Michael Gary Scott was born on March 15, 1964. He was hired as a salesman at Dunder Mifflin in 1992 and proved to be extremely effective, which resulted in him being promoted to regional manager. However, he’s incompetent at this important role and keeps injecting his personal feelings into the work environment. Michael abuses his authority by holding events that his superiors disapprove of, such as The Dundies Award Ceremony, and likes to throw his favorite catchphrase “That’s what she said!” in business meetings and legal depositions. He’s also fictional. But the character has plenty of real-life ‘admirers.’
And we might not have even realized it if it wasn’t for Redditor u/Supersmaaashley. Some time ago, they created a post on the platform, asking other users: “Do bosses like Michael Scott actually exist? And if you worked for one, what’s your craziest story?” Apparently, they do! We at Bored Panda went through all of the 6.9K comments and picked out the best so you wouldn’t need to. Enjoy!
#1
I used Michael Scott as a reference point for an old boss of mine from the moment I started working there. He made Chewbacca noises on the regular because one of my coworkers’ names sort of vaguely sounded like Chewbacca (it didn’t), used voice to text extremely loudly in his office for no reason to send really personal messages, got really excited and wore a specific vest any time we had after-work outings scheduled, shouted the same like 7 references to old movies and extremely awkward hip-hop song quotes 100 times a day, and insisted on greeting all our international coworkers very loudly in their language (they all speak perfect English, of course), looking around for approval afterward, and then fully giggling at everyone’s French accents on conference calls. He also told me a lot about an improv show he did for a full year after it happened.
That said – he had all the good parts too. He never hesitated go to the mat for any of us whether we deserved it or not, he gave really sage business advice and great examples of how to face challenges out of absolutely nowhere, and he came to every community play I did in the 4 years I worked for him – and told everyone else in the office how good I was in it for the following month and chastised them for not coming. When things really got serious or bad in my life, he couldn’t have been more kind, helpful, and supportive.
Honestly? Probably the best boss I’ll ever have.
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#2
My first boss in America, I was 21. He was Asian-American. I had never seen the office but noted the absurdity.
He would get free potato chips from a guy in a company truck and would stuff his cheeks in the middle of telling me what to do. He always offered some.
He’d call our coworker a baby lion because she was tiny with unruly hair. He’d even do a small roar whenever she was about to report for her shift or when I mentioned her name.
He once threw a cricket at me from the very opposite end of the office floor. He and another coworker kept such straight faces that I finally convinced myself the cricket flung itself at me. I watched the cameras at the end of the day, only to see them do it. I’m still traumatized.
He’d also bring his daughter to work and give her piggyback rides in the office. He’d ask me to take videos too.
He had an open-door policy and would do shots in his office.
Would regularly fall asleep under his desk. The snoring was so loud you could hear it in the front. Once a client asked what that noise was and I said it was the plumbing.
Another time, he fell into a poison ivy bush and didn’t know it. He ran around screaming until we sat him in his office, semi-undressed, and put medicine on his wounds. He was so miserable for days.
He was actually the nicest boss I’ve ever had. Well-meaning if a little racially insensitive — all while being fascinated by other people’s cultures. He would buy different cuisines for us to try each week.
He gave bonuses because he knew the job didn’t pay much, so that was always a nice surprise. He also paid my former coworker when she had to stay home all through her husband’s COVID.
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#3
My current boss is a Michael Scott.
Once he came out to the office where all of us sit in cubicles and told us we needed to have an emergency conference. “Get up, get up everyone in the conference room this is really important let’s go”
So we all go in, he turns off the lights and the projector turns on. On the screen is not what we expected. It was an ultrasound video of our coworkers GOLDEN RETRIEVER. Our boss wanted us to guess how many puppies we thought we saw in the ultrasound and that the person who guessed closest would win 100 dollars.
Image source: chandlercreates, pexels
#4
Worked with a genuine Michael Scott: i.e. a nice, well-meaning person who just did some absurd things.
We had kidnapping drills one day, where we learned how to ‘not be kidnapped’. Notably, this was a regular, boring office in a regular, boring suburb. No reason why kidnapping would be on anybody’s radar…
He and several of the guys randomly broke out into a push-up contest. Again. White collar office. Middle-aged dudes in khakis.
Couldn’t remember the nationality of our Hispanic colleague. Tried to “learn Spanish” to make her feel special when she returned from maternity leave. (1) What he learned was NOT Spanish, and (2) she was from Portugal. She knew like, five words of Spanish.
