Are you driving your boss crazy?

In “45 Things You Do That Drive Your Boss Crazy,” Anita Bruzzese reveals the most common complaints from bosses about what their employees are doing wrong. Here's an excerpt:

Introduction
Let’s get this straight right off the bat: Bosses do not hire you to fire you.

It costs money to recruit and train someone, from the lowest position at a company to the top brass. It takes time and energy away from current employees every time someone has to show a new worker where the bathroom is or how to use the computer system.

So, it makes sense that your boss hires you to keep you. But after nearly twenty years of covering the workplace as a journalist, I think we have a problem.

Based on hundreds of letters I have received through my syndicated workplace column for Gannett News Service and USAToday.com, and hundreds of interviews I have done with company managers and career experts, something is seriously wrong here, folks.

The reason I say that is because I’m always getting letters from employees who are bewildered — hurt — that things have gone wrong or are going wrong in their careers. They don’t understand it, they tell me. Why are they not successful at work? Why did the boss give them a poor performance evaluation? Why did they get passed over for the promotion or the raise?

The answer is usually the same: Because they didn’t do what the boss wanted them to. (Duh.) And this, I have found, seems to confound many people. (Double duh.)

Let me be clear here: A boss expects you to be the best and the brightest you can be. That means you can’t cut corners, or try to “get by,” or whine about what you deserve. They give you a paycheck and they expect certain things — many of which they do not believe they should have to tell you. That doesn’t mean you won’t get the training you need for certain tasks, but it does mean that you’ve got to stop making some pretty dumb workplace blunders.

It’s sort of like the robin that came to my house last spring. Not unusual, of course. But this robin had a problem. He continually flew himself — full tilt — into my window.

This was alarming at first. I worried the poor bird would at least break a wing, and at worst, kill himself. I wanted to help but didn’t know what to do.

So, I watched helplessly as the bird flew over and over into my window. It happened about every ten minutes for a couple of hours. He would sit in a nearby tree, fly into the window then return to the tree.

Unfortunately, not only was this disturbing to watch such a misguided bird, but it seemed the impact would literally jar the poop out of him. My window was covered with bird droppings and the bird showed no sign of stopping.

But finally, it did stop. He simply flew away, leaving me no wiser as to his reasoning.

The next morning at daybreak, I was awakened by a thumping noise. Every few minutes it sounded as if something would hit the side of the house, then stop. After lying there bleary-eyed for about ten minutes, I got a sneaking suspicion of what it might be.

The robin was back, and this time, he stayed. After a couple of weeks, after placing netting over the windows to try to keep him away, I was nearly crazed with that stupid bird. He was no longer a beautiful harbinger of spring but a nasty piece of ruffled feathers who was covering all my windows with poop, driving me from bed in the early hours and just driving me mad the rest of the time.

Finally, for no reason that I know of, he left for good. I don’t know if the other robins did a kind of “robin intervention” to correct his self-destructive tendencies or he simply tired of the window assault and left.

Just like that bird, people in the workplace do things that make no sense and end up hurting themselves and driving those around them whacko. You may or may not be as stubborn as this bird, but I’ll bet you have some bad habits that could be cleaned up.

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