules are enforced fairly, and there are no exceptions or excuses. There was a person on my server who was being a prick, telling people to kill themselves, spamming Thanos smut to my moderators, stuff like that. Obviously, that would earn him the ban hammer, but that one guy got really really angry and said that he should be immune from bans, because of the off-chance that he might be depressed.

That nonsense doesn’t fly with me, I ban the spammer, the guy yells at me, leaves and then comes back. And then proceeds to give me ‘advice’ on how to be ‘less of a dictator.’

Then some other incident happens, he gets angry and calls me a ‘homophobic tyrant’ and leaves for good. But not before attempting to encourage others to leave as well.

From what I have heard, this isn’t the first time it happened, and he tends to be a bit too proud of himself for leading a Discord server, and tends to strut around and tell people what to do, despite having no power.”

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