Bad Boss: Ditch Digging in Hell

The movie Horrible Bosses opens this weekend. If you’re a dude who’s made it to your twenties or beyond, you’ve probably had a horrible boss once yourself and live to tell the tale. In honor of this common bond we all share, we’ve asked our contributing staff to share some bad boss nightmares of their own… We hope you revel in our unfortunate plights!

The Boss

In the middle of a hostile war zone, the last thing you want to have is an incompetent boss. Southern Afghanistan was a very intimidating place in early 2009. Women and children were getting mutilated and killed in broad daylight, corrupt officials were bailing their insurgent cousins out of jail, and Osama Bin Laden still had breath in his body. Terror walked the streets and I was digging in the dirt.

I worked on an airfield in Kandahar for 6 months. During that time I was under contract to install and maintain communications infrastructures for NATO, local nationals and the good ol’ US DoD. A cable guy can do his job anywhere in the world and my skills had lead me to one of the worst places under the sun. In this decaying land of hate, I wound up being the proud subordinate of a complete fool.

Carl Daubler* was boss of a 13 man shop. I was the lead technician on the cable side of the house. I was the only technician on the cable side of the house. The rest of the shop managed the network and took care of the equipment and supplies. A job ticket came in to provide a newly built airplane hangar with the capability to network office computers. We had an issue between the server and the hangar.

A meeting was called to discuss how to get a fiber optic cable from our building to the site 5,000 feet away. I recommended utilizing a pre-existing connection that passed through multiple facilities owned by NATO partners. We had little resources and laying new cable would require almost all the line we had and a repeater to boost the signal after 3,000 feet. My shop superintendent had already made plans to provide the connection. This was on a Saturday. We all agreed to resume work on the request on Monday.

Monday morning I drove past the new hangar. There was a cable on the road that ran alongside a chain-link fence for about 1,000 feet. Multiple gates were open along the fence line, and construction vehicles had been running over the fiber optic cable for hours. The line crossed under the street, through a drain, and came out to lie on a rock-covered field. It ran on the rocks for 500 feet then ended where another cable began and continued for about 3,000 feet. The two ends were to be spliced together.

A car came tearing across the field toward me and ran over the fiber I hadn’t just followed. The total damage now would cost around $5k. The driver shouted out of a rolled-down passenger side window, “You need to leave now. This field needs to be de-mined.” Apparently, the Soviet-Afghan War had left many tracts of land littered with waiting munitions ready to explode. We got the fuck out of Dodge quick.

I went back to my shop and explained the damage I saw. The guys who spent their Sunday laying that cable had been told that after the two lines were spliced together in that field, it would all be buried 2 feet in the ground from end to end. We then talked hypothetically about shovels hitting mines. Word got to me that Superintendent Daubler had sent the whole shop out to do the work. Not only did an EOD crew find mines in that field, but they uncovered buried corpses as well. That’s bad management. And a ridiculously crappy boss.

*Names have been changed to protect the horrible.