People Spill The Revenge They Got That Their Enemy Brought Onto Themselves
12. Really Want To Go To The Bathroom Despite Her Warning? Fine, Go Ahead
“My nan and grandad used to live in sheltered living accommodation. It was basically like individual flats along a corridor. My nan lived in the flat across from the toilet room, and one weekend when I was 9, I was staying with her, and her neighbor from a few doors down knocked on the door.
Another resident, one of the eldest there had an accident in the toilet.
I remember going out with my nan, and it stunk. When I looked past the toilet door, it looked like a colostomy bag had exploded; there was diarrhea all on the floor. Bob had been taken away by his daughter and grandson, and my nan’s neighbor wanted my nan to tell her what to do.
My nan told her to go into her flat and pull the cord that calls the warden, and while she was in there to make a note to put on the door to stop people going in.
The leisure room was always packed full of residents and family members on Sundays, and no one needed that surprise. I remember Beryl saying, “Oh yes, Mary, I should have thought of that, silly me,” and my nan replying, “foolish cow” under her breath.
About 2 minutes later, the man’s daughter, who lived in the flat above my nan’s, turned the corner looking like her usual miserable self.
My nan hated the man above her until her death, and I hated his daughter. She was 45 and once trapped my fingers in the laundry room door, she shoved my cousin down the last few steps, and she dropped a flower pot on a resident’s foot on purpose.
At this point, my nan is guarding the toilet door waiting for Beryl, and I’m standing with her because she’s singing the White Cliffs of Dover to me when we’re rudely interrupted. The horrible woman, Lesley, demands my nan moves as she needs to use the toilet.
My nan says no but gets cut off as to the reason why as Lesley starts shouting at her, calling her all sorts of names, swearing at her, threatening to beat her. The part that always stuck with me was when she said, “Get out of my way, you ugly old jerk. You’ll be dead before I pee my pants, so I don’t have to worry anyway.
Now move and let me in or else.”
Through all this I’m looking at my nan with my mouth wide open, just truly scared for this lady who’s calling her names. My nan was the loveliest, kindest person ever, but she was also mean on occasion and spiteful and she held a grudge, but she never held her tongue. But she didn’t do anything. Lesley was getting herself worked up again, and when she brought her body forward and started shouting, my nan just moved to the side.
Before she’d even fully moved, Lesley had shoved her, opened the door, took a big step in, and slipped. Feet in the air slip and all. It was beautifully disgusting.
When she hit the ground and took a few seconds to recover and take in her surrounding, she shrieked and hurriedly tried getting up. She’d made it to one knee and was mid-thrust up when she fell again.
I don’t think she could do anything but shriek and scream. I know I couldn’t do anything but gag. My nan says, “There’s been an accident in here” and then turns to me and quietly says, “If you’re going to be sick, try to aim for her; you won’t get in trouble.”
And that is the story of how Lesley got the nickname P******p for 15 years until my grandparents died.”
11. Just Leave? Okay, I Will
You’ll definitely miss them.
“About a year ago, I was hired for an automated marketing company as a UX Designer.
They did mention they’ll hire a senior above me as well.
I was happy as this was my first ever job as a young guy. The company founder was a guy in his early 30s whom I worked with very smoothly along with all other teams.
5 weeks later, this grumpy, old CEO shows up from their parent company (which owned the one I worked for), he always had some negative comment to pass to the team although I was never treated badly yet since they knew my importance (I was the only one driving their UX Design work; they never hired a senior).
I asked the founder of the company for a laptop (which they promised me when I first joined). The parent company CEO stopped them from giving that to me as he was very stingy and had no sense of productivity versus more hours of useless office sitting
I kept bringing my personal Macbook to work every day. One day, the tracking pad broke. I got angry because they should have given me a device to work on.
I kept pushing them for a good week or two, but the old guy (CEO) kept delaying with no intentions to provide me one.
So I told them that I wouldn’t be coming to the office and will be working from home given the fact that it’s my personal device.
A week later, that parent company CEO called me to the office to discuss something else but also asked me directly, why I have not been coming to the office.
I told him that I won’t bring my device every day to damage it further as I should’ve been given one a long time ago, and he started arguing. I went back and forth with him while everyone watched with their jaws dropped. It wasn’t shouting but an aggressive tone with loud voices than normal from both of us.
At the end of it all, he said, “Don’t give me that attitude, and if you don’t like it here, then you can leave.” Others jumped in, calmed the situation, but I made my mind to comply.
As soon as I received the paycheck 3-4 days later, I resigned and wrote a letter to everyone explaining how pathetic his leadership was. Turns out, 2 other guys resigned with me as well in protest to his ways.
The project deadline got totally screwed. They couldn’t find any UX designer to continue, more developers left as well, their investor backed out seeing their performance and inability to meet the deadline, they had to shut it all down, couldn’t even pay the office rent.
That young founder still contacts me to offer projects from time to time as I was pretty good at freelancing before and after this job.
Pretty satisfying.”
10. Think You Can Get Away With Being Rude? We'll Show Your Photos To Your Partner
“Once upon a time in my computer repair shop days, a man came in with his wife and his desktop.
It’s been a while so I can’t remember the exact complaint, but the system was generally misbehaving. I expected we would have to reload the OS, so I explained this to the couple and walked them through the backup procedure.
The husband was quite insistent that he had some very important Office documents on the hard drive that we would need to back up if it came to that.
He explained the exact folder they were in. As I always do when I hear the word ‘important’ I offered them rush service, which they politely declined. We chatted a bit, the wife talking about some bake sale or something she was running for their (very conservative) local church.
I had them sign the requisite paperwork and sent them on their way.
A day or two later I get called into the back.
My tech is working on their repair and the hard drive is going bad. He wants to know if we should switch to a data recovery, which is more expensive, but our only option for retaining any files at this point. One of the downsides of this is we now have no control over what data we are able to recover, so we just grab everything.
I try to call the customer and get voicemail. I tell the tech that he had mentioned some important files, so we start the recovery anyway. Worst case, if he doesn’t want it we just destroy the data.
A few minutes later I get called into the back by our tech guy (I run the front desk and answer phones).
Me: “Hey T, what’s up?
Were we not able to get any data from the client’s hard drive?”
Tech guy: “Well, uhh… that’s not the problem. We got data. There’s a lot of it. Plenty of Office docs in there that look like they came from the folder he mentioned.”
Me: “Awesome, that’s great news! Looks like it’s still running, why did you call me back?”
Tech guy: “Well… the file recovery worked, but we weren’t able to save the directory structure. It’s been completely flattened. We… we wound up recovering a bunch of files beyond just the ones in that folder.”
Me: “Ok, no problem, I’ve talked customers through that before. I still don’t understand why you called me back.”
Tech reaches up and angles his monitor towards me.
Tech guy: “Is that… the customer?”
Me: “Yup.”
Tech guy: “Is that… the customer’s wife?”
Me: “Nope.”
Tech guy: “So… I guess we ought to… uhh…”
Upfront, the phone rings. I run to escape the awkwardness answer it.
Me: “Hello, thank you for calling A Computer Repair Shop, this is Me, what can I do for you?”
Dave: “Hey. You called me. Is my computer ready yet?”
Me: “I can certainly check for you. If y…”
Dave: “Then check already.”
Me: “If you would please provide me your phone number?”
Dave: “You called me.”
Me: “Yes, I’ve called about 10 customers in the last hour. I need to…”
Dave: “Stop messing around. My time is valuable and the documents on that computer are very important. Is it fixed yet?”
Me: “I need to confirm your identity.
Is this about the (computer model)? I nee…”
Dave: “Yes. Obviously. Is it done?”
Me: “Sir, I need to con…”
Dave: “I asked if it’s done. You aren’t answering me. Yes or no. Is it?”
Me: “Once again, sir, I need to confirm who I am speaking with.”
Dave: “This is ridiculous”
Me: “Sir, we have 3 computers with that model number in right now.
What is your name?”
Dave: “Dave.”
Me: “Thank you. Now, the repair is not y…”
Dave: “What!? I told you this was important! I need those documents tomorrow for work! When will it be fixed!?!?”
Me: “Since you declined the rush service, I…”
Dave: “WHAT!?!? I TOLD YOU IT WAS IMPORTANT! GET IT DONE! WHEN WILL IT BE DONE?”
Me: “Sir, we are working on it.
Now, the reason I called was that your hard drive is bad. We wi…”
Dave: “MY FILES!?! You don’t understand; they are very important!”
Me: “We will need to perform data recovery. Be aware tha…”
Dave: “DO IT!”
Me: “There will be a charge of…”
Dave: “JUST DO IT!”
Me: “When we do this, it may flatten your directory structure. What wi…”
Dave: “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE JUST FIX IT AND GET IT BACK TO ME!”
silence
Dave: “Did you hear me? Are you going to fix it?”
Me: “Do you approve a charge of $x.xx?”
Dave: “Yes, When will it be done?”
Me: “Most likely tomorrow. We’ll ca…”
click
Sure. Will do. I went back to the tech and paraphrased the convo. He shrugged and kept trucking along on the repair.
