Oh, where to start? I've had so many bad managers that I wonder if it oughtn't be me writing an article on the subject. And this isn't to say I'd make a good manager; these are individuals so socially retarded that the shear wrongness of their decisions is blindingly obvious to anybody on the receiving end of them.

Naturally I won't name them, but whilst working for one of Europe's largest printing companies, I was part of the internal IT team developing the intranet. The IT manager, I discovered, was not only rotten-to-the-core racist, but was actually a closet Nazi. Well, not so closet given he wore his racial views on his sleeve, but it was still a shocking surprise to hear him quote Mein Kampf off the top of his head. I was eventually 'made redundant' due to not fitting into the team; it was made clear to me that it wasn't because my work had been substandard. Essentially what it boiled down to was that I wasn't racist, and so didn't fit in.

In a more recent role I came under the command of the company's marketing manager; a man who had no prior experience of marketing in a real company having only previously been a tutor of the subject at a local college. His 'hands on' approach to person management was to effectively ignore me for months at a time, allowing the interfering MD to regularly sidetrack me with non-essential work not related to my key projects, only to pass on the blame directly when the MD queried as to my progress on said projects (although in truth they were both as responsible for that sad situation as each other).