I work for a Federal agency which has in excess of 500,000 employees. Most managers come up through the ranks, but occasionally upper management reaches outside the ranks when they can't get enough suckers who want to move into management. I had the misfortune of having one of those "outsiders" who went into management training before he even finished his 90-day probationary period, graduated from the training program and received three promotions in two years.

The man is a control freak with an explosive temper, which is manifested if he feels that you're trying to usurp his authority or simply can't met the demands of doing your work and his too, because he doesn't know what he's doing. He required that any employee in the office using company email to contact anyone else in the company send a copy of that email to him, along with their responses and any subsequent emails. One time I came to work on Tuesday morning and found him at my desk reading my emails from the server, at which time he exploded because I had DARED to respond to an email from someone in the district accounting office without copying it to him. After he finished his 15 minute harangue, I filled out a sick slip for stress, went to see my doctor, and took the rest of the week off with stress leave.

He also made use of his power to block our use of the agency's computer systems on multiple occasions. One morning he had a confrontation with my office mate, and to "reinforce" his authority over us, disabled computer access for both of us. I wasn't even in the building when this happened, but he blocked me anyhow, THEN expected me to get my work done without the computer. Each of the three times he locked one of us out of the computer, it took up to a week to get full access back on all programs, and until we had that access, we couldn't do our full job. He's no longer in my office, but is inflicting his control issues and temper on a nearby office instead, except that he apparently did something that got his boss upset with him and he was summarily removed from a higher level detail and moved to the nearby office. Perhaps he treated his boss like he treats his subordinates?