Bright and early the next day, before we even had a chance to call and confirm that repairs were completed, guess who walked in alone to pick up the machine?
I explained about the data recovery, how we lost the directory structure so all recovered files were just in a folder called ‘backup’ right on the desktop, with no user credentials or password or anything.
I explained that we recovered the requested documents, but also a large number of other miscellaneous files. I suggested they check the files as soon as they got home to make sure what they needed was there.
“I will absolutely do that for him, sweetie! Thank you so much for all your help! God Bless!” said the (STBX-)wife as she walked out with the desktop.”
9. Reduce Our Grocery Budget To Only $150 A Month For 4 People? Um, Sure...
And while his partner is pregnant?! Yeah, he’s crazy.
“Several years ago, my ex, our son, and I (pregnant) lived in a fairly well-off town. We weren’t rich or even middle-class at the time, more like upper lower-class living in a low-class apartment. He thought he was good with cash, but he really wasn’t. He thinks he has an idea because his dad is an accountant, but he had no actual practical knowledge.
I knew we were on a budget, and for the most part, agreed to keep down the cost of most of the expenses. The only exception, in my eyes, was the food budget. I would try to spend $600/month on food for the 3.5 of us, and this was still what I considered on the low end. For example, friends of ours (just a couple with no dependents) would spend about $800-900 on groceries, while my ex-in-laws would spend $1,200-1,500 on groceries for 3-4 people.
We had a young child and a baby on the way. Cutting food out wasn’t an option. The kid is hungry; the kid needs to eat. As a pregnant woman, I did eat for my child and me, but I didn’t splurge on treats for my cravings. I knew we had bills to pay and that my financially strict ex would be upset if I ate away our food budget due to a craving.
My ex would frequently complain over several years about how we spend too much money on groceries. He mentioned a couple of times per month that $600 per month was too much. We needed to reduce our food budget to $150/month.
I tried to show him grocery receipts. I tried showing him flyers and online ads. He still maintained that we could survive off $150 in groceries each month.
He was adamant. He was sure. He was positive that I was just making things difficult. I wasn’t the only one to tell him that he was wrong.
As I stated, I was pregnant, which means hormonal. I’d had enough, so here’s where the malicious compliance comes in.
Me: OK, I’ve had enough of this. Tomorrow is the start of a new month. I haven’t gone grocery shopping in a week.
Give me $150 in cash and I will feed us for the month.
Ex: Really? Ok! I’ll bring home the cash tomorrow.
I spent the rest of the evening searching for every single coupon I could find. Fun fact: Americans have this system where if you spend a coupon at certain grocery stores, you could buy an item for $0.10-0.50, however, we don’t live in the US.
Our coupons pale in comparison. I searched for all the deals. I wrote down a list of items we needed, what store had them for what price, and noted if I had a coupon or not. (FYI, I generally did something similar to this anyway, but I just expanded my search to a couple of extra stores.)
The following day when I was given $150 from my ex, I waddled my pregnant butt around 4 different grocery stores grabbing all the food we normally eat.
When I got home, I had spent approximately $145 of our oh-so-generous food budget on the 1st day of the month.
I was proud of myself! sarcasm I had budgeted so well. I showed my ex-husband all the food I bought and all the receipts. I placed the change in a jar on top of the fridge with the receipts inside. He said I did well and was happy I bought so much for so little.
Later on that week, we ran out of milk. The kid has no milk to drink or for his cereal. Out to the store to buy some.
A week and a half later, it’s getting close to dinner time.
Ex: What’s for dinner?
Me: Nothing.
Ex: What do you mean nothing? We have plenty of food!
Me: Oh, do we? I didn’t realize. What did you find in the cupboards?
Ex: opens cupboard doors, fridge, freezer, pantry door Ummmm, nothing. There is literally nothing.
Me: OK, so we have no food in the house. How much money do we have for our food budget?
Ex: empties jar $0.34… That can’t be right!
Me: Did you add up the receipts and see if we made a mistake somewhere?
Ex: ……………… Ok, I get it. I’ll go buy some groceries.
And that, my friends, is how you convince your financially strict (ex) spouse that their budgeting ideas are out of touch with reality.
Sadly, I did not convince him to increase our food budget back to $600/month, but he did agree to $500/month, which I suppose he keeps to this day, despite the fact it’s usually just himself he has to feed.”
8. We'll Be A Bad Neighbor Back, Plain And Simple
“I grew up on a horse ranch in Colorado.
We had a long piece of property, about 80 acres, and we raised Missouri fox trotters. We had lived there for almost 20 years when some folks bought a strip of property way at the back of our land. It was a strange plot of land as it was very narrow, and was sandwiched between our back fence, and a busy county road. We were surprised anyone would buy it actually, as it forced the house to be pretty close to said road.
Well, we never meet these new neighbors until one day, my dad gets a notice from a lawyer telling us that after having surveyed the property lines, our back fence encroaches on their property between 3 and 6 inches depending on the spot along the fence line.
These folks had never met us, never introduced themselves. Our first introduction was this legal demand.
My father was a salt of the earth kind of man, very kind, but also very strong-willed. He called these folks, arranged a meetup, and tried to talk some sense into them.
First, did 3 to 6 inches really matter that much, and why had they not come to us to talk it through? He even offered a number of different compromises.
These folks were hostile from the get-go. They demanded he move the fence immediately, or they would sue. Apparently, the law stated they had to put their house so far away from our fence line, and they wanted to push it as far back from the road as they could when they built it, so they wanted that 6 inches very badly.
I still remember when my dad got home from the meeting. He hung his hat up and shook his head when he told my mom in his slow way.
‘Well looks like we got the kinda folks for neighbors you don’t ever want to have for neighbors.’
They sued and won, and we were forced to move the fence in 2 weeks.
I say we because I was the free slave labor as all farm kids are for this kind of thing.
All that fencing material and time were a big cost for my family. But we got the work done that late fall.
Here is where the fun comes in. So the new neighbors broke ground and built all through the end of winter and into spring. The very next weekend after they had moved into their house, Dad rousted me out of bed and we took the big truck into town to the lumber yard.
I was extremely puzzled as we loaded up a bunch of fencing material, and building supplies.
We didn’t have any big projects going that I knew about, and I kept asking him what it was for, but he just told me to wait and see with a devilish smile on his face.
We built a pen and a small enclosure very near our back property line, directly behind the neighbor’s new shiny house.
The next day one of our farm friends delivered a half dozen pigs to their new home.
Dad insisted on feeding those hogs table scraps and all the things that would go in the composter, as well as some well-balanced hog feed to keep them healthy.
Now you may not know this, but the smell of pig excrement is directly related to what they eat, and their pen conditions.
Table scraps make them smell BAD. I mean BAAAAAAD. I had to drive the four-wheeler back there every day to take care of them, and within a month halfway to the pen and my eyes would start watering it smelled so bad. When we mucked out the pen with the bobcat we also made the pile right next to the pen. I can’t even imagine how bad the smell was living in that house.
The neighbors, of course, freaked out and again without ever even trying to talk to us, went the legal route.
They lost the case asking to have the pen removed as the area was zoned agricultural, and my dad had done his homework to make sure he was NOT breaking any laws or regulations. The pigs were far enough from us and our other neighbors that it didn’t bother anyone but the people he wanted it to bother.
Come fall when winter moved in we sold the pigs to slaughter, and dad stacked up a bunch of building supplies next to the pen and let the neighbors know we would be expanding the profitable operation in the spring. He smiled the whole time, speaking in his slow steady way as they screamed at him.
The new neighbors sold their new house in January when the ground was frozen and the new owners would not smell the pen.
Though as soon as the old neighbors were gone we tore down the enclosure, spread the nasty stuff on the hayfield, and the new neighbors never had any bad smell come spring. They also were great neighbors and are still lifelong friends.
Never mess with a rancher…
(Here’s a little more context: My dad really, really did want to try to cultivate a good relationship with a new neighbor, even though they started on such a lousy foot.
He offered to sell them 5 acres of land at the back of the property at a super affordable price so they could have a better plot, and get well back from the road.
Our back fence line was almost 5 acres long, so it would have shaved an acre long line off is all, and that was wooded land that was not good pasture land anyway.
They were not interested. (They had plenty of funds too btw, as they were sitting on a million-dollar payout from selling their home in CA which we knew as they brought it up multiple times in the discussion. Statements that ‘They had all the cash they needed to take us to court if we didn’t comply immediately!’)
My dad asked if he could move the fence over time them, rather than being hit for the cost all at once.
Ranchers are not made of money. We could move the section right behind the proposed building site immediately to help with planning etc first. They were not willing to do that. It all had to be moved immediately.
Lastly, my dad was friends with the two guys that did the inspections for the county for this kind of stuff. We had built many additions and changed on the ranch over time as well.
They were all in the volunteer fire department together as well. He offered to get all of them together and see what options they had for dealing with the offset issue.
The neighbor refused, again demanding the fence be moved immediately.
