Flexibility begets flexibility, and a little understanding goes a long way. There's no sense in being overly rigid about rules when they don't serve to benefit anyone and make things worse for everyone overall. This worker enjoyed a flexible working arrangement until they were singled out by their boss and made to work 9 to 5 each day instead of 8 to 4 as they had been working. Frustrated at these new restrictions and at the erosion of the work-life balance that that flexibility had allowed the…

When you're planning the biggest event of your life, what is possibly a once-in-a-lifetime event, it's important to make sure you actually get to the planning part of it and not just leave essential parts to chance… this, coming from someone who is notoriously poor at planning beyond the end of the week. If you want to go on a trip that is going to require you to take time off work, you should probably make sure you request the time off work first so that you're not stuck with an already booked…

This employee worked in the contracts department of a major software company, which they refer to as “MidSoft Inc” Continual foolish decisions that thought of nothing but the bottom line and cost-cutting measures, driven by the ravenous interests of private equity investors, reduced the company's senior development team from 12 to one soldier, “Sam.” While the ledger might have looked better for a time, the immeasurable loss of institutional knowledge and literal lifetimes of experience would g…

It's often said that we accuse others of the thing we're most guilty of, our own guilt subconsciously directing our thoughts in that direction. For instance, your boss who is constantly hounding you about your hours and accusing you of having not worked them is probably not working their full hours themself, either slacking off at their desk or making excuses for leaving early that they wouldn't accept from anyone else, amounting to hours of time over the course of a month. This, of course, tak…

Keeping a friendly rapport with your supervisors and fellow employees is crucial if you want to progress in the company. Having said that, is this truly a place you want to be if a manager is continuously criticizing you? The story below is an account of a frustrated employee. The original poster (OP) worked on a video production shoot. At first, everything was well as he enjoyed working the set and made a good impression. But things turned sour when a few weeks passed and he was still unpaid.…

It doesn't hurt to be nice or at least kind to people who are just doing their job. Oftentimes, your complaint with their service will have more to do with the organization and its cost-saving policies rather than with the individual themself. And this is important to remember because a lot of people—well, they don't think about it at all. Customer service agents are no strangers to verbal mistreatment from customers. Don't get it wrong; customer service agents can be prone to being just as mis…

It's common knowledge that you'll often never be appreciated for your job when things are going well—or even great. Your boss and employer assume your high performance is just a given and merit to their management rather than a credit to your own talent and efforts. But, as soon as something goes wrong, they won't blame themselves, even though that will make the most sense based on their logic. No, they'll suddenly come around asking questions, trying to figure out what went wrong, and looking…

There's nothing worse in the workplace than being stuck with a slothful coworker who refuses to do any of their own work and is constantly asking you to help with their workload, meanwhile you know that if you were to refuse to help you'd just be seen by the rest of the workplace as “unhelpful” or “not a team player.”

Depending on your age, you probably had a teacher who constantly reprimanded students for having their phones out in class or even just the presence of any sort of technology or devices that they felt detracted from their lessons. When you get out of school, you come to find that some managers operate in exactly the same way, seemingly confusing effective management with policing their workers as if they were still children. You've probably worked for one of these places or one of these microma…

With the continued rise of video-centric social media platforms in conjunction with the ever-increasing presence of video recording devices, it seems that any etiquette there might have been surrounding not recording videos of strangers or acquaintances and posting them online is virtually nonexistent. The desire for views, clicks, and fake internet points has increasingly encouraged bystanders to whip out their phones and start recording whenever something “interesting” occurs. Turning unhelpf…

Some business leaders wield workers' feelings of insecurity like a weapon, using snide, cutting disparaging comments to keep their subordinates on the back foot and underfoot where they safely won't try to rock the boat, following orders without question—most importantly, not daring to ask for more money or promotions that align their compensation with the work they're actually doing. While being capable of getting along with anyone is an important skill to have, it remains a fact that you're n…

The reality of the hiring process meeting expectations takes place on both sides. The entire process has such a ridiculously excessive performative requirement that there's no way either party can live up to all of the gassing up they've been doing. There is sure to be more time spent completing monotonous tasks than the interviewer implied, with also less room for growth and creative freedom than you might have been led to believe you would receive. Similarly, your employer might come to find…

Nothing breaks familiar bonds between once close-knit coworkers, who have bonded through commiserative mutual suffering at the hands of a toxic employer like the eventuality of one of them leaving. As the realization dawns that they're going to have to continue on in the world while their coworker is freed, stress sets in, and the toxic atmosphere takes hold. Then they collectively turn on the leaving coworker, partly out of jealousy at their newfound liberation and partly because turning on th…

There's always a bigger fish… No matter how big or small you are, you can almost take solace in the fact that there's always going to be someone bigger or better than you at something and will soon come to take your place. This is a real worry to the big fish out there who are desperate to maintain their status as top dogfish. In this way, sometimes being the smallest fish is beneficial because all the other fish are so much larger than you that they consider you to not be a threat or even wort…

"Cause and effect" or "action and reaction" is typically a predictable concept—bounce a ball on the ground at your feet, and you'd expect it to come flying straight back at your face. Still, when the factor of human perception motivations is included, you can end up with some interesting reactions that you might not have considered. Take for instance, this worker who injured themself during their lunch break while working from home, leading to their boss's ending of their workplace's flexible w…

If you’ve ever worked a job where your work site was off-site, then you know exactly how this goes. It’s not unusual for some superior, probably your boss’s boss or boss’s boss’s boss, to make important decisions about the manner of your work and instate policy that makes very little sense in the reality of your working conditions. Almost always, they're sitting behind a desk in a city a long way away and entirely disconnected from the reality—even the context—of your job. The problem is that t…