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Being employed is a burden. Yeah, it’s nice to receive a check twice a month that helps subsidize your way of life, but the tedious bullshit that goes into earning that money makes it almost unbearable. Only 50 more years of doing this mind-numbingly awful work until we can retire to Florida for three years before dying of a heart attack on the golf course!
Man, being dead sounds prime.
The good people of Reddit are here with another amusing workplace topic. This time it’s about the one moment that made them lose faith in their place of employment. The question posed: What work moment made your attitude go from proud employee to “I’m just here for the paycheck”?
Here are the best responses, via Reddit:
Boss at department store wanted me to pressure people into buying shit they didn’t need. Old fella came through, needed help with his disconnecting Internet. I know my networks, identified from his information that the fault was the Ethernet cable between his gateway and wireless AP, sold him a cheap cable. Boss tells me I should have tried to sell him a new router too. Guy was a fucking pensioner, you slimy cunt. I quit a few days later, fuck that shit, I refuse to lie to sell shit.
Ah, who doesn’t love Mall Scum?
When the new guy who relies on me to do his job got promoted.
Office politics. Almost better than real politics. Almost.
When I asked for a big ass fan be put in our work area to help circulate air, since we were working in 120 temps with nothing to move the air around.
I was told it wasn’t in the budget to purchase another fan. Two weeks later I found out that not only did no one check the budget or put in a request for said fan, we had two sitting in storage gathering dust.
Where the hell do you work?
This happened a few weeks ago. My boss told me to go to one of the project leaders and tell him to stop work at a particular project. So I do that. The project leader goes like “this is ridiculous, this is a 400k job”, to which I was like “[my boss] told me to tell you. Don’t shoot the messenger”. So the project leader talks to the operation manager, the operations manager comes up to me while my boss is in the room, goes like “XXX, did you tell the project leader to stop work at a particular project?”, I say “yes I did”, “why?”, “cause [my boss] told me to”, the operation manager turns to my boss, goes like “did you tell XXX to tell the project leader to stop work at this job site?” my boss says “no I did not”. There were 3 other people in the room when my boss originally told me to do this, and those same 3 people were also in the room in that moment, no one spoke up.
Courage the Cowardly Boss.
Worked sales in a radio station. We promoted the hell out of this concert coming up and usually if the numbers reached the goal we had I would get a bonus for it. Usually, a large bonus.
We double the attendance, easily beating the goal we had, and I received a $10 gift card to Applebee’s.
Applebee’s.
Immediately after I got that gift card I applied for a new job, and ended up leaving. When they asked why I was leaving, I decided to be honest and said “When you compensate someone with a 10 dollar gift card to Applebees for reaching a milestone for a concert, you won’t keep many people.”
I’ve thankfully never been to Applebee’s in my life, but how far does $10 get you there?
Worked as an attorney at a small firm ~30 attorneys. We had a gigantic case that occupied years of firm time and involved basically every attorney at the firm at some point. Without going into details, we won big time. We won an absolutely huge verdict for our client, and more importantly than that, we actually got paid for it too when the defendant chose not to appeal and agreed to an 8-figure settlement. Our firm took a standard 33% cut.
Since we were primarily a defense shop, the firm didn’t have a written policy on how to divide large awards from plaintiff’s side cases. Even accounting for the lead attorney and partners taking their standard huge cuts and associates getting minuscule percentages, every associate at the firm was looking at a high 5-figure or 6-figure bonus from the case (depending on seniority).
Instead, the senior partners got extra greedy, and so they fucked everyone else. They gave every associate $1,500, and not a penny more. Within 6 months, every single associate had quit. All told, I’d estimate that they screwed us associates out of well over two million dollars in bonuses that any ethical firm would’ve disbursed.
Holy shit. I would have made a scene.
For 7 years I had a boss who valued the work people did, and didn’t care how you arrived at the end product. Motivated and innovative employees were recognized and generally received additional responsibility and challenges.
Then came the new boss, who was the text book example of micro manager, and ran the department like it was a 50’s assembly line. Watched the amount of time people took breaks, watched the minute people arrived, and the minute they left. Achievements were no longer recognized and employees were just cogs in a wheel.