If you see a theme here, so did my dad. There is no pleasing some people, so my dad let him take us to court.
I later found out dad was using the time to save up some dough since he figured he would have to move the fence and that was expensive, and he hoped maybe the neighbor would not push it that far and come to work with him rather than go to all that cost. I know my dad reached out a couple more times to the neighbor before things went to court too.)”
7. Take A Break During A Rush? Sure!
“A few years ago, I was working in a small bar in a mall. I hadn’t been there that long, but I knew the place well enough after a couple of weeks. I and a girl who had also recently started working there had made a pretty good team. We worked 8-hour shifts together almost every day and had a nice flow going on.
The manager had been looking for an assistant manager for a while and had decided to give the job to one of the waitresses who had been there a while.
This is when everything started going wrong. The waitress turned assistant manager decided that she was going to be telling everyone what to do and when to do it and how to do it. Now the girl that I worked every day with and I had a good understanding of the day-to-day traffic coming into the bar. We knew when it was going to be quiet and when it wasn’t.
So we made sure to take our breaks during the quiet times. It never sat dead in the middle of our shift. We’d just take them knowing that we couldn’t take them later, or we would be leaving one of us swamped. So she’d go for a half-hour, then I would one day, and then I would, and then she would the next day. The new assistant manager decided that wasn’t right and that we shouldn’t be doing that and that we should be taking our breaks in the middle of the shift. We both tried explaining to her that both of us taking a break at the same time was dumb and that it was better to do it now when it was quiet.
But she knew better; she would take over bar duties while we were away. I guess she was seeing that it was dead and didn’t think about it.
Anyway, she really wants the bar cleaned, something we did every day anyway, but she wanted it done now. So we did. We didn’t prep for the rush; we didn’t do anything but clean the bar. About 2 hours later, the mad rush starts.
There are three of us behind the bar taking table orders for the waitresses and serving people that want to sit at the bar. It hit bang on the middle of our shift, and I and the girl downed tools and left the bar. The new assistant manager was like, “What are you doing? You can’t leave now?” I and the girl told her, “This is what you wanted. We tried to tell you, but you didn’t want to listen.
So it’s break time just like you said.” We smiled, linked arms, and went off to enjoy some food together.
We came back about a half-hour later. The place was in shambles. Turns out, the new manager had very limited experience working a bar. She didn’t know how the coffee machine worked. She didn’t know how to pull Guinness. So the place was dead again, most people just going elsewhere.
She was super angry, calling us all the names under the sun and saying that she was going to get us fired. Just an extreme rant complete with finger-pointing. And that just made us leave again. We both quit on the spot and left her to explain to the manager what had happened.
We came back later on in the week for our final pay and to return the t-shirt uniforms. Had a sit down with the manager who gave our side of it.
The manager wasn’t impressed with any of us. Which is fair enough. But I stand by what we did. We did everything to try and explain to the new assistant manager on the day, but she just wasn’t for hearing it. She wanted things done her way and to lord her new power over everyone. I don’t think anyone responds well to, “I’m the boss; you do as I say!”
The girl and I became friends outside of work for a while, but we got other jobs and just kinda drifted apart as you do.”
Another User Comments:
“A heads up, managers are rarely perfect. A good one should try EVERYTHING, measure the results, and then adapt. Often these experiments fail, some are surprising successes.
So, let new managers fail; they are learning to be managers.
You get to learn from their failures and successes too.” BergenBuddha
6. Have It Your Way, Chef
Stubbornness brings out the worst in people.
“While I was studying, I started working for a successful bar, which also served gourmet wood-fired pizza. I was employed as a kitchen hand, and my main duties were helping on the pizza section during service, helping with food prep, dishwashing, and cleaning.
After 6 months, I had slowly taken more and more initiative in the kitchen, until I was eventually promoted to Cook, which meant I learned how to cook all the dishes in the kitchen (even the fancy stuff), and usually ran the kitchen on late-night service with the help of a more junior kitchen hand.
Around 1 year in, my boss, the Head Chef, decided we needed a better pizza dough recipe.
He bought a dough recipe from a popular pizza place in my city, and it tasted great, but the problem was that it didn’t last long in the fridge, which meant lots of wastage.
So, HC decided to tweak the recipe to make it last longer. He changed the type of yeast, and changed it to a cool proof instead of a warm proof, along with many other things.
Now to give some context, by this point I had become one of the better pizza guys on the team, and quite a few of my colleagues had commented that the dough I made always came out the best, which I attribute to quite a few modifications I had made to the recipe over 12 months of working at it.
I had changed almost every part of the recipe, except for the actual basic ingredients used. I made the recipe adaptable, too.
If we suddenly needed an extra batch ready to use in 4 hours, I would make it completely differently than a batch that would sit in the cool room all week. HC never said a word about me quietly tweaking the recipe, because the feedback from the customers was almost always great, and he was getting all the credit.
HC initially came across as a nice guy, pretty chilled out, but he was a terrible boss and very disorganized. This led to us never having the necessary stock to prep all the menu items, and always having poor staffing ratios and skill mix.
These faults alone would be forgivable, after all, he was a nice guy under a lot of stress, but he was consistently jerking staff members around. He promised full-time contracts that were never signed, pay rises that never hit the bank, staff parties that never happened, and constantly rostering us to work on days that we had specifically asked to have off.
One chef was employed on a sponsored visa, meaning that if he lost his job, he would likely have to leave the country, and this poor chef got worked into the ground, basically abused, because the boss knew he couldn’t do anything about it.
Safe to say, morale got pretty low in the kitchen, and lots of the staff were looking for jobs elsewhere.
It gets to Christmas, and it’s end-of-year party time for a lot of businesses, which means our venue was booked out every day and night for a month.
We had all been working crazy hours doing prep work, and while I was at home, finally chilling out after a double shift, my phone starts blowing up.
HC is blasting us all on our workgroup chat because one of the batches of dough had turned out bad (not my batch of course), and he was demanding that we all had to follow the recipe to the letter. I spoke to HC the next day, to remind him that we didn’t have the right kind of yeast for that recipe, and to ask if we were having some delivered.
HC told me I was to use the yeast we had, that it would be fine. I tried to point out that the original recipe was written for a different type of yeast, and proofing method but he shut me down pretty hard –
“I’m the head chef here, and you’re a dishwasher. I said it’ll be fine.” OK Chef, let’s do it your way.
The next day I prepped 20 batches of dough, which for our small kitchen was a massive amount. On a typical weekend, I would have gone through 1, maybe 2 batches, but for the next week, all the customers had paid in advance and they wanted huge amounts of food for their end-of-year parties, and why not, when it’s company coin. As explicitly instructed, I made all 20 batches exactly as stated in the original recipe, just like I’d been told.
I used precisely zero of my hard-learned tips and tricks.
The first big night comes around, and I already know it’s going to be a disaster.
The dough is terrible. Like really, really bad. I seriously felt ashamed sending them out, but there was nothing to be done at that point.
Then the complaints started coming in. It was quite a night, let me assure you.
The next day, after presumably getting chewed out by one of the event organizers from the night before, HC comes into the kitchen and tells us to throw away the entire weeks-worth of dough, and that we would all be offered overtime for as many additional hours we had to stay back to remake it all (we were almost exclusively on fixed rates until that point).
On top of that, in a sublime piece of sweet satisfaction, I overhear HC quietly telling the Sous Chef to “get them to make it the other way” before walking out of the kitchen. SC is the aforementioned visa holder. He turns to me with a knowing grin and nothing more is said.
I continued working in the kitchen until I completed my studies, mainly because the late-night shifts rarely interfered with my curriculum, but almost all of the other staff moved on from that place.
I’ll never know just how much it cost the bar to replace all that dough, or how much revenue they lost reimbursing the customer, or how HC explained it all to his corporate bosses (probably blamed us). But I like to think he got exactly what he asked for.”
5. Cut My Salary In Half? Your Business Will Turn Into Dust
“This takes place near the very beginning of my software engineering career, back in ’05 or ’06. I’d just been let go from my previous place of employment due to not being compliant with directives I’d been given (although not maliciously, so that story wouldn’t be appropriate here, sadly), and thus, working myself out of a job.
I was a young college dropout from a technical college that hadn’t been federally accredited yet, and thus, all my student loans were from banks and loan companies instead of from Uncle Sam, and debts were due. I was also making payments on my very first car, even though it was a beater that the prior owners had already nearly driven into the ground (4 years old and nearly 200k miles on it when I bought it), and of course, rent and utilities.
The job I’d just been let go from already had me working paycheck to paycheck as they paid far under average rate, but I was still a new professional, so I couldn’t be very choosy. I was living in Los Angeles County, so the cost of living was so bad. I was having to choose which bills were going to be late on a monthly basis.
Specifically, I was living in a town called San Pedro, a small town tucked fairly out of the way.
After blasting my resume to all the job boards, I get a call from a startup that seems interested in my resume and wants me to come in for a face-to-face interview (skipping the call-screen entirely). In my desperation, I agree. I’m given an address, which is all the way up in Woodland Hills.