Disappeared for four days. No call. No email. Wouldn’t respond to any of our attempts to reach him. Finally, someone drove out to his house to make sure he was alive. He was. He’d just forgotten to tell us he was taking the week off, and then lost his phone in a lake.
There were many, many moments like these. Great boss. Genuinely cared about everyone in the company. Occasional moments of brilliance, where he really got things done. But OMG, so many moments of ridiculousness.
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#5
My boss is certainly Michael Scott-esque. When I first started I was essentially Pam as well since I was both receptionist and his assistant to some extent. My favorite story was back when we were prepping for a conference. Some context, he’s terrible with the English language in general and will mangle phrases and descriptions to no end (how the turn tables…). So on a group call he kept talking about wanting a “golden hamster ball” to do giveaways with. Was raving about how great it would be spinning around while people walked by, all the while everyone on the call was just sitting in confused silence. However by that point, I had become so good at decoding his nonsense that I knew he was referring to a gold raffle cage and sent him image privately asking if it’s what he was thinking. To this day he still talks about the fact I can read his mind and must be psychic. And he still refers to it as a hamster ball.
All in all he’s a pretty nice guy and a solid boss. Hired me based on a gut feeling and has been decent to me ever since. I think I knew it would be a good fit when during the interview he tried to tell me about the four pillars of the company and forgot one. Told me later it was Knowledge.
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#6
I had one and these are just a few quick stories
– he asked me how much I weighed during my interview
– one time he was considering selling the company to a Japanese company and while walking them around the building he was heard saying ‘we really bombed the hell out of you, huh?’
– he got on the intercom and interrupted everyone by yelling for someone to bring him the football team’s schedule
– I have video of him telling a really cringy joke during a sales meeting. You could see at least one person covering their face in embarrassment
– one time he told me to call his assistant and have her bring him a bag of coffee and his 5lb dumbbell
– he had a ‘secret’ facelift. He was mysteriously gone for 3 weeks and came back with a beard.
– I ended up with a box of pictures from the 70s with an exotic dancer giving him a lap dance. In the conference room. Same furniture.
– One time I watched his business partner go down the pot luck line, tasting everything with the same fork. At the end of the line, he stuck his used fork into the cake. I haven’t eaten at a work buffet since.
Honestly, these are just the ones I immediately remember. It was 5 years of this.
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#7
My boss used to carry around a backpack full of hammers and if you fell sleep at your desk he started banging a hammer on your desk until you woke up and then he would autograph the hammer and give it to you as a gift
#8
We had an anonymous feedback program at work, and our boss was livid with the results, particularly with several comments that he frequently lost his temper in meetings and would yell at us.
The more he talked about how incorrect and unfair and hurtful these comments were, the redder and angrier he got, until he finally pounded the table and shouted, “I DO NOT! SCREAM! IN MEETINGS! OKAY?”
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#9
He wanted a pomegranate for lunch and they were out of season, but that didn’t stop him from sending me on a quest to every grocery store in town in search of a pomegranate. Multiple produce guys laughed at me, but that was the easiest $13/hr I’ve ever made.
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#10
I literally had a boss who would stop us in the middle of our work and hold company-wide meetings talking about 9/11 truther conspiracies and chemtrails. Mind you we were furniture-making company. He would get so caught up in his conspiracy theories that he forgot to order wood to make furniture one month.
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#11
I worked for a woman as her “personal assistant/ cat sitter”. She was super rich and off the deep end nuts. She had me order a mannequin online, and then paid me to take one of the mannequin legs to Nordstrom to try and see what suitcase I could buy that would fit the dismembered mannequin body, because she wanted to fly with the mannequin to Pittsburgh to display “as her daughter”, dressed in her daughter’s clothes, at that daughter’s graduation celebration. buying the mannequin was a whole thing too. She kept trying to get me to order from “adult doll” websites because she didn’t get it.
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#12
Only boss that comes to mind, have had some really horrible ones, that fits this was a foreman that on my first day took me around to the “dangerous equipment.” To show me the safety features. All of the so called dangerous equipment i have been around since i was 5. Table saws and other wood and metal working gear..i had to stop hom twice before he hurt himself. I unfortunately was not quick enough to stop him from shooting his thigh with a nail gun!!
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#13
I had a redhead boss who made us all sit down and watch a training video about how we shouldn’t refer to him as a “ginger” because it is bullying.
No one had ever called him that.
