Employees Who Report To IRL Michael Scotts Are Sharing The Most Outrageous Thing Their Boss Has Done, And It's Low-Key Hilarious
As fans of The Office, we all love Michael Scott and the ridiculous, often misguided, shenanigans he pulls at Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch. But what if you actually had a boss like him? Well, you don’t have to wonder. People across BuzzFeed and Reddit who have reported to a real-life Michael Scott are sharing their wildest experiences at work, and honestly, these 26 stories could carry an entirely new season of the show:
1. “We held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new hospital unit. In the middle of the ceremony, my boss walked from the audience to the front, took the giant scissors from the chairman, and cut the ribbon himself.”
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2. “One day, we had ‘kidnapping drills,’ where we ‘learned how to not be kidnapped.’ Notably, this was a regular, boring office in a regular, boring suburb. There’s no reason why kidnapping would be on anybody’s radar. Another time, he and several guys randomly broke into a push-up contest. Again, this was a white-collar office with middle-aged dudes in khakis.”
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3. “I had a principal who was Michael Scott-ish. He once planned a field trip to a museum three hours away without checking to see if it was open that day. It wasn’t. Students spent a total of six hours on standard school buses to eat at McDonald’s. He also announced the names of students who got suspended on the PA system by saying, ‘[Student’s name], grab yo’ stuff. You headin’ fo’ the crib!'”
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“That was probably a major violation of privacy rights. However, he was also great with the students and generally nice. He just lacked a lot of common sense.”
4. “Long ago, my 80-year-old boss pulled me into his office. ‘Paul,’ he said, ‘I’ve noticed that your shirts come untucked, and that looks unprofessional.’ I apologized. He then said, ‘I want you to start tucking your shirts into your underwear. Go ahead and try it now.’ I told him, ‘Joel, you know I have 15 women who report to me. I can’t undo my pants in the office.’ His response? ‘Sure you can,’ right before he dropped his pants and revealed his Spiderman underoos.”
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5. “At my wedding reception, he told me I was spending too much time talking to one person and needed to work the room more.”
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6. “We were an online maternity store, and our manager mailed out a bunch of cards to a list he got from a marketing company as part of a marketing campaign. The cards looked like they had been sent by a friend and contained ‘gift cards’ to our online stores (they were promo codes). Anyway, people freaked out. A bunch of people who received them weren’t expecting, had had an abortion or a miscarriage, or were dead, causing their families to receive their cards instead. Still, our manager was convinced that it was a great campaign and that most of the cards went to their intended audience. He actually went to each address the cards had been sent to, knocked on their doors, and asked if they were pregnant. He also waged war on the Better Business Bureau over the negative reviews we received over said campaign.”
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“The store’s CEO was also a flat-Earther, and a divorced couple ran the company. Nevertheless, they treated their employees well; we got huge bonuses at Christmas and COVID packages.”
7. “He wanted a pomegranate for lunch. 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 it was the easiest money I made. No, I did not find a pomegranate in the end. When I came back, he was eating Subway and seemed to have forgotten that he’d even sent me.”
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8. “I worked with a genuine Michael Scott (i.e., a nice, well-meaning person who just did some absurd things). Once, he couldn’t remember the nationality of our Hispanic colleague. He tried to ‘learn Spanish’ to make her feel special when she returned from maternity leave, but after, he learned she was not Spanish and was actually from Portugal. She knew, like, five words of Spanish.”
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“There were many, many moments like these. He was a great boss who genuinely cared about everyone in the company. There were occasional moments of brilliance, where he really got things done, but OMG, so many moments of ridiculousness.”
9. “He held a meeting with our whole team minus one person to discuss said person being gay. We all knew for over a year and never made a deal of it.”
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10. “I worked for a woman as her assistant. She had me order a mannequin online and kept trying to get me to order from ‘adult doll’ websites because she didn’t get what it really meant. She then paid me to take one of the mannequin’s legs to Nordstrom to find a suitcase that would fit the mannequin. Why? Because she wanted to fly with the mannequin to Pittsburgh and display it ‘as her daughter’ — dressed in her daughter’s clothes — at said daughter’s graduation celebration.”
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11. “I had a boss once who spent all morning locked in his office. He asked me to come in after lunch and showed me a handmade graph. He explained that it was a chart of all the sex he had ever had in his life. ‘See, here it’s 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.'”
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12. “I had a redheaded 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.”
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13. “I had a boss who would stop us in the middle of our work to hold company-wide meetings about 9/11 conspiracies and chemtrails. Mind you, we were a furniture-making company. He would get so caught up in his conspiracy theories that, one month, he forgot to order the wood to make furniture.”