I check the internet… 55-minute drive as long as there’s no traffic. With traffic, it looks like the commute will be more like an hour and forty-five minutes each way. I’m desperate though, and literally, nobody else has reached out to me about my resume or responded to my applications, so I go to the interview. I arrive at a mostly empty office complex.
Maybe 6 or 7 other cars in a parking lot capable of holding at least 50.
I go into the building mentioned in the address and call the phone number I was given to let them know I’ve arrived.
Enter Chad. Chad comes to meet me and seems excited that I’ve come! He escorts me through the building to an office. Mind you, as far as I can see, we’re the only two humans in the building.
He gives me the pitch for the company, tells me he built the software being sold, but it’s not scalable and needs someone who can rewrite it. After we go through the whole interview song and dance, he offers me the job on the spot.
The pay is marginally higher than the last gig, so I figure gas would be covered for the commute.
I agree, and we shake hands, as I’m going to be starting the next Monday.
Red flags start appearing from the very first minute I arrive on Monday. First, I’m given a tour, which consists of the 14×14 foot office I’m going to be sharing with Chad, as well as another engineer who’s going to be starting the following Monday.
I’m not a fan of having someone able to look over my shoulder; it makes me nervous.
I ask why each engineer’s desk has two computers. “Because the one you will be writing code on doesn’t have internet access for security purposes.” (Note: This was pure paranoia. There was nothing about this software that required such tight security; we weren’t doing any government contracts or anything of the sort.)
Then, I’m escorted clear across the building, to meet with the CEO (Richard), the IT guy (Eddie), and the sales/support team.
I’m told that half of the team is supporting the existing version of the application, two people are selling the existing version to new clients (or trying to), and one person is explicitly tasked with selling the new version. The one I haven’t even started on yet. I’m still young and dumb at this point, but even I know this means the salesperson is probably giving out a date when the customer should expect their purchase to be filled.
“It’s a good thing you started when we did. We’ve been telling customers it’ll be ready in June.” Did I mention all this was happening in February? Apparently, I’ve agreed to rewrite, test, and package an entire application I’ve never seen before in approximately four months. So, the tour being done, I sit down and get to work. After jumping through a bunch of hoops of getting the software I prefer downloaded onto the actual work machine, as well as the code, I set about reviewing code so horrific, I’ve not seen anything like it since, and there isn’t a single comment in the entire thing.
Before I can ask a single question of the CTO, however, he tells me he’s headed to downtown LA to scalp his tickets to the Lakers game and that he’ll see me tomorrow. So, now I’m alone in the office with this abomination, a machine that’s been hamstrung from a nightmare, and the only thing I’ve got to console me is the fact that at least I’m employed again.
Fast-forward a week, I’ve documented the bulk of the code (because there wasn’t any), and the boss and I do not get along.
He’s mad because I’ve not written any substantial code, and I’m frustrated because I’m trying to understand a lot of what specific code is trying to do, and he’s routinely leaving around noon to go sell his tickets for Laker’s games or just not in the office because he’s chatting with someone else.
When he is in the office, I show him my documentation and try to get him to verify it or describe the purpose of the code where all I can say is, “What?” By the end of the week, I’ve covered about 30% of the project in a wiki-like document, and I’ve taken to leaving after sunset, so I can a) get more done, b) have a shorter commute and c) drive when my car isn’t an oven (the AC didn’t work).
I’ve barely managed to convince the CTO that what I’m doing is necessary, so the engineer starting the next Monday doesn’t have to do anywhere near the same nonsense I’ve got, which would make us a more efficient team.
Monday arrives and in comes Big Bro. I call him this because he was a much more experienced engineer than I was.
We spend the first day with him getting set up, then us reviewing what I’ve documented.
He manages to answer some questions the CTO never did, just because he is that much better, and I start to feel more confident. Over the next weeks, Big Bro took me under his wing as an engineer teaching me best practices, standards, and where my plans were good and where they could be better.
If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have gone insane! I end up joining him outside for smoke breaks even though I don’t smoke, just so I can get a breath of non-office air.
He and I discuss the project, and we also make friends with Eddie, who makes us laugh by telling us horror stories about the CTO and CEO (apparently he was a school friend of theirs and basically worked with them because they paid him to do something he felt was super easy).
April rolls around. I’ve got a special occasion I need the day off for, which happens to be a Wednesday that year.
I’d advised him when I first started, and he’d been cool with it. I remind him on April 2nd (since I had an irrational fear of policy decisions being made on April Fool’s Day), and he loses it. He goes off on a rant and straight-up informs me that he regrets hiring me, claiming I didn’t have the skills I told him I did and wasn’t worth what I was being paid.
We’re definitely not halfway done (more like one-third), and it’s already been decided that June is a lost cause and that we’re shooting for August now. That habit I started before of leaving after the sun went down? Yeah, that never stopped. I was arriving at 9 am every day and leaving around 10 pm every night, trying my best. Big bro was the same, and Eddie would stay late with us just because we liked hanging out together.
So, it should be understood that I was very close to losing it right back at him. In a strained, yet diplomatic voice, I told him that if he put in the same amount of work to help us as we put in to rewrite his code, we’d probably be a lot closer to done than we were, especially given the twelve-hour days. He was not a fan of that and switched to straight-up yelling, blaming us for the lost sales and refunds due to the delays, and that the only way he’d get off our backs was by getting the project done.
This entire time, Big Bro is just sitting there and says nothing to back me up. Chad then left the office for a bit, and I just declared I was taking my lunch and would be back in an hour. I felt frustrated by Chad and betrayed by Big Bro, who I felt (rightly or not) should have had my back since we were in the same boat.
When we were both back in the office, he apologized for yelling and told me that since he agreed when I was hired I could have my day off.
Cool. I apologized too, although not for anything specific. I just didn’t want to talk to him anymore and figured that was the fastest way to end the conversation.
Fast forward to June, and the opportunity for malicious compliance.
Over the last two months, Chad has been getting worse and worse. He’s yelling nearly every day (and still leaving early too). Big Bro and Eddie are also feeling the pain; nobody is safe from his ego.
The smoke breaks and afternoon/evening portion of our day are when we’re most productive, as nobody can focus until Chad leaves. The first Monday in June rolls around, and Chad invites me to go on a walk outside for a 1-on-1 meeting.
I figured I’m being fired (at this point, we’ve had to refactor the rewrite almost entirely due to missing a critical chunk of functionality, and we’re still only 60% done. August release is looking less and less sure). Chad informs me that he’s hired a 3rd engineer, but in order to stay within the budget to pay him, he’s cutting my salary in half.
I stop on the spot and just give him a blank look.
“Are you serious?” I ask. “I’m barely able to pay for my bills and the gas required to commute here as it is. If you cut my salary at all, I won’t be able to afford to live.” At this point, the idea of cutting my productivity to help ramp up a new engineer, so he can help us meet the deadline doesn’t even occur to me, although in hindsight, that would have also been a pretty major issue.
Chad brushes me off. “That’s not my problem. The fact that you missed one deadline and look like you’re gonna miss another is. If you’ve got a problem with that, you’re more than welcome to go find another job. The new guy starts in two weeks.” And with that, he walks inside. I’d just been told that I had two weeks left of my job at my current salary.
Cool. So that day, I do something I hadn’t done since I first started. I left while the sun was still up. (Specifically, I left at 5 pm). I drive my oven-car (no working air conditioning in a car that had been left in the sun all day in Woodland Hills had me feeling like a baked potato) through traffic (an hour and a half commute home through LA heat) and updated my resume before reactivating my accounts on all the job sites.
I’m contacted the next day by a potential new employer, and I get an interview scheduled.
I decide to tell Big Bro about the new opportunity, and he hits me with news that lets me know just how small a world we live in.
Me: “Hey, Big Bro, just an FYI, I’ve started looking for a new job. I’ve already got an interview lined up.”
Big Bro: “Really? Where?”
Me: “Over at (Company Name).”
Big Bro: “Wow! That’s where I worked before I came here! That place is pretty awesome, and I left there on pretty good terms. I know the CTO there – go ahead and use me as a reference!”
Me, skeptical: “Really? Okay….”
Turns out, Big Bro was true to his word, and the CTO and I even talked about Big Bro during the interview.
Apparently, they’d already talked about me, and Big Bro had been the ultimate hype man, confirming everything I said about why I was looking for a new job and everything.
All goes well, and I’m electronically signing an offer letter that Friday afternoon (Chad had already left for the day, so there was nobody to look over my shoulder as I used the work computer that had internet access to get this done).
At the new job, the commute is cut by more than half and comes with a pretty significant raise. I tell Big Bro and Eddie on the last smoke break (I still don’t smoke) that I’m done, and I’ve found something new.
Oddly enough, they both smile and just wish me luck. “No hard feelings – hope we stay in touch!” Odd, but I’d stopped really caring about anything related to that job, so I paid it no mind.
I went back inside, packed up my stuff into my backpack, and walked to the CEO’s office.
Me: “Hey Richard, got a minute?”
Richard: “Hey OP, what’s up?”