#14
He held a meeting with our whole team less one person to discuss said person being gay. We all knew for well over a year, and never made a deal of it. So yes, they are out there and that is why the show is so funny to me. I can relate..
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#15
I had a boss that used to watch me through a gap in the glass partition between our desks. She wanted to see if I was paying attention during meetings. One day, I put a large folder to cover the gap and she freaked. I still laugh when I think about it.
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#16
Never have worked for one myself, but my dad told me a story about his boss who was giving out awards to everyone in honor of how long they’ve worked there, and he would give speeches for each person.
A woman employee received her award and he gave a speech about the story of how she came to work there. And he said, “At first I didn’t want to hire her because she was so hot.”
My dad’s not working there anymore, but I love that story because I will never not picture Michael Scott giving Pam a Dundie and saying that about her.
#17
My Italian Michael Scott boss has that traditional stubbornness which he’s really allowed to display since it’s a traditional gelato shop and we’re an at-will state (US).
One summer, he fired a kid for ‘not being hygienic and not cleaning well’ when we all knew the boss was uncomfortable this kid was queer.
Next summer, I’m the manager and my then assistant manager and I are both queer women. In the midst of a mild homophobic/heretophobic (?) misunderstanding, we both came out to my boss. At one point before opening he pulls me outside to ask me a “personal question”- if I preferred having sex with men or women.
I told him women, and I’m a pretty open person and find jokes help break barriers, so I ask him which he prefers. He says women, “of course,” and we walk back inside where my assistant manager is and joke about it with her, and I tell him he’s a lesbian since he prefers women. He finds this f*cking hilarious, and yells out in the shop
“I GUESS I’M A LESBIAN!”
He’s grown more understanding ever since. His questions are sincere, though sometimes badly phrased.
Image source: pixieeeee0321
#18
My a*s boss insisted his daughters be flower girls in my wedding. I declined. At the reception, he told me I was spending too much time talking to one person, and I need to work the room more.
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#19
I had a boss and I am not kidding it was like he watched The Office and took it for a real documentary and applied Michael Scotts management lessons accordingly. Not the craziest, but the best example of a daily interaction with him:
He decided that the reason we were struggling to keep to time frames, is because our checklist was not right. However he has no experience in our field of work, so he did not know what was actually needed (the real issue was severe understaffing). But he got it in his head and there was no talking him out of it.
So I redid the checklist to have the same layout, I just changed the order of the items. He didn’t actually realise I changed the order, he just took one look and decided that nope, its not right.
So I went back to the original version and put the check boxes on the left instead of the right. Literally all I did.
Apparently it was perfect and we would see an improvement in our time frames because of his idea to ‘fix’ the checklist.
SIGH
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#20
I had a boss once who spent all morning locked in his office. He asked me to come in after lunch where he showed me a handmade graph. He then proceeded to explain that this was a chart of all the sex he had ever had in his life. “See, here it is blank until I joined the army. Then I went to a hooker here. Then they sent me to Vietnam where hookers only charged $2 per time. That’s where you see the big jump. I was on two tours but then got shot in the face. I came back home and you see how it just drops to almost nothing. ” I was astounded.
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#21
Long ago, my 80 year old boss pulled me into his office
B: “Paul, I’ve noticed that your shirts come untucked and that looks unprofessional”
Me: I’m sorry about that Joel
B: I want you to start tucking your shirts into your underwear
Me: Uhhh…
B: Go ahead and and try it now.
Me: Joel, you know I have 15 women who report to me – I can’t un-do my pants in the office.
B: Sure you can. Drops pants. He is 80 and wearing Spiderman underoos…
This is also the story of how I went to work at *oke instead.
Image source: paulfromatlanta, pexels
#22
Currently work for someone who played out, almost word for word, one of Michael’s crises. Remember the ep (during the Cathy Bates era) when the parent company was coming under fire for their printers catching on fire? Michael was equal parts aghast but also bizarrely loving being in the limelight.
My boss had a similar reaction to something. She would run around like a chicken with its head cut off constantly talking about this news story that we were only tangentially involved with. But it was national news. She was practically giddy, “…and now I have to return a call to Vanity Fair because they want an interview! And even TMZ is calling to!” When she would bring it up she sound so exasperated but at the same time she could barely contain her excitement that she might be quoted (for a sort of bad story mind you) in a major entertainment/news source. In the end, smarter heads prevailed and our response was, “no comment.”
