what’s the smallest amount of power you’ve seen someone abuse?

Remember the person whose company accountant was nitpicking his travel expenses to the point of responding to a $12 Chipotle tab with,”Ordering extra guacamole is wasteful of member dues”? Or the weeks-long battle about the purchase of a $10 calculator? Or the admin who wouldn’t give anyone a new pen unless you turned in your old, used-up pen first?

And then there were these:

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I have had two different colleagues in two different jobs repeatedly change their signature blocks within hours of their boss being out of the office.

One of them would change his signature block to “Acting Deputy Spokesperson” every time his boss took even an afternoon off to go to the dentist or was out of the physical premises of the office for a conference.

The other changed hers to read “Acting Deputy Director” within an *hour* of her boss sending around a message that he had to go into five day quarantine because his son got Covid.

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In my old neighborhood in Chicago, there was an incredibly dramatic crossing guard. She was an older woman, who would halt traffic for every single person crossing at a four way stop, yelling, “PEDESTRIAN CROSSING” at the top of her lungs. She worked every morning and every afternoon on weekdays. It was always a slightly eccentric, but harmless part of the neighborhood’s local color.

We later found out that she was NOT a crossing guard, and had just bought a crossing guard vest at Goodwill.

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I worked with someone who would not read messages if he was cc’d rather than included in the “to” field of emails.

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Many years ago I was a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company. I learned that the mother of a professional colleague — a colleague who was also a vendor to the company and someone with whom we worked closely — had died. I wrote a condolence note to the colleague and put it in outgoing mail. The admin for the department refused to send it unless I personally paid for the postage because it was handwritten, so it couldn’t be business correspondence. When I explained that it was business-related because it was to a vendor, she demanded that I “prove” that sending the note furthered the business interests of the company before she would send it.

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Clearly, there is no amount of power too small for someone somewhere to want to abuse it. In the comments, let’s hear your stories about about the smallest amount of power you’ve ever seen someone abuse at work.

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