Me: “Just wanted to let you know I found a new job, so I’m moving on.”
Richard: “Really, why? We need you!”
Me: “You guys decided it was cool to cut my salary to a point where I couldn’t afford to live.
Chad said if I didn’t like it, I should look for something new, so I did.”
Richard, looking defeated: “Well, when’s your last day?”
Me: “Today.”
Richard, now angry: “We need you here to train the new guy who starts soon!”
Me: “Hey, I had to train myself, and to an extent, Big Bro when he first started. The new guy should be able to as well.”
And with that, I left for greener pastures.
The unexpectedly huge fallout:
Four months later, Big Bro texts me to ask me how things are going.
I tell him things are great, and we schedule a lunchtime call because, apparently, things have gone sideways in a huge way.
Apparently, Chad came in on Monday almost violently angry and demands Eddie re-image my work machine first thing in the morning, which erases everything I’d left on there.
Big Bro comes in an hour later, and he and Chad discuss the new timeline for the project.
Somewhere in there apparently, Big Bro asks Chad to log into the admin account on my old work machine, so he can pull the documents I’d accumulated about the planned architecture, the existing code, meeting notes, etc. Chad answers by apparently punching a hole in the wall, and leaving for the day (probably to go to the hospital to deal with his hand), at 10:30 in the morning.
Big Bro then spends the rest of that week ostensibly working on recreating the documentation from scratch.
When I asked how the new guy handled the new documentation, Big Bro laughed and told me there never was any documentation. Apparently, he and Eddie had become really good friends in the months we worked there, to the point where they’d become roommates about a month before I left.
More than that though, they’d decided to start a freelance/consulting business together and only had to decide on when to make that their full-time jobs. Neither of them liked Chad much and wanted to make their departure hurt as much as possible. So, they decide to make Big Bro’s last day the day before the new guy starts, and Eddie would quit shortly afterward, sticking around just long enough to watch the bomb go off.
Did I mention Big Bro never told Chad he was quitting? Yeah. He just didn’t show up that Monday. He had, however, emailed that ‘documentation’ he’d spent a week writing to Chad. Turns out, he wasn’t documenting the code at all. He’d spent a week writing a letter explaining in excruciating detail why Chad was such a bad boss, and he’d emailed it to everyone in the company.
I asked if he still had it so I could read it, and he sent it to me after the call.
Thankfully, like the big helper he was, Eddie had ensured that the new guy’s email was set up and in the proper groups before the email was sent, so the guy’s first email in the company was a novella about the kind of person he’s agreed to work for.
Apparently, Chad thought it was appropriate to take his frustration out on the new guy, who’d already read a significant portion of the email before Chad shoved him away from his desk and deleted it. Apparently, new guy promptly decided (and rightfully so) that agreeing to work for Chad had been a mistake, packed up his things, and quit on the spot.
With the new guy quitting, the August deadline was now little more than a dream within a dream, which according to Eddie doesn’t stop Chad and Richard from trying to find that miracle rock star engineer who can save them from their own situation (which, given what they were offering as pay, didn’t exist).
So time advances in its unstoppable way, August arrives, and customers find that they’ve paid for something that hasn’t been delivered yet, and pretty much unanimously demand refunds, with a few customers bringing legal action against them. With the amount they have to refund and the cash they now need for legal fees (because of the way they’d incorporated, they were personally liable), they could no longer afford to pay anyone and were forced to shutter the business.”
Another User Comments:
“I was reading, this and as a PHP engineer, I’m sitting here like, “Jesus, could be worse, could be one PHP file,” then I got to the end…” Illurity
4. Clean The Fryers Right Before Lunch Rush? Fine Then
“As my current job begins to start back operation, my memory brought me back to my previous years as a long-suffering line cook.
For those of you who have worked this job, you know it is simultaneously the best and worst job in the world. The people are great, but if it wasn’t for the low pay, long hours, working conditions, stress… anyway!
I was in management training at this time, and this was used constantly to coerce me into doing many downright dangerous things such as in this story.
But this time, it bit them in the rear.
The Story:
On this particular Friday, I was working what we called “salad side,” which meant I was in control of the salads, pizza oven, and fryer. While it could be a lot to juggle during busy hours, I had managed to get into a pretty good groove through the morning shift.
With no orders in the window, no tables on the floor but a bar regular, the day’s prep all finished, and the area cleaned and restocked, I was looking at a good thirty-minute break between my shifts.
(We didn’t get one scheduled nor were you guaranteed a meal on a double shift; you only got one if you finished on time.)
I figured that I, for once, had a good chance at a break. After checking with the other line cook on duty, I let the General Manager or GM know I was ready to go on break and to check my part of the kitchen.
From now on, she will be referred to as Lazy Daisy because that is what she was, lazy.
She is the source of many terrible events in this building, and her nickname used here comes from these. She walks and immediately goes to the deep fryer which had been forgotten about by the previous night’s crew as is tradition.
Lazy Daisy: “Why hasn’t this been cleaned out?”
Me: “Because it’s in the middle of the day. We can only clean it out at the end of the night shift, and the night cook didn’t do it last night like it is scheduled. I can do it after we close tonight, though.”
The oil was too viscous in the morning when I arrived, and the sickly pump could not cycle the thick oil through the “gunk trap” properly.
Therefore, the oil must be heated up first, but it has to be allowed to cool down enough to safely cycle the oil. Even if we tried anyway, the time spent cleaning the fryer prevented a lot of essential prep work to be done before opening and then you had to hope the fryer would be ready before opening.
While this may not be a problem with some fryers, this old girl has seen better days and took forever to get started. Often, the opening manager coming in at 8 am had to turn it on to make sure it was alive for the 11 am opening.
The current roster managers usually refused to allow it to be taken offline during normal hours as they didn’t want to have to deal with the “but my nuggets” problems, so I didn’t think to come to her about it. No idea what possessed her to want it done now of all times.
Lazy Daisy: “Quit being lazy and swap out the oil and clean this fryer out.
It’s disgusting. This is not the attitude I want in future management!”
Me: “And good future management would know not to change out fryer oil that is currently sitting at almost 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). I could lose a hand doing that! It will take a while to cool and clean.”
Lazy Daisy: “If you don’t change the oil and clean it up right now, I will have a talk with (area director) and discuss this promotion of yours.”
She then proceeded to strut back to the office to ignore her job and eat her lunch. This was doubly insulting as I have not had a chance to have my own lunch now.
I sat there for a moment, kind of just seething until the other line cook came over and said, “Don’t. It’s not safe. Mucho caliente.” I nodded in agreement trying to figure out what to do.
I have ignored her in the past on these kinds of things, but it never ended up with me on top.
We stood there for a moment silently trying to figure out what to do. He was a good man and very concerned for my safety and was adamant I not even try since I had a bit of an injury reputation. That’s when light bulbs popped up in my head.
Oh, I’ll make sure the fryer is clean alright, and I’ll make sure that oil is replaced.
Me: “You know, the rush starts not too long from now. And since my night shift starts in a few minutes, no need to do it quickly.”
The other line cook stood there for a moment looking at me like I was crazy, then smiled, eyes closed, shaking his head at me as if to say, You are an idiot, and you are gonna hurt yourself.
He then shouted out. “Heard. Servers, 86 fried!” (him letting the servers know we couldn’t do fried items.)
I put no effort into doing the next steps swiftly. I cut the heat then headed out to the back dock and grabbed this metal tube on wheels we used to transport the old grease. While the grease typically was not insanely hot when transporting it out, it was still at a mean temperature and needed a lot of precautions as it would quickly heat up the metal.
I won’t bore you with the steps required of changing and cycling grease, but know that several times hot speckles of oil popped onto my face and arms. It was painful, but I knew this sacrifice will be worth it.
As I am perfecting the art of gunk poking, several tables walked into the door including a 12 top (12 person table) of mostly little kids.
I was able to see them because the majority of the kitchen was visible from the dining room and vice versa because of the open-concept design of the restaurant. One server’s section groaned because the night shift was still several minutes away from arriving, and she hadn’t even finished looking at her snaps. Oh, how fortuitous.
Lazy Daisy began to stir in her office, so I knew I had to rush this next step.
I pulled the gunk trap out, slid in the wheeled grease tube, and began to drain it, making extra sure the flow wasn’t strong enough to splash and burn my feet off. Since it was only a two-slot fryer, this happened very quickly, just quickly enough that she arrived as the last drop went into the tube. The distant childish chorus calling out, “I want cheese sticks!” could be heard in the background.
Lazy Daisy: “What is taking so long! We have customers now, and the grease isn’t swapped out. Why did you waste so much time cleaning!”
I simply shrugged as the night shift began to walk in.
“It takes time to clean it out with it being so hot. I had to be extra careful. You demanded I clean it, and I haven’t even had time to wipe it with the towel yet.
But it’s still too hot. I would need to wait.”
I wasn’t lying, the metal was still extremely hot, and she knew that. As if on cue, I heard a ticket print, and despite my pretty bad eyesight, I could see plain as day what was on the ticket. Three orders of the best mozzarella sticks this side of the Balcones. I guess the server was too busy playing on her phone to hear the other line cook call 86.
