Jobs in Canada - Episode 15 - my boss the bully

In this post, I continue my story at Scotiabank talking about my boss D, the bully.
What do you think of someone who puts his hands on his head and says he is the smartest among his fellow citizens? I am not talking here about a president (who, putting his hands on his head, said that he is so smart that even the Chinese are amazed), but about boss D.
From the first moment he got me on his team, he started doing weird stuff. He would call me into one-on-one meetings to tell me he had been with the company for over 20 years and should have been vice president. He said (putting his hands on his head again) that he had all the company’s business in his head, and those who came after him unjustly became directors and one vice president. He and all whom he talked about were Indians like himself. I make a small parenthesis here. He was a team leader, but he called himself a manager. The manager called himself director. The director was addressed with the title of vice president. There was something wrong with the pride of these people.
 
Against me, D had even greater anger because I had a higher salary, I was a consultant, he worked full-time. I had about 30% more hourly pay, which must be calculated differently. I was paid for hours worked, I was not paid for vacations, public holidays, or time taken in case of illness or personal problems, the company did not pay me a percentage for the personal pension plan, no one paid me medical insurance, I had no protection from termination of the employment contract, etc. He had all this paid for because it was permanent time. But his face was red every time he looked at me, and I think with one eye he saw the hourly pay for me and with the other for him (his eyes bubbled differently).
 
What I had to do was mainly installations. We had to fill out a paper form with the steps during the installation (it was 2017 !! when nothing was done on paper anymore). Well, that form was D’s invention, and since hundreds of installations had been made filling out that piece of paper, he thought the bank would have collapsed without that form. He thought all DBAs were fools who couldn’t have done without that piece of paper. I used to fill it out while doing the installation for peace of mind, but I found out that other colleagues were doing the installations without looking at the form and then filling out the form because they knew it by heart, and they were almost identical anyway. I think they were just copying the previous ones. D didn’t even look at them anymore, I think he was sick of them too.
 
I lived in a suburb of Toronto and had a train home at 5:15 PM. I had to leave at 4:50 or 4:55 if I ran to catch it. Well, D would send me an email every day at 4:57 with an exclamation mark next to it (which meant URGENT, meaning I had to respond immediately). I think he was thinking all day about what to write in the email because he didn’t have much to do. After a while, he started repeating the emails because his imagination wasn’t helping him, something like: “Have you prepared the form for tomorrow’s installation?” What to prepare? I had 100 printed forms in the drawer. But I answered, “yes, it’s in the drawer.”
 
So I had to take the next train at 6 PM which was overcrowded. D knew very well which train I was taking because he was also taking the same train, two stations farther than me. When we met at the station a few times, he looked through me as if I didn’t exist. He was getting into the front cars somewhere. I learned this and sat on the platform at the back cars. The train had 12 carriages.
By the way: D came around 10, right before the department meeting. He had to stay until 6 PM (working 7 and a half hours plus 30 minutes for lunch). How did he catch the 6 train? He stole half an hour of work time every day.
 
I told D I wanted a staggered schedule, from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM. All IT managers want staggered schedules, some start at 6 AM, some finish at 6 PM, so the team covers much more of the workday. The rule was that everyone had to be in the office between 10 AM and 3 PM when meetings were scheduled.
D told me: “You can come at 5 AM if you have a lot of work, but when you leave, you leave at 5 PM.”
 
About 2 weeks after I danced in the meeting room (previous post), he called me again to lecture me about how important he was for the team and how unimportant I was. I told him I didn’t care about his frustrations. It’s like he swallowed an apple whole.
After a week, my contract was canceled because the bank no longer had the money to pay me. They couldn’t say for disciplinary reasons (for example) because the people from human resources had to investigate and hear my version as well, and that’s exactly what his manager, who knew D well, didn’t want. Or (maybe), his boss didn’t want to open Pandora’s box, because more would have been found out about what D did (he was always losing people from the team because of the way he behaved). With some kind of investigation, the calamity would have fallen on the director for not taking action sooner. I’m sure the director (well, the manager calling himself director) told the human resources department something like they want permanent time for the job covered by me, or that I no longer correspond for some reason. Anyway, I couldn’t take it anymore working in D’s team, and left without comment. It was a Tuesday, and they paid me for the whole week.
 
Somewhere in this Universe is a balance because what came next for D is worth telling. He took a kick in the ass bigger than all of mine put together. 
https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-16-ds-fate


Where it all started:
https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1