Help! My boss is nuts

A reader from New York writes:

I worked in the research labs for a company I won't mention, except that its initials are Eastman Kodak. My boss thought that because it took him 5 minutes to read my monthly report, then it must have taken me 5 minutes to do the work. He would give me jobs that had strict deadlines. After they were done, he ignored the results. He would give me research problems that were impossible to solve, then berate me when I failed. Then he would give me something easy because I "wasn't capable of handling more complex work" and then berate me when I came up with a good solution because the problem was "trivial". I finally walked into his office and quit. His response: "You can't quit, you're fired".