What If The Boss From Hell Happens To Be a Medium Member?

Adebayo Adeniran
10 min readJan 21, 2022

Imagine a sexist, racist, psychologically abusive and an all round shit head being your boss? Our chap was all of those of things and so much more.

Morgan Basham via Unsplash

Originally published 10 months ago, it was removed by the editors of this platform. Changes have been made to the names, hence the republishing of the post.

There are a plethora of articles, on this platform regarding absolutely repulsive human beings disguising themselves as business leaders and bosses. To the unsuspecting, everyday reader in this space, awful bosses are unseen, so far removed from sane humans like you and me, plotting in the basements, looking to inflict maximum psychological damage on the rest of us.

What if the boss in question was a monthly paying member of Medium? what if the boss from hell pays $5.00 dollars like everyone else, commenting on articles like a thoroughly sensible human being?

My former boss — AH — was exactly that.

Not to be confused with the bloke with the same initials, who writes on venture capital on medium, our protagonist, the subject of this piece, was born on the 8th of June 1967 in Yorkshire, England and grew up out there, has spent the bulk of his life in retail.

Preamble

Prior to October 2006, AH was the general store manager at the Tesco Superstores in Brent Park, located very close to the A406, in North London. Legend has it that he was asked to leave when a fair number of Irish travelers were allowed into the shop to work. Tesco’s loss, became Asda’s gain, as he was quickly snapped up by the second biggest retailer in the United Kingdom.

At that time, I was working at Asda Wembley, which doubled as a store of learning (SOL) — a much-coveted status — afforded to stores with the very highest standards across all departments and the very best training managers. In London and the M25, there were only two stores of learning at the time — Wembley, North London and Swanley, Kent, a few miles out of the Capital.

In Asda Wembley’s case, it certainly wasn’t the best store by any stretch of the human imagination and nor did it have the best managers, if anything, it had an extraordinarily bad reputation as having poor managers…

Adebayo Adeniran

A lifelong bibliophile, who seeks to unleash his energy on as many subjects as possible