Working remotely has its advantages and disadvantages… While you no longer have to use your own time and money to commute into an office, which is probably open plan (which you loathe,) crammed directly adjacent to your other disgruntled coworkers (whom you abhor,) all that in order to have your time and productivity wasted by meaningless small talk and because you need to “look" busy even though that actually means you're being less productive. On the flip side, while remote working would cert…

the night shift is not for the weak

Getting the Monday Blues is in employees' DNA. Nobody likes going back to work after having a nice, long relaxing weekend spent by doing absolutely zilch. Maybe some micromanagers enjoy the prospect of coming back to psychoanalyze their employees' work, but for the most part, everyone likes the weekend. I don't know who came up with the 5 day work week, but it feels a bit extreme. Why do we only get 2 days to chill? After the Industrial Revolution, employees' work time was cut into 2, but we st…

Management doesn't have any idea what you do; let's just get that out of the way.

There's a pretty simple rule of management that leaders should follow: Don't mess with something that's working. Whether that's a single high-performing worker, an efficient team, or just a general flow of business, messing with something for the sake of it is always going to end poorly. It's a similar premise to “let sleeping dogs lie” but in this case, it's more of "leave

Landlords are just about one of the only things that could make us root for lawyers. The lesser of two evils really comes into play when those two parties are in the same room together. The powerful preying on the weak is one of the oldest tropes in storytelling. What's not to love about a story like this? A wily lawyer who wants to do the right thing—but still doesn't work for free—coming to the aid of a desperate owner of a local restaurant (that happens to be the lawyer's favorite.) The cart…

Being lazy on the job is something every single worker has experienced. No matter how good of a worker you are, or even how much you love your job, everyone has downtime in which they simply need to be a little lazy. There are actual studies that show that out of the 8 hours a day that people work, the average amount of time workers actually get work done is 3 hours. This means that 5 hours of those 8 are for workers to simply idle by, scroll on their phones, or stare into the abyss. Hopefully,…

All throughout the 2000s and 2010s, we used to eat up “goodwill” stories about people banding together to help their fellow—coworkers by donating PTO to a sick team member and crowdfunding to help cover the cost and medical debt of sick community members. All this really begs questioning, questions that are finally being asked more frequently in discourse online. Where these types of stories are no longer viewed purely as “wholesome” or “heartwarming” but rather as a sign of the dystopian, soci…

Some employees think that the office manager, HR, or whoever organizes the office works for them personally. See, I was an office manager back in the day, and people would leave the dining room an absolute mess. When I opened the fridge, I frequently thought that people were growing fungi there on purpose, by leaving their containers for weeks on end. It was so frustrating that I sent out countless emails, and even held an office meeting regarding the whole thing. Nothing changed, and I eventua…

Rejection is a hard pill to swallow, no matter what form it comes in. You can sugarcoat it any way you like, throw around the whole “It's not me, it's you,” “It's just not a good fit,” and your words are still going to have the same message: “You're not good enough for me." This, of course, is a brutal affront to anyone's ego

There's no surer sign that you might need to reassess your leadership "style" than having multiple people opt out, in quick succession, of being under that leadership. After all, as the old adage famously goes, “People don't quit jobs; they quit bosses.” There's no telling the level of miserable or monotonous job conditions some people will put up with just as long as they enjoy working with the people in their immediate team—especially their managers. Good managers are hard to come by, so when…

You are typing away, your keyboard going clickety-clack as your fingers fly across the different buttons. When you look down, you notice that your keyboard is a little bit dusty. Hmmm, that's not right. You guess it's time to deep clean it. How do you go about it? Well, probably not the way this employee did. One tech support worker took to r/talesfromtechsupport after they got an unusual call regarding a printer. Apparently, the printer wasn't working, but it had been just before. So IT saunte…

In writing, both for entertainment and for technical purposes, it's important that your reader be able to comprehend the meaning of your words. For example, if you happen to be writing a snazzy and engaging introduction to a discussion about a story that someone shared online, it would be foolish to begin using words that your reader is likely not to understand. In fact, it would be perspicacious for the author to eschew using a myriad of archaic verbiage that obfuscates the meaning of what the…

There's this old adage that takes many shapes and forms but usually goes somewhere along the lines of this: You should always be kind, or at least decent, to the people you meet as you never know when even the smallest act may have far-reaching consequences. You've probably heard of or read one of these stories before, and it's one of the oldest tropes for teaching the morale of being kind to others. Where old stories involved a frail old woman or man asking for assistance from a character, onl…

Bad experiences are a dime a dozen when it comes to interviewing for a retail role; in no other line of work are there so many desperate interviewing managers looking for such a high level of effort and experience for such minimal pay. Usually, if an interviewer takes issue with you, there's no coming back from it, no avenue of recourse; after all, they're the ones doing the judging, and you hold very little control over the situation outside of your ability to walk away. Yet, sometimes, a hidd…

There are some things in life that just make sense… and not messing with the spicy death wires when you don't know what you're doing with them is one of them. It makes perfectly logical sense that, rather than playing “Operation” where instead of a startling buzzer sound and a light-up nose the penalty for failure is your own untimely fiery demise, you should just let the guys who know what they're doing do it. Sure, electricians get flack for being grosly overpaid for what they're actually doi…