It feels like awful bosses never run out of ways to make their employees’ lives harder, but some executive decisions are particularly baffling. Take, for example, this boss who told his employee that moving to an open desk near a window wasn’t acceptable because having a window was above his position.

The original poster works in a small office and had spoken to her boss several times about moving desks as their current desk had no natural lighting and no temperature control, forcing them to use a space heater in the winter.

Their boss responded with remarks like “I don’t see why not” whenever the topic would arise, giving OP the impression it was fine to move desks. With this in mind, they moved into an office their colleague had vacated when they moved to a larger office, and they sound like a prisoner seeing the outside world for the first time in years: “It was so nice to be out of the harsh overhead lighting, actually know what the weather is, be able to track the passing of time, have circulating air…”

Unfortunately, one of their colleagues let their boss, who was working from home, know about the move, prompting the boss to send OP a genuinely unhinged email reprimanding them for “feeling entitled to an office” and not discussing it with someone beforehand (setting aside all of those discussions they’d had, I suppose) and that the office they’d moved into was “above [their] position.” The boss explained that the office OP chose was the nicer of the two vacant ones, and that if they were to be allowed to move into an office, it would have been the other one, “but even that would warrant further thought.”

OP moved back to their original desk, and admits they may have shed some tears over how humiliated they feel. Thankfully, some commenters had a few suggestions for OP, including conducting all of their conference calls on speaker while talking loudly, or just quitting, and letting their boss know exactly why they were doing so.

Whatever OP does, we hope they end up somewhere with lots of natural light and ventilation.