Every office has an infuriating coworker, and they can really be the difference between a perfectly average day at work and the worst day of your life. This week, we have a variety of difficult team members that range from the entitled to the chaotic. The entitled ones tend to boss you around even when they are just slightly senior according to the company hierarchy. The chaotic ones, however, can be even worse, as these stories will show. Sometimes, you actually befriend your chaotic coworker,…

We somehow muster the strength to report to work every day, seven days a week. We work very hard at our occupations so that we are capable of a fair standard of living. Thus, it may be said that even though their justifications may differ, the employer and employee have a common goal in mind: producing high-quality material. The story below is an account of a frustrated employee. The dispute between the original poster (OP) and his micromanager is discussed. After the micromanager started track…

There's nothing worse than trying to voice your opinion and stand up for yourself at work, only for the conversation to be one-sided and your boss to ignore your concerns completely. That's exactly what happened to this employee. After one of his coworkers resigned, he went to his boss to say that he was capable of taking on his coworker's accounts. He had been working at the company for a while and was ready to prove himself. Only for his boss to pass him over and give all the accounts to anot…

Here's a rule of thumb: try not to unjustly fire someone with the specialized skills you so desperately need. That's what this manager learned the hard way. She hired a video content creator to be a one-man team for all of the social videos for an entire university. Despite numerous attempts to convey to his manager that the KPIs she and the director had set were unfair, this employee was not listened to in the slightest. In fact, his manager was convinced she could get someone better to finish…

It's often said that HR is never on your side, but is merely there to maintain an equilibrium that will prevent the organization from opening itself to vulnerability or liability. They are there to manage the “human” resources of the company, and—well, that's you . Still, in instances where you're dealing with someone in the organization—be it a boss, coworker, or other party—who is so incredibly off base with their actions or reasoning, then it just makes sense to go to HR and help them see yo…

Duplicitous managers may praise you one moment and then come up with every excuse under the sun to not give you a raise the next. We've all had managers like this. You know, the ones who don't seem to understand that giving someone a raise means that they have been performing their primary responsibilities well. It does not mean going above and beyond and doing extra, unpaid labor. That wouldn't necessarily be a raise, then. It would be overdue compensation for responsibilities that are already…

We work to earn money to support ourselves and our families and to give ourselves a chance at a life of better comfort and the space to pursue our individual interests. Sure, some of us might be lucky enough to reasonably enjoy our work and even find fulfillment in it, but it still serves as the means to an end. In short, you work so that you can better enjoy the time spent not working. And in some sort of weirdly depressing poetic sort of sense, the two are permanently at odds with each other.…

Every new boss likes to demonstrate their particular way of doing things to their team, but blindly enforcing those rules can lead to unexpected consequences. If you're new to any company, whether you're in a position of power or if you're in an entry-level position, you have to take time to learn and adjust the current system before making suggestions that would radically change things for everyone else. Sure, new voices can be instrumental for productive change, but it's pretty self-involved…

It's ironic how the cubicle was the symbol of working-class oppression in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, with countless references in popular culture using it to establish the character's insignificant overlooked place in society. The cheap grey carpet and the temporariness of the fabrication reflected how the organizations viewed their lowest productive workers—too expendable to bother placing in an ordinary office.

Let's talk about unnecessary dress codes. Sure, there are certain jobs where the clothing you wear is important. Healthcare workers and firefighters are a couple of professions that come to mind. Uniforms can signify that the person who is about to perform a job is the right person to be doing it. However, in most workplace environments, uniforms are less necessary and more performative. For instance, do all finance bros need to wear a jacket and tie for their jobs? Absolutely not. It should al…

Being overworked and understaffed, working long hours at odd hours, is no way to live your life. Still, many of us are doing so in order to eke out a living in this wild world. It can even seem manageable while you're in it, grinding out the hours to keep up with an ever-increasing workload to keep the bossman happy while seasonal demand runs its course or to cover for that vacant role that they've yet to see fit to fill. The reality is, by trying to do the right thing and keep everyone happy,…

It's a common misconception that cutting overtime hours can be a structurally sound decision for a company. This boss told a call center manager that management was no longer allowed to work overtime. Now despite this new bogus policy, he didn't say anything about the employees that report to management. At the end of every day, this manager tends to check up on his team to help them wrap up their calls and get them out of work on time. This often results in him having to stay after for a littl…

People will always be willing to better their own situation at the expense of others, whether it's that guy in front of you who sees fit to recline his seat for the entirety of a 15-hour flight despite having no one in front of or next to him, or something like cutting a queue in traffic or manipulating the schedule so that they don't have to work a shift that they find to be inconvenient. Everyone's the hero of their own story, so they, of course, won't see themselves as doing anything wrong.…

Something bosses never seem to consider when enforcing strict rules is the consideration of life events that are out of everyone's control. In this instance, we have a fancy new boss from the big city who moved out into a rural area to work for a company that runs local cell phone towers. One employee was threatened with termination if he was caught using a competitor's phone ever again. The confrontation itself was already a bit much. Well, flash forward to a power outage in the most remote ar…

Human resource employees don't always get the best rep, and unfortunately, this particular employee is not helping their case. After hiring a candidate, the candidate suddenly cut off communication and ghosted the company. According to other HR professionals, this behavior is not uncommon in the early stages of hiring. But unfortunetly for the candidate, she chose the wrong HR employee to ghost. Instead of addressing the issue internally, the employee took to LinkedIn and posted a public call-o…

It's easy for the boss to tell their employee to go on a vacation somewhere nice. It's harder when you don't have the funds to plan a trip like that. This overworked employee recently learned that his company was doing away with bonuses and was therefore losing out on $20K that year. That was money he was planning on using for a real vacation, but without that extra money, he really could not afford to plan a trip. All of his income was now going into living expenses, as the cost of living was…