What was your most unprofessional moment?

Written for Quora.com in response to "What was your most unprofessional moment?"


I will share two stories from my first job.

This was back in 2003. I was a fresh graduate from a top business school in my country, and I got delighted to get a job in one of the top companies.

My boss was a horrible woman. She still is, but I am glad that I am miles away from her influence sphere now.

She had this particular management style of making fun of young employees and attacking them at their vulnerable points. She once pointed out that as I belonged to a middle class family, if she hadn’t hired me, I’d be roaming around the streets like a vagabond. That was not even the worst thing she said to me.

I had a regular responsibility of updating a very boring and useless document. Everyone in the team found the exercise to be boring and non-contributing, but she still insisted that I present it on the weekly team meetings (read team grindings).

So one week, I just didn’t get the report done. Looking back, I can’t really tell what motivated me to get so rebellious, but instead of completing the report by Thursday evening, I took an early out, went home and played some Sims 2 on the PC. I totally forgot about this until Sunday arrived (we have Fri and Sat as weekends).

I entered the office and remembered about not doing the report. I didn’t bother, and just went in to the meeting.

After grinding a few guys for not so urgent issues, she shifted her attention to me and asked to share the update. I just blurted out “I haven’t updated it”. She went in to an instant fit of fury, and literally shouted “WHY?”. I mustered the calmest voice I could ever produce, and said “Because I did not feel like doing it”.

The answer was so outrageously unprofessional and incredible, that everyone got silent. She searched for the right words, and after a while, told me to just update it after the meeting.

Later on, after the meeting, some of my seniors in the team confronted me. I was the youngest member and we were a close knit team; as in, everyone was united due to having a common enemy. So this senior lady, who was a sister figure to me, told me that she was very upset with my attitude, but also glad that I gave her a piece of my mind.

I felt proud then, but looking back, I realize that I should not have done that.

On another occasion, she gave me another boring task which was taking ages to complete because of her incessant revisions and changes in the scope of work. When I came up with the 18th version (yes, I had all versions saved separately) of the presentation, she came up with some totally new perspective, which meant I had to run a new set of numbers to get the figures updated.

I fiddled with the revised requirements, but could not find any way to fit them in unless I totally changed the presentation.

I didn’t do it, and showed her a slightly modified 19th edition.

She was furious, as usual, and asked me “Is this the best output you could show me?”.

Once again, my arrogant self replied “Yes, I don’t see any way to improve this without changing the document totally”.

She said “So you are confessing that your dimwitted brain cannot produce anything better than this?”.
I replied “Yes, you got that right”.

She didn’t say anything further, and I left the job within the next couple of months.