Image source: JMCrown
#23
Mine had aspects of Michael Scott but the ones that are sad and pathetic and not funny. A couple examples: – he called an all staff meeting to announce his divorce. He then instructed our receptionist to lie to his soon to be ex wife and deny he was in the office, all the time. – he was just so, so incompetent at his job. If a task was too big or complicated he would just …. Not do it. Wouldn’t ask for help or anything, he’d just move on and leave whatever issue to fester. I would have to constantly monitor and follow up with him to get things done that effected my job – his writing read like he used a thesaurus heavily. Tons of superfluous words clearly put in there to make him sound smart – when he was terminated he kept the corporate laptop and cell phone. After several strongly worded letters requesting their return, he drove back to the office, parked on the edge of the road (think busy rural highway) and made his teenage son carry it all across the yard and parking lot to deliver them
I was eventually tasked by the big bosses to coordinate his termination. They then gave me his job plus my previous one. I can do both within a 40 hr week no problem.
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#24
I told him we were pregnant, but it was early and we weren’t telling anyone (we had had a few miscarriages), so he emailed the entire agency congratulating us.
After the baby my wife had a little belly. Nothing major just a Pulp Fiction “pot”. A year or so after the baby was born he congratulated her in the parking lot on being pregnant again. We were not. His wife was there and was mortified.
A year later he congratulated me again saying he saw my wife and when were we due. This was in front of all the ladies in the office. Again, we were not pregnant.
I once made him cry bc I told him a client didn’t really like him and would rather deal with me.
He had one of those yoga balls he would sit on instead of an office chair and he would bounce up and down while taking to you.
The list is exhaustive. This was at the height of the American Office popularity so it was downright amazing to see it represented so accurately on a week to week basis.
Image source: doordonotaintnotry
#25
I used to work stocking shelves at a grocery store. Thanksgiving was coming up and we were slammed. We were getting a massive shipment in, almost twice as many pallets as we normally get. After we unload the truck, we’re all scrambling to get things done so we can leave on time. Well our manager calls an emergency meeting. We all get into the back office and he proceeded to have a 45 min meeting about this is a big shipment and we can’t waste time. I thought it was a weird joke but he thought he was giving us a pep rally.
Image source: Lefthandfury
#26
Yep, I had one.
Organized a thoroughly awkward award ceremony once (that we never did again).
Asked a Mexican employee if his new baby’s name was going to be “No Mas” during the shower we threw for him.
Heard me once use the phrase “economy of scale,” then used it wrong 5 minutes later in a conversation with different people.
Didn’t know the meaning behind “Black Friday” and what it meant for a company to be “in the black.”
Just like Michael Scott, only more of a d*ck.
Image source: mackenziefox55, unsplash
#27
I once worked for a family company (not my family) where my boss often had loud fights with her husband, mother, and sister (an addict with a penchant for stealing) in the halls. I have a million wonderful stories about that workplace but one that stuck out to me is this:
Once for someone’s birthday, she decided it would be fun to buy an anatomically correct, male blowup doll. She took this doll into the office, blew him up, and dressed him in a construction vest (the company was a contractor). When I walked by, my boss was trying to manipulate the position of the blowup d*ck, and asked me if I wanted to be the “fluffer”.
Image source: Bananabreadandchill
#28
My mom’s boss was the head manager at an office job in suburbia, pretty similar number of employees and function to the Office in the show. He was in his late 40’s at the time and invited himself to my mom’s birthday party at our house one year. Basically was just my siblings and and a few family friends meeting up to play cornhole and chat for a couple hours. He showed up in pastel blue shorts, a pink polo, and flip flops with a case of Natural Light. He got hammered by like 9pm and started yelling at everyone. He saw a couple of our neighbors (younger guys) drinking next door and took the liberty to invite them over. Eventually he ended up in a wrestling match with one of the neighbors in the living room, which he finished by lifting the neighbor up in the air and body slamming him directly onto our coffee table. His final act of the evening was sh*tting his pants in the kitchen and passing out on the linoleum.
Image source: trialobite
#29
I had a boss once offer me 50$ if I came in to cover a shift for him. Instead of paying me cash he gave me a comic he claimed was worth $50. It wasn’t.
Image source: ClioEclipsed
#30
I believe every manager in the world has had a Michael Scott/David Brent moment; that is what makes it so hard to watch at times. I have had nights where I have often wondering how many I have had and how badly was I viewed as a result.
My worst I think is telling someone they got a job (in a warehouse) and then realising I had told the wrong person and having to tell the him 30 minutes later that he didn’t have a job after-all… dreadful.
Image source: ell_wood
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