When it comes to backstabbing and the pursuit of revenge—no one is walking away with their hands clean. Such endeavors require one to get intimate with underhanded affairs—hands and knees in the dirt, tossing and tumbling together like a litter of five-week-old puppies. Of course, this is all metaphorical—in a sense… You won't actually find the battles of office politics being fought with grown adults tousling on the ground, vying for the upper hand as ties are tugged, and high-heels are repurp…

Pulling far greater than your own weight at work—or in any team—is a common frustration to experience and can make you feel like you're carrying an incredible burden on your shoulders. What's worse, it can make you wonder whether any effort is even worth it… Why bother working so hard if your coworkers are just going to refuse to do their fair share (and get away with doing less) anyway? This is something that you first encounter in grade school in the form of group projects, with some members…

Being a ruthless cutthroat certainly has its advantages. Being unencumbered by the usual social requirements like empathy, mutualism, and reciprocation really frees you up to make some agile and dastardly moves. Still, the only friends you'll make will be “yes men” and sycophants, who are really only there to ride your coattails and feed off your scorched-earth rampage to the top, hanging around begging for scraps like a dog at the dinner table. When the house of cards eventually topples, these…

If you consider yourself to be smart and clever, you might think that you can get away with gaming the system, and it's only when it blows up in your face that you realize how much you overestimated your intelligence. Congratulations, you played yourself. Maintaining one full-time job is a lot of work, so it really makes you wonder how some people have been, reportedly, managing to work two at the same time. Every now and then, you see a story pop up online about someone who has been holding do…

Visiting an old workplace is a weird experience. Seeing old friends and coworkers still bound by the same toxic policies and stresses that once held you stirs rippling memories like a stone skipping across a pond's still surface before coming to rest in waters that were better left undisturbed. While you attempt to make small talk and reconnect, you can't help but detect feelings of resentment from the old comrades you left behind; while once you suffered together, now you're free from this par…

Sometimes you should be careful what you wish for because your deepest desires may come with unintended consequences. For example, if you make a wish to some magic dust as a 13-year-old to be “30, flirty, thriving, and thriving” hoping to have the future and life that you think you want to have… You may, instead, wake up to find that, while you're now successful, you've also become a vapid, hateful, spiteful individual. Hopefully, it's not too late and the magic dust takes you back, traumatized…

If you're keeping files on your work computer that you really shouldn't be keeping on your work computer, it would be foolish to complain when those files mysteriously disappeared during a scheduled security wipe… It would probably be best at that point to cut your losses and hope that whichever poor IT guy had to delete them either didn't see them or never mentioned a word about it to anyone. But, if you're keeping files like this on your work computer in the first place, good judgment clearly…

There is a quote that is often attributed to the likes of Bill Gates and Walter Chrysler that goes something along the lines of “Always choose a lazy man to do a hard job because a lazy man will find an easy way to do it.” Whether or not either of them actually uttered this string of words (or was the first to do so) is up for debate. But the sentiment rings true in many instances that require innovation: Why hire the guy who is