If there is no incentive to do anything more than the minimum amount of effort, the minimum amount of effort will be done.
I can confirm the minimum amount of effort portion of this post.
Both of my mentors — two ladies who saw potential in me that I didn’t and helped me turn my life around — were fired (packaged out) within a week of each other. Fired by people who had only started a few months before and then themselves quit a few months later.
Damn. Watching people lose their jobs is horrifying.
Big businesses often hire people to come in and make big ugly changes, get rid of dead weight, to fire people that are paid more then they are worth, but are too beloved to be gotten rid of, and these new people take all the blame themselves, then get fired by the head honcho, making the head guy look like a saviour at the end, even though it was all his idea.
See: Steve Patterson, Texas.
When the CEO sneered at me, “Should I call your mother, and tell her you can’t do your job?”
No one had bothered to train me and I wasn’t getting paid.
I took my things and left. Never went back.
I fully advocate quitting in fits of rage with bosses like this.
When the owners and GM looked at my prostate cancer as a major inconvenience – for them.
When they bitched about my being out for cancer surgery – and I’d been out less than two weeks.
When I was back after two weeks wearing a fucking diaper because I was afraid of losing my job because of cancer.
Then they expected me to be concerned whether they made a profit. Yeah, that’s likely.
Life can be tough for victimized bosses and their cancer-ridden employees.
Previous job: the owner of the company let go of a secretary due to hard times. It’s sad but understandable. He then fires her husband who worked the night shift cleaning crew because “I didn’t want any retaliation”. He took away both sources of income from this family at the height of the recession for no reason other than paranoia. The owner would say “we are family here”… sure.
Pre-emptive firing without cause is usually a sign that it’s time to float the resume around.
After 7 years of service, going above and beyond my role and pay cheque, volunteering countless hours without claiming for them I asked for 2 days off for my grandpas funeral as he lived 4 hours away and they only gave me 1 day. I had to leave my grandpas funeral during the service to get back home in time to go to work the next day and the past time I ever saw my grandma was at my grandpas funeral. She died a few months later and the last time I saw her was at my grandpas funeral.
After that I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
I’d burn the place down.
Watched as the district manager for a gamestop convinced a clearly poor family that their warranty didn’t cover their 3ds.
I’m pretty sure it did so i caked the hero line or whatever to report him. I got fired 2 months later, by him, the day before my benefits kicked in.
See you in hell mother fucker
Gamestop has benefits?
Recently the company I work for took away commission and replaced it with a “bonus” of a free pair of jeans from the store (the item gets taxed as well which is fine).
Today we found out we get an item up to 200 dollars. The company is American, and my store is in Canada. Our dollar is shit, so the prices of the clothes in my store are a lot higher now than before. In the states, that 200 dollars gets you pretty much everything save 2 or 3 styles of jeans and outerwear.
In my store, not a single pair of jeans fall into that category. So I contacts the DM and asked if we could go off the American price (which would mean we could actually get our free pair of jeans). Nope. It’s 200 dollars company wide “for fairness”.So I asked if I didn’t take my pair of jeans, if I would still get taxed. Regardless of if I take the jeans or not, I get taxed on the 200 dollars.
So they took away my commission, replaced it with a bonus structure I can’t use and get taxed on it anyways.
Moral of the story: Canada is dogshit.
When they did layoffs (during the recession, I understand) but laid off the people who cared about their job and worked their butts off and kept the people for whom it was like pulling teeth to get them to do anything. Well, that, and also when I was interviewing for a promotion and the interview was 15 minutes of them telling me how much they loved my work and how perfect I would be for that position, and then ended with “and we’re giving it to the VP’s daughter”
Ah, blatant nepotism. My favorite part of capitalism.
Do you have a story that can top these? Leave it in the comments. You can read the rest of the original thread and the replies HERE..
[via Reddit]
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$10 gets you half of a 2 for $20 at Applebees, so that’s something. Just means you’re going dutch on your date.
Sometimes when our office doesn’t drink enough of the good beer out of the beer fridge on Friday afternoons they restock it with Miller Lite instead.
