The 10 Most Horrible Real-Life Bosses

The awful workplace superiors in the new movie Horrible Bosses have nothing on these a-holes.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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At one point or another, most people hate their bosses. Those who can genuinely contest this notion are amongst a highly privileged few, and should do whatever it takes to hold their jobs down for as long as humanly possible. Because, for the rest of the world’s low- to mid-level employees, the office, or wherever one calls “work,” can be a miserable cauldron of humiliation, psychological torture, and piece-of-shit copy machines. Waking up at the ass-crack of dawn five days a week is grueling enough—having to do so in order to share space with a cold-hearted superior, one who shows no signs of ever offering a promotion and seems to exist only to make his or her workers’ lives dismal.

Much like the trio of workforce leaders in the new comedy Horrible Bosses, in which Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis play three friends who share a mutual hatred for their in-office authority figures. And, boy, are their bosses real pains in the ass: Bateman’s boss (Kevin Spacey) teases dude with a promotion only to give himself the bump up; Sudeikis, meanwhile, has to answer to a cokehead asshole (Colin Farrell) whose favorite hobby is pretending he’s a kung fu master; as for dental assistant Day, his sex-obsessed, gorgeous dentist of a boss (Jennifer Aniston) threatens to tell his fiancée that he’s cheating on her if he won’t sleep with her.

As bad as those characters sound, though, they’re softies when compared to the bosses who’ve earned piss-poor reputations in the real, non-Hollywood world. Throughout history, superiors of varying power brackets have inadvertently killed employees, purposely murdered employees, and treated them like slave laborers. A nymphomaniac boss who looks like Jennifer Aniston doesn’t sound so awful anymore, does it? Wait until you get a load of the 10 Most Horrible Real Life Bosses.

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Richard Beckman

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Pablo Escobar

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Naomi Campbell

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Francine Patterson

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Alex Campbell

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Henry Clay Frick

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George Pullman

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Henry Loeb

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William Bryant and Francis May

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Max Blanck and Isaac Harris

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