Oh well, that is not my problem.
Lazy Daisy turned and looked at the ticket then gave me a death glare. “How long?”
I shrugged again. “Usually takes a bit. The left fryer is still acting up, but I can crank up the right. Still gonna take a bit with the new grease.”
Lazy Daisy puts her hand to her forehead frustrated. “Just put the old grease back in.”
Because of the rapidly rising heat of the wheeled grease tube and lack of hand grips beside the one next to the opening and the significant number of obstacles in the cramped kitchen, it was now impossible to put the grease back in without severe risk to anyone nearby, and she knew that.
Me: “No can do. If I try, the grease will be spilling everywhere, and I will probably have to go to the hospital if I try.
Even if it doesn’t spill, I will still have burned hands. And do you really want all these guests seeing me pour grease from this dirty, grease encrusted tube?”
Lazy Daisy had this look of absolute defeat, and she marched over to deal with the table as I dumped the cold, thick new grease into the fryer then poured the old grease into the grease bin on the back dock.
The Fallout:
The left fryer took forever to heat back up and wasn’t ready until well after the rush was in full swing. The right side was much quicker but still took quite a while anyway. Aging and broken equipment were common in this building, and commercial grease fryers are not often prized for their turn on the speed.
The parents of the little kid army were complete and total Karens and began shouting obscenities at Lazy Daisy which could easily be heard over the growing bustle of the restaurant and the snickering of the line cooks.
The other morning, the line cook even found an excuse to stay a few extra minutes to watch before he headed out for the night. Lazy Daisy then spent a good part of the night going from table to table explaining that there were no fried items as servers never pay attention to any ‘86’ call no matter how many times it is repeated. (And as a current server, I admit to doing this far too often to be this judgmental.) This only infuriated and stressed her out even more.
Once the right side fryer had finally heated up, she spent even more of the night explaining why all the chicken parms, eggplant parms, nuggets, wings, fries, mozzarella sticks, etc. were running so far behind. After all, we only had half the usual frying capacity. She ended up having to buy a lot of food for the tables and stay late to “put out fires” as the other manager Lucy was terrible with tables, all of which were in perfect view of me.
Thank you, open concept kitchen.
After close, I got a stern talking-to from Lazy Daisy and Lucy, but they knew I had won this round and knew that Lazy Daisy was the one who demanded I clean the fryer so soon before the night began.
I never ended up eating lunch that day, but before I turned off the fryer for the night, I made sure to sneak out with one quick item: a batch of five delicious mozzarella sticks.”
3. Order Stuff That We Don't Even Sell? Okie Dokey Then...
“When I was in my early 20s, I was a seafood department manager for a chain grocery store. I was good at my job, motivated to do my best for the company, etc. At my first store, I increased the sales and gross profit percentage within a few months.
After a year, I got transferred to a larger store that had tons of issues with instructions to turn things around.
Within 3 months, we were leading the district. After a year there, I get transferred yet again with the same instructions, which is where the fun begins.
This store was the smallest in the district and was barely making money. My first store averaged $12k in sales per week.
My second garnered about $20k in sales a week. The third counter was only doing $3-4k in sales per week and was losing cash.
Five different department managers had failed in trying to fix things. My first week was spent getting things organized, going over sales reports, and getting to know the type of shoppers the store had. The problem was easy to see.
The company was trying to sell things that people didn’t want to buy.
I quickly changed what was being ordered. Since it was such a slow store, there was a lot of downtime during the day.
I was ordering whole fish and marketing everything in multiple ways (whole but pre-cleaned, steaks, fillets, even the heads, and bones), cutting everything myself. I also switched from fresh to frozen for high-dollar items that didn’t sell well.
I was keeping very detailed records in Excel spreadsheets. I was bringing in a lot less overall product but had a much better variety that our customers actually wanted.
By the end of the third month, we were doing almost $6k in sales per week, and my profit was again leading the district (it was something crazy like 50% when the target was 30%). More people were coming into the store, so total sales were increasing as well.
The fourth month was just as good, even though it was during our slow time (mid-summer).
Enter the district manager and my supervisor.
Both came in to visit after seeing the reports for my third and fourth months. They had figured the third month was a fluke, and when they got the fourth month, they figured I must be playing with the numbers somehow. Their first reaction was, “Wow, the department looks amazing.” As I showed them what had been happening and what I had done to fix it, you could see the supervisor getting more impressed while the district manager was getting mad.
I finally looked at the district manager and asked what was wrong.
He went on a 10-minute rant about needing to carry all of the things that didn’t sell and asked why I didn’t have fresh flounder. I replied that when we carried it at full price, we would only sell about 2 pounds per week but would have to order 20 pounds (things came in 10-pound increments, and fresh fish had to be ordered twice a week) a week to carry it.
I explained that doing things like that on a regular basis was why the department had been losing cash. I also explained that I had been told by the supervisor (who was there) to fix things any way I could. The supervisor denied saying that. I was told that I was to follow the plan the company had for the district at all times and if I ever didn’t have something on the sheet or had something that wasn’t on the sheet, I would face disciplinary action.
I asked for the instructions in writing this time and received it in the form of a written “verbal” warning for failure to follow instructions.
I was obviously mad, but I did what I was told. The next month was a nightmare. The store manager, district manager, and supervisor were constantly checking on me and trying to find things to write me up for. At the end of the month, we had sales just over $3k per week with a 2% gross profit, and thousands of dollars of fish had been thrown away when they went bad.
We also were getting customer complaints about not having the items they wanted. The district manager and supervisor came back in and started chewing me out. I sat patiently until I was asked if I had anything to say. I pulled out my reports that showed that I had ordered everything I was supposed to and how much of that was being thrown away because my customers didn’t want it or couldn’t afford it.
Things went back and forth, and I finally asked how two people who obviously knew nothing about marketing had reached the positions they had (maybe a mistake, but I was young and hot-headed). This time, I ended up with written warnings for insubordination and failure to follow instructions and was told I was being demoted to clerk because I “didn’t know how to do my job.”
I challenged both through the union.
Long story short the insubordination was lowered to a verbal warning and the failure to follow instructions was completely removed since I had written proof that I was doing exactly what I was told. I was given a full-time clerk position at a different store and kept my manager pay. I ended up staying for about 8 more years before being forced out after refusing multiple promotion offers (they wanted to eliminate the full-time spot to save coin but couldn’t take away my full time).
That isn’t the end of the story.
The way I had been treated angered a lot of people at a lot of stores in the area. A lot of the same people also got worried the company would do the same to them which sparked two issues. The first was almost every seafood department started following the company plan 100%. People started getting jobs with competitors as well.
Over the next two years, seafood profits went down company-wide which affected all other sales and a lot of talented people had jumped ship. The company ended up closing about 1/3 of their seafood counters (they switched to pre-packed product) and closed 3 slow stores altogether in attempts to increase their gross profit (not sales or actual profit, just the percentage). They are still around, but they lost a lot of market share and still struggle to keep talented employees.
I no longer work any form of retail and will never go back.”
Another User Comments:
“Having also worked in retail (sporting goods) as a manager, district managers are the most clueless people on earth. Their sole purpose in life is to bear down upon people that are paid 5x less than they are with inane tasks.
I tried to increase the profitability of my store by moving out socks to our footwear department.
The thought process was simple. People buy shoes. If the socks are right next to the shoes, either a) an associate can offer the socks as an add-on, or b) they’ll see the socks while trying on shoes and grab a bag to go with their new shoes. We octupled our sock sales in one week and kept that number constant for a month.
Seeing this in reporting, the DM shows up unannounced and asks for me. She wants to know how the socks are selling so well (socks are a very high-profit item, so it’s imperative that they sell well). I show her the setup, go over the rationale, and she loses it. She said that socks are an apparel (clothing) item and can’t be in the footwear section.
Our sporting goods section was in between our footwear and apparel sections, so the best I was allowed to do was put them on the very edge of apparel closest to footwear. I just started shaking my head. It was ludicrous. I did what she asked and sales cratered. That company is now bankrupt and completely deserved to go out of business.” NoREEEEEEtilBrooklyn
2. Sit And Do Nothing? Fine By Me
“So in the late ’90s, I was hired as a temp for the summer at a company that provided store-brand credit cards. My sister and her friend were also hired, so we were able to commute together. The two of them worked in data entry, and I was assigned to help in the research department.
Overall, it was a well-run place, and everyone was generally friendly and nice. My boss was pretty good, but she didn’t really know what to do with me. On my first day, she sat me next to a full-time woman in the research department.
Our job was when someone called the call center disputing a charge, the agent would take the information and the research department would reach out to the store to get a copy of the signed receipt.
The other woman would call the stores to request they pull the signature slip, but if they were too busy to help, we would fax the request for them to fax back the signed copy. I still don’t know why we couldn’t just email the request, but we had to fax it.
There was quite a backlog of faxes to make when I started. So I would create a request page in MS word with what we needed (date, amount, register number) and provided a fax number for them to send it to us.