Not as bad, but I was in charge of health and safety for a manufacturing company that had temperatures in the 110 degree range. I had requested from the parent company that they look into any sort of air conditioning system. They determined that it was too big of an expense, so they sent the operations manager out to buy some coolers and ice to keep bottled water in.
Someone reported the company to OSHA. The official conclusion was “Yup, it’s hot in there. But at least they’re doing something about it.” That was about the time I decided it was time to get out of there and never work in safety again.
I did an engineering internship at a steel mill in college (terrible job environment, wouldn’t recommend) and they have some interesting health and safety issues. I remember once a roll of steel somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 pounds got dropped from a crane, rolled right through the concrete wall of the factory, and sliced a F-150 completely in half like it was a loaf of bread. I have a picture of it somewhere, I need to find it.
Mfw I know that feel, I need a hug bro
I once got called into the VPs office for him to tell me and my manager that we were meeting with some new partners that night for dinner and drinks. He was very casual about it and said only to come if we could make it. A friend of mine was in town only for the day and we had made plans a week ago to get dinner. They don’t pay me enough to dictate my life outside of work so I went to dinner with my friend. The next day we had meetings during the day with the new partners and lunch was catered. I saw the list of who was allowed to eat the food and the cut off was just before my name, just to show how valuable I am apparently. Later in the day I got chewed out by the VP for not showing up to the dinner that he “told” me to be at. Finally to put a bow on the whole day, I got my first “Happy Birthday” as I was walking out the door to go home.
Every year we have a Christmas decorating contest. My team came in 3rd place. 3rd place means $15/person. My company taxed this $15.
Not as bad but I got a new position (It wasn’t a promotion because I wasn’t making any more money but I had a hell of a lot more responsibility) at the publishing company I currently work for back in late August. Their idea of training was sending me 40 pages of notes about how to do my job, and nothing else. I messed up filing reports and they told me to take my time so I wouldn’t repeat my mistakes. I do what they tell me to do.
Month and a half later they call me up and tell me I’m not working fast enough to meet their needs (primarily because I don’t wanna fuck up again so I check my work before sending it). They sent me back to my current position (where they never hired anyone to replace me) and hired someone else. From talking to everyone in the company they all universally agreed that shit like that happens all the time. Admittedly, it’s not nearly as bad as the examples above.
That would be rough to recover from ego-wise.
I worked for a company where the owner sold the business on a Tuesday (new owner would be moving everything to a different state). He told us that same day that our last day would be Friday so we should all look for new jobs. He wasn’t going to pay us for vacation or helping him pack up the entire building either until I told him how much of a miserable coward that made him.
Only 2 people were offered to move with the new company; I opted not to move to Chicago.
Like others have said, this story isn’t as bad, but working for a weasel is never fun.
While working full time in the windows and doors dept of a big chain hardware store, I had a store manager completely fabricate a story to a couple that wanted to return their special order, so that I was the bad guy. I can’t remember exact details, but it was more than just telling them I ordered the wrong thing. My manager went out of his way to make me look stupid. He was catching heat because the customer wasn’t happy (part of a store managers job), but he didn’t like so he blamed me. I found out through the grapevine the same day, but luckily I was about to start my apprenticeship for my current job so I just had to ride out that week. I don’t know how people make careers out of retail.
Unless it is written in some form in a contract of your employment that you are entitled to bonuses, don’t be a whiny bitch when you don’t get them. It is a fucking BONUS, you aren’t entitled to anything other than your salary/hourly wage. Fuck that guy bitching about the $10 Applebees card. I’d gladly have my half of the 2 for $20 comp’d.
You sound like a fun time
Worked for a fairly large company whose executive team was comprised of mostly the same family. A couple years ago, they started having the senior management (VP of Sales, Marketing, Operations, etc.) who had been working there for 10+ years start training members of the family for their replacements. It was like receiving an expiration date for your career when you were assigned to start training one of them. Needless to say, the fresh-out-of-college family members who took over have been driving the company into the ground ever since that disgusting display of blatant nepotism.