While the “Carrot of Promotion” sounds like a great name for a Dungeons and Dragons item, it's not so great when it has been dangled in front of you to encourage you to do more work while working more hours and taking on more responsibility all under the promise that you might one day be compensated for it. Of course, often, employers fail to follow through on this promise and lead employees on for as long as possible before gaslighting them and pretending that this was never in the cards.

Sometimes, the only way to get a dumb and unnecessary rule changed is to follow it to the letter and prove to your superiors what you knew the whole time and show them that it doesn't work… Only then will they realize the error of their ways and relent. Of course, they're never going to admit that they were wrong and will just quietly sweep things under the rug and pretend that they knew it wasn't going to work all along.

Introverts aren't really known for being socially forthcoming. In fact, that's kind of the entire point. Rather than attending parties, drinks, and after-work hangouts, they'd prefer the relative silence and peace of their own company, often preferring only to engage with others over shared interests, activities, and hobbies. Let's be honest: for most introverts, engaging in the required social interactions at work is more than enough, and many won't feel a particular need or even the ability t…

Generally, the idea of managing something implies that you have some understanding of how that thing works and are, thus, capable of coordinating the operations of said thing. But, surprisingly, very few managers actually have a real understanding of the thing they're managing… and so their job mainly consists of talking to other managers who don't understand their thing very well either. Still, companies continue to think this is a good idea and continue to hire external candidates with no ind…

Job searching can be a painful process, and trying to stand out from a crowd through an electronic submission is difficult to do, meaning that you'll probably submit hundreds of applications to jobs—most of which you'll never hear back from. In a hundred submissions, you might hear back from a few—let's say 5%—so five interviews per 100 applications, which is a generous estimate. Of these five, you'll actually sit a first-round interview for three, hopefully getting asked to come back by two of…

Certain organizations, especially within certain industries, love to save on labor, and one of the ways they do this is by sending workers home from a scheduled shift when things are quiet to try and keep from being overstaffed. Of course, predictably, as soon as the manager has sent someone home, you'll end up with the biggest rush of customers you've ever experienced, ensuring that the rest of the day is going to be a living nightmare—and no one will be getting any breaks.

Working in a call center is a pretty thankless gig. Constantly dealing with less-than-kind customers who are frustrated at your company's refusal to help them with their problem with your product—which to be fair, is a known issue that the company has deemed to be too expensive to resolve. So, now you're bearing the brunt of that frustration on a daily basis because your wage for 20 years still costs far less than paying R&D to fix the issue.

While it might be gratifying to send that email you've been desperately wanting to send or to verbally rebuke your boss for wasting your time—as with anything, it's always best to sit on it for a little while… Let that scathing email sit in your drafts until you've had a good night's sleep, and take some time to reflect on what it is you're saying and how other people will perceive it. Maybe, after a little reflection, you won't be feeling so hot-headed and will take a more diplomatic approach…

Some people want to have their cake and eat it too—this employer wants to put their cake out on the street with a sign that says “free” and then sue you after you come along and take that perfectly good cake home. Except cake we're talking about here is a human being If you wanted further evidence that some employers think they own their workers, look no further than the fact that this employer thought that they could lay a worker off and that they were just going to come back on their knees be…

No one likes insurance companies, and what is there to like about paying for a service on the off chance you might one day need it, only to have that service provider behave with hostility and suspicion when that day arrives, doing everything they can to get out of honoring the service that they were being paid all this time to provide. Sure, not all insurers are like this, but being left in the lurch when you're already in a dire moment really sticks with you, and people's fear of that happeni…

There's a reason why businesses only offer services once an ironclad contract has been signed and reviewed. It's because they know “good” business is conducted on what you can legally get away with—maximizing your own cash flow by separating someone else from theirs—and that it's not conducted on verbal agreements, vague promises, goodwill, or moral quandary. Yet, they expect their workers to accept doing more work, working more hours with the vague expectation that it might one day lead to a r…

Sometimes, getting too good of results will only prove to your boss that you're a threat to them and will earn you the honor of being the target of their ire and infantile rage as, rather than up their own game, they try to politically hamstring you in order to prove their superiority. After all, whenever their ego is involved, you can trust someone to make an irrational decision.

Some have been calling this a “bait and switch” and while it is arguable that something along those lines is happening, there seems to be more of an erosion of expectations happening. It stands to reason that

When this restaurant worker was running late for their shift, their manager reached out to ask if they were coming in, probably not realizing that the simmering heat of anger that had been bubbling below the surface was about to boil over. After a series of unmet promises, unrealistic expectations, and even being cheated out of pay, this restaurant worker was more than happy to call it quits. The reason they were late to their shift in the first place was that they had actually been interviewin…

Surely most, if not all of us, have fantasized at one point or another about quitting our jobs on the spot, getting up and just walking out, either silently slipping out an exit door never to be seen again or adding a little fanfare to the occasion and going out with a touch of bravado by telling your boss and coworkers what you really think of them. Yet, for most of us, these fantasies will remain exactly that. When it comes to employment, there's too much at stake, and when you burn bridges,…

You wake up every day and drive into the office to do your job… and there's a comfort in that dull mundanity, a consistency. You've got a mortgage to pay and a family to feed, so you're happy (enough) and more or less resigned to the arrangement. Yet, as time goes on, you find yourself doing more and more work, your coworkers are leaving, and no one is being hired to replace them, leaving their workload split up amongst those remaining. The company is floundering—that's easy enough to see—and u…