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14. “My boss once hired a private investigator to follow his ‘Number 2’ around because he thought Number 2 was having sex with his wife. Then, he thought I was having sex with his wife and had Number 2 follow me. My boss finally confronted me when he found out I’d hugged his wife.”
15. “I used Michael Scott as a reference point for an old boss of mine. He made Chewbacca noises on the regular because one of my coworkers’ names ‘sort of vaguely sounded like Chewbacca’ (it didn’t); loudly used voice-to-text in his office to send really personal messages; shouted the same seven references to old movies and extremely awkward hip-hop song lyrics multiple times a day; and insisted on greeting all our international coworkers very loudly in their native language (they all speak perfect English), looking around for approval afterward. He also told me a lot about an improv show he did for a full year after it happened.”
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“That being said, he had all the good parts too. He never hesitated to go to bat for any of us — whether we deserved it or not. He gave sage business advice and great examples of how to face challenges out of nowhere.
He also came to every community play I did in the four years I worked for him. Then, for about a month after each play, he’d tell everyone else in the office how good I was in it and chastise them for not coming.
When things got serious or bad in my life, he couldn’t have been kinder, more helpful, or more supportive. Honestly? He’s probably the best boss I’ll ever have.”
16. “I had a boss who 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. I put a large folder to cover the gap one day, and she freaked out.”
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17. “My dad told me about his boss who once gave everyone awards to honor how long they’d worked there. He also gave a speech for each person. When one woman received her award, he spoke about how she came to work there and said, ‘At first, I didn’t want to hire her because she was so hot.'”
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“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.”
18. “My boss used to carry around a backpack full of hammers. If you fell asleep at your desk, he would start banging a hammer on your desk until you woke up. Then, he would autograph the hammer and give it to you as a gift.”
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19. “My boss is certainly Michael Scott-esque. During my interview, he tried telling me about the company’s four pillars but forgot one. (He told me later it was knowledge.) However, my favorite story is when we were prepping for a conference on a group call. He kept talking about getting a ‘golden hamster ball’ for giveaways (English was not his first language, so he always mangled his phrases). Everyone on the call just sat in confused silence. By then, I had become good at decoding what he meant and knew he was referring to a raffle cage. While he was raving about it, I privately sent him an image and asked if it was what he was thinking about. To this day, he talks about the fact I can read his mind and must be psychic — and he still refers to it as a hamster ball.”
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“When I first started, I was essentially Pam since I was both the receptionist and his assistant to some extent. All in all, he’s a pretty nice guy and a solid boss.”
20. “My boss once heard me use the phrase ‘economy of scale’ and then used it wrong five minutes later in a conversation with different people.”
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21. “I had a boss like Michael Scott. One time, he was considering selling the company to a Japanese company. While walking them around the building, he was heard saying, ‘We really bombed the hell out of you, huh?’ Another time, he got new patio furniture and sent the guys from the shipping department to put it together at his house. Orders did not go out that day.”
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“During my interview, he asked me how much I weigh. And I have a video of him telling a cringy joke during a sales meeting; you could see at least one person covering their face in embarrassment.
I also ended up with a box of pictures of an exotic dancer giving him a lap dance in the ’70s in the conference room. Same furniture.”
22. “When I was 21, my first boss in the US was like Michael Scott. There are so many stories I could tell. 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. 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.”
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“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.
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, which was always a nice surprise. He also paid my former coworker when she had to stay home all through her husband’s COVID.”
23. “For someone’s birthday, my boss decided it’d be fun to buy an anatomically correct, male blowup doll. She brought the doll into the office, blew him up, and dressed him in a construction vest (it was a contracting company). When I walked by, she was trying to manipulate the position of the blowup dick and asked if I wanted to be the ‘fluffer.'”
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“It was a family company (not my family). My boss often had loud fights with her husband, mother, and sister in the halls. I have a million wonderful stories about that place, but this one stuck out to me.”
24. “My boss called an all-staff meeting to announce his divorce. He instructed our receptionist to lie to his soon-to-be ex-wife and deny he was in the office at all times. When he was finally terminated, he kept the corporate laptop and cell phone. After receiving several strongly worded letters, he drove back to the office, parked on the edge of the road, and made his teenage son carry them across the yard and parking lot to deliver them.”
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“When I say ‘edge of the road,’ think of a busy highway. The big bosses eventually tasked me to coordinate his termination. They then gave me his job, plus my previous one. I can do both within a 40-hour week, no problem.”
25. “He once disappeared for four days. No call, no email. He didn’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.”
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26. “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, 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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OK, be honest. Could you see these happening in an episode of The Office? I definitely cracked up imagining them. Let me know in the comments below — and definitely share if you’ve also worked for an IRL Michael Scott!
