… a few weeks later a guy broke into Frick's office and shot him in the neck. Twice. At this point Frick rose up (presumably laughing deeply while his wounds suddenly healed before the assassin's eyes) and fought back. The cops came and arrested the assassin, and Frick was back to work in a week. And by "back to work" we mean he quickly fired 2,500 workers, and halved the pay for the ones who were left.
“The 6 Most Horrific Bosses of All Time | Cracked.com [1]”
And Henry Frick [2] was only the fourth most horrific boss of all time. I mean, I thought my boss at Negiyo [3] (it's been over ten years now) was psychotic—he got pissed at me because I came down with acute bronchitis [4] and took a few days (okay, two weeks!) off. He dismissed the doctor's note I procurred, changed my schedule without informing me, and had scheduled my exit interview with HR (Human Resources), while telling me, in no uncertain terms, that he had full blown pneumonia [5] for six weeeks and that never stopped him from coming into work every single XXXXXXXX day. I found out later that a few months before I started with Negiyo, he had a somewhat invasive heart procedure and was back to work the next day!
He also had a habit of logging into the computers systems at night and checking up on us third-shift workers (I'm not going to say he had no life, because who am I to cast that aspersion on someone, but he certainly took his job way too seriously, especially since the department itself was nothing more than an expanded version of Tom Smykowski's job [6] (no, really! If tech support thought a server was down, they would call our department. We would ping the machine, and if it didn't respond, we could then call the Unix or Windows administrators and tell them a machine was down. Seriously! That was the job! Some well written scripts could have done our job. Such was life at Negiyo).
After reading that article, I realized that it wasn't as bad as it could have been. At least he didn't lock us in a burning down office.
(Just a warning—if you are anything like me, then viewing any page at Cracked.com [7] will suck you into that abyss for easily a few hours. Just thought I should warn you.)
[1] http://www.cracked.com/article/89_the-6-most-horrific-bosses-all-
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clay_Frick
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002078/
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001200/
[6] http://www.llakomy.com/Projects/flashvideo/office-space/tom-smykowski-s