However, our fax machine was AWFUL. Remember this is the late 1990’s, and tech was improving but often still clunky. The fax had a memory that would hold like 6 pages. It would also take 2.5 minutes per page to send. The fax machine was not close to me. It was probably 50 yards away right outside the boss’s window.
So after the first day, I decided to print six requests, go load the six faxes to memory so they would send, and then go back to my desk and generate another batch of new requests and deal with any other tasks or emails in the 15 minutes it took for the first batch to go through.
Usually, when I would go back to the fax machine, we’d have a response or two from the stores that my coworker could process.
After about an hour of this pattern, our boss decided I was just screwing around because I wasn’t right next to the fax actively processing another fax at all times. She was very concerned about getting through this backlog as quickly as possible.
I tried to explain that I was being more productive, and I was using the memory function on the fax to its fullest, so there wasn’t any additional productivity to be had. She wasn’t buying it, so she said, “Stop wasting time going back and forth. I want you to generate all the request pages at once, then sit next to the fax and send them all.”
Okay, boss. It’s a waste of time, but you got it. So every day, I would spend the day next to the fax machine. As soon as I saw that memory was less than 80% full, I’d queue up another fax to go. It was excruciatingly dull.
Unfortunately, because the fax machine was getting no breaks other than my lunch breaks, none of the stores could send us back their signed slips unless they did it after hours.
So not only was I less productive, but my coworker was also unable to do as much because we weren’t getting responses since the fax line was always busy.
Finally, after a week, I was done. But, because so many stores hadn’t replied, I was asked to repeat the process for all the ones who hadn’t replied, which was most of them.
But since I figured out what was going on, I stopped filling up the memory on the fax and would just send a fax and then wait a minute after it was done sending before I sent it again. I just pretended I was waiting for the memory to free up, and the boss didn’t notice. We were much more successful that week than the first.
After that, we caught up and the job became much more interesting, and the boss much more reasonable and good to work with. It turns out, her boss had been riding her on not making more progress on dispute resolution. It wasn’t until the end of the summer that I told her again what a waste that first week was. She was able to laugh about it then and apologized for giving me such a miserable first two weeks.”
1. Shutting Down An Entire Organization For The Week
“I work in a very large community center that is non-profit.
We have tons of stuff. Like children’s daycare, open college, physiotherapy for seniors and disabled people. We got 6 huge apartment buildings for senior citizens throughout the city, activities for immigrants and the unemployed. We got a cafeteria and a restaurant. And more.
Now. I love my work. I got promotion after promotion. I started as an IT-tech support person. I was the only IT guy in the whole organization.
When I started, we got like maybe 80 persons working there including the teachers in our open college. (Today, we are over 200 strong.)
So anyway, it’s a relaxed and nontoxic work environment. As I got tons of work to do as I am alone with everything that runs with ones and zeros, I have to plan my work a little differently than the rest of the bunch.
So I have 100% flexible work times meaning I work when I see fit. I am on salary. They pay me once a month and not hourly. The executive director approves this as I can maintain the whole organization’s IT infrastructure without any downtime. I come and go as I see best for me doing my job.
This worked fine for about 12 years or so. Everyone was happy, and I was respected because not only did I get the job done but my job did not cause any downtime on IT at all.
The only downtime was an hour or less if someone’s workstation broke down etc. I always had spared ready to go. I also was 24/7 on-call and went to the office in the middle of my vacations if needed and I was able to go.
I worked on weekends and sometimes nights on work weeks just to get things done, so there is no downtime during office hours.
At that time in my career, we had a pretty massive amount of servers. 8 server machines just for Microsoft stuff. 4 Linux servers and a couple of BSDs for open college. I had a maintenance routine divided into small maintenance that I did after office hours and large maintenance that I did after office hours and continued through the night and the huge ones that needed me to live at the office over the weekend.
And as there was no such thing as “overtime.” We had an agreement that whenever I had to work more than 8 hours, I would get paid leave instantly the next day. So if I came to work at 8 in the morning on a Monday, stayed until everyone left, and then started the smaller maintenance, that would usually take like 2-3 hours max. I would then come 2-3 hours later to work the next day.
And if it took long enough, I could take the whole next day off. I always informed the whole organization that maintenance was due, and I would deal with it and take x amount of leave the next day.
No problems with anyone. Business as usual until…
We hire a new project manager, a middle-aged lady that has the most piercing blue eyes that drill into our soul and sucks all the joy and will to live out of us.
And she was a corporate manager. It was her first time working in a non-profit organization, so she was super shocked by how relaxed our office was.
There were complaints about everything that I don’t want to list here because only one is relevant.
Working times.
I did not get how she was able to boss around our director when she was only a project manager.
I mean, what the heck. I was at that time already a Systems Administrator.
But anyway. Soon came the time for large maintenance. Some updates for accounting software and some smaller things to open college end. I put a notice to our org’s e-mail list like always and state that large updates are going in starting this evening and ending before tomorrow morning. And that I would not be in the office the next day.
E-mail me or call if any problems. I never gave any time estimates because there was always a chance that they won’t hold. If something goes wrong with updates of other stuff, it’s my butt who has to fix it anyway, and then it’s God knows how many hours it takes.
So evening comes, everybody goes home, and I wait till the last one logs out from their workstation, and go to work.
Routine stuff. Some updates. Weird database conversion that has to be done every time our accounting or wages software gets an update. It takes time but only like 6 hours or so as it’s only the accounting database.
I finish my stuff and head home.
The next morning, I wake up around 7:00. Make some coffee and head to my gaming computer and think, “Ah, all day nothing.”
At around maybe 9 something, my work phone rings. I answer, and it is the project manager. I’ll just call her PMS from now.
PMS yells to me on the phone (something like this, don’t remember actual words):
PMS: “Where are you?”
Me: “At home; it’s my day off.”
PMS: “Oh. Well, we have a situation here. I need you here now!”
Me: “Ok. I’ll be there in 15 minutes.” I still lived pretty close to my work.
On my way, I thought, did I mess up something last night? Can’t be. I tested everything, and it would have been accounting calling me or the secretary if it was about updates at the open college end.
Well, whatever. I’ll see, then.
I rush to the office and go straight to the project manager’s office.
Me: “Hey what’s up?”
PMS: “My printer is out of toner.
Get me a new one”
Me: “?!?!?Out of toner? Is this the situation? There are toners on a shelf at storage on the 1st floor. All desktop printers are the same and use the same toner, so why did you not get it yourself? All this was explained to you a week ago.”
PMS: “I am not going to change any toners boy, do your job!”
Me: “Ok, whatever,” and head to storage to get new toner. We have a policy that all employees deal with their own desktop printers. Like add papers to them and change the toner because it is as easy to put your shoes on. And it takes these trivial tasks away from me who already is overworked and underpaid.
I got back and change the toner.
Then I head back home.
She actually stopped her whining for a while, and I thought all was good.
But after a couple more maintenance days and nights, she called an administrative meeting.
So there were me, our new wages clerk who also was HR manager, director, office manager, and PMS.
PMS starts the meeting. (Again, something like this as I don’t remember the actual words.)
PMS: “I wanted to talk about work times and how “OP” has been slacking and taking leave on his own accord. I thought that in this community we all share the same rules do we not?”
Me: “Sorry but as the same rules do apply to all, work times don’t. We do different kinda work here so same exact works times just won’t work.”
PMS: “You have been at home when people here have problems with their computer.”
Me: “Yes and they call me if there is a problem, and 99.9% of the time, we get it sorted out by phone.”
PMS: “But your home is not your workplace. Your office is.”
Me: “Yes, but as I have to work late and even nights sometimes here, I take the paid leave asap like we have agreed here.”
PMS: “Well, ALL work should be done at normal office hours.
Why do you even have to work nights or weekends?”
Me: “Because no one here wants any downtime on their work.”
Just to clarify. There were at this point maybe 120 people strong. At least 80 of those used workstations or laptops for their work. Even the darn fitness instructors. Everything was at this point digital and ran ones and zeroes. The physicist meets a client, they do their stuff, and then the physicist does the mandatory report on the computer.
They make all the plans for clients on the computer. Kiddie daycare uses computers daily to be in contact with parents, etc. Everything is run by computers now.
PMS: “Nonsense. You can do your job at office hours like the rest of us.”
I look at the director as I know HR and the office manager don’t give a flip about this. And for some reason, the director tells me…
Director: “Yeah, PMS and I have been talking about this issue a few times now with the whole staff and from now on our old agreement is no longer valid. You have to do all your work during office hours. Many people don’t like that you can take paid leave.”
Me: “Are you sure, like 110% sure about this? All my work. Server and network maintenance too?
At office hours? Can we make a new written agreement on this like we did on my open hours?”
Director: “Yes. Come by in the evening before we close the office for today. I’ll have the agreement ready by then.”
Me: “Okey-dokey,” and leave to continue whatever I was doing before this nonsense-is-about-to-hit-the-fan meeting.
As you can guess what is about to happen… har har har.
I mean there was zero toxicity at our work. Everyone was happy and then. Argh. One corporate goblin just has to some and create this tension.
Oh well. They are about to learn their lesson.
I go to see the director later during the evening, and we sign the agreement about my new work times. I check the agreement and tell the director that he forgot something.
There is no mention of the timeframe and I need to inform the whole staff when maintenance is about to happen. Only that I have to do all my work during office hours from 8:15 to 15:30. Also, as I am on salary, overtime is not allowed unless we have an agreement on it. And whoopsie, an old agreement that stated my overtime hours would be paid leave hour by hour, the new agreement had nothing about overtime.
So absolutely no overtime hours. Period! But I did not mention this to him.
He just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Just send them an email in the morning if you are about to do it that day.”
Allll righty then! Will do.
I’ll just start my waiting game. I love my work and all the people here, but I’m about to make myself the most hated man here, at least for a while.
A couple of weeks go by. I do few small maintenance jobs here and there, and downtime is only from one hour to 2 and I usually do it at lunchtime, so everyone gets as little downtime as possible.
Because I am waiting for the huge one.
And the patience of rewarded. In a few months, accounting and wages are getting huge updates. I mean this is the stuff that usually means that I stay the whole weekend at the office sleeping on the floor with a sleeping bag for those couple of hours I can.
I still think that I should just go and tell the director that we are about to hit the big one. Nope. I won’t.
I also had saved some smaller updates just for this occasion. Muahaha. I have never felt so evil in my life.
So the day comes and I go to the office at 8:15 sharp and send the message to the whole organization.
“Good morning. It’s xx.xx.20xx, and today is again maintenance day. Prepare for some downtime. This maintenance concerns whole organizations as I have to update all the servers and some routers too. There is also a huge update on financial software, and it is critical and has to be done. I will start operation at 11:00 as usual. Thank you for your understanding. Sincerely – OP”
Remember that I never have told anyone any estimates of how long maintenance will take. Heh heh.
I do my other stuff, and then, ding ding; it’s 11:00.
Time to start. Phase one. First, I kick every employee out of the network. Easy. I got a script for that. Phase two. Then I hit OS updates on EVERY server and go get some coffee.
Now, everyone got kicked out from the network, so they can’t access anything on the network.
Fileserver is offline. Print server, offline, database servers, offline. They cant even use a photocopier because you have to log into AD (Active directory) to use it with an RFID card. They still have access to their desktop, and they can use desktop applications but as company policy, ALL data is stored to file servers as no one is allowed to save any files on their laptops and workstations.
Also, they can’t use the internet at all because every server is now downloading updates from the internet. And I made sure every Linux and Unix box downloads everything possible.
My phone starts to ring.
Me: “This is IT services. How can I help?”
~Screaming~
Me: “Yeah, it’s a big maintenance today. I did send an email this morning about it. No, I don’t know how long it’s gonna take.
All day at least, maybe. We see.” Click on the other end.
12:00. People are starting to return from lunch. The whole network is still down and stays down. 13:00 ish. I start to get phone calls about how long it’s gonna take. Some people come to my office when they can’t reach me by phone. I just tell them that the estimated time is unknown on these big updates.
Should not take more than a day or two.
Day or two. This is what stirred the whole place. It was like a beehive all of a sudden. People came to me screaming and yelling. “Why do you do this to us? WHYYYYYY? Cancel the updates now. I need to work. Stooooooop.”
I just shrug my shoulders. Sorry. Can’t do anything about it. It’s impossible to cancel or stop once it is put into motion.
Just hang on.
Even the director came to see me and was first angry and then a little confused. I told him that this is what maintenance is. It is what it is, and nothing will change it. At least not this instant. Everyone just has to******* up and wait till it’s done. I’m just doing my JOB here.
So I just read some IT magazines and had too much coffee for the rest of the day as I was waiting for the servers to update.
Then 15:30 came, and I went home. Some people were still sitting at their offices waiting and looked at me with the most questionable faces asking where I am going.
“Home, see you tomorrow.”
Next day. I go check the servers in the morning. Almost done all of them. Unix and Linux are peachy. I still have to reboot all the windows servers. I do that.
I could just boot them all at once, but I feel eviler by the minute, and I just boot them one at a time, waiting for the server to fully boot, login, and check that updates are ok before moving to the next one. And of course. After every server, I pull my own laptop and make a maintenance report in detail. (No one reads these reports, but office managers demand them anyway?!
They go straight to archive and into recycle bin a year later.)
After I am done with the servers, the clock is around almost 14:00, and I haven’t had my lunch yet, so I go and have lunch. I come back at 15:10 and start to plan the next day. I need to install updates for financial applications, and I want to do a checklist that all goes smoothly.
Did not complete my list and plan, so it’s 15:30 again, and I’m going home.
Did I mention that it’s now Thursday? I started my maintenance Tuesday. Oopsie.
I finish my checklist and plan for financial software updates early. I start dropping updates one by one before lunchtime. I could drop them all at once, but I just want to go by the book and follow my checklist. It’s by the way recommended by this software supplier that updates are installed one by one.
All goes smooth, and I put the databases to do their weird conversion. As I am not a total jerk, I drop the rest of the smaller updates on other serverside programs while I wait for the database thingy to complete. Well, as usual, it takes forever, so I head back home when the clock hits 15:30.
By Friday, I have been the only person in our 120 person company working since 11:00 last Tuesday.
Everyone is so livid. They have to come to the office and do nothing. Some are doing cleaning operations to their desk. Some are tidying paper archives etc. Most are just sipping coffee and reading magazines. The Internet has been fine since Wednesday, but I don’t think anyone has noticed.
I feel sorry for the physicists who have to use pen and paper for all clients and then later sort everything on their computers.
The restaurant and cafeteria are fine as I did not mess with cashier systems at all.
Friday morning and I get all ok from database conversion. Ok. Let’s see. Hmmm. Ok. I think I can now begin starting the SERVICES on servers. One by one, of course.
I take my sweet time, using every break I am entitled to, and have a full-length lunch break.
Finally, it’s 15:00 sharp, and I send an email to the whole org that maintenance is now done, and you can now relogin to get access to the network. Thank you for your patience. The next estimated huge maintenance is about in 3 or 4 months.
Director, office manager, accountant, and wages clerk had been at home most of the week. I think I saw them Wednesday morning and but not after that.
The project manager was angry on Wednesday too but left me alone as I explained that if I have to go to some meetings with every branch about this downtime issue, downtime would only get longer as I would not be actively working on it.
Next week, we had a new administration meeting, and my old openwork times agreement with overtime leave was active again.
I got it in writing.
No one ever complained about my paid overtime free time ever again.
And I was not concerned about getting fired as in my country firing employees is hard. It is super hard to get rid of someone. And as I had a written agreement about worktimes and my work contract clearly stated what I do at my work, there was no way they could have any case of sacking my temporary evil butt.
But in the end, all was good. A couple of weeks, and everyone is happy to work again, with no downtime at all.
The “villain,” PMS, was chill for the rest of her career. I even visited her family’s house and fixed their home computer and installed a new printer and wifi for them. She retired from work a few years ago. She was actually sorry about what happened and took all the blame.
There have been few longer downtimes, but those were always hardware failures. When servers go booboo, there are no spare ones to put up in an hour. But thanks to containerization and a lot cheaper hardware, I’m prepared for that too now.
I was away for a weekend with no Internet. I like to take a few days off the grid from time to time when possible to reboot my brain.
But anyway, I bet many are wondering how PMS was able to boss my boss around. The answer is pretty simple, but first, I have to explain how the work culture works in our non-profit, and most likely, at any other similar work environments as well in my country.
I am an executive sysadmin. Sounds like a top-notch position, right? I must have plenty of power right?
The answer is yes and no. I have clients I work for. Who are these clients? Well, every single employee at my org, I serve them; I work for them. I don’t work for some faceless stakeholder or CEO who just wants to get his bank account fatter. I work for my clients.
How about our other executives, like managers and our high honcho, the director.
Same thing. Their job is to make sure that everyone can do their job and are happy to do it.
I know it must sound weird if you are from a stiff corporate world, but this is how it basically works here. If an employee is angry about something, the manager is going to hear and have to deal with the issue. The chain of command is short and simple.
We only have a branch manager who is usually an employee who is most skilled and experienced. He does the manager stuff along with the normal work regarding his field. The next level is the executives. No middle managers. We even don’t have an office manager anymore.
Of course, this does not mean that employees can do whatever they want. No. If they start to slack and won’t do their job, the manager or director will take matters and see that they get back in line.
But also if an employee has complaints, concerns, or just wants to change things they can freely go straight to the director about it and they have a right to go there angry if they feel the issue needs. (the only reason I was given the executive title was that the director wanted to wash his hand from responsibility. If an employee screws up, it’s his/her boss who takes the heat usually.)
Anyway, this leads to an environment where stuff gets done even if it sounds the opposite.
You could say that we are all equal here. No one is bossing around anyone because they have a need to show their power, and then again, everyone is bossing everyone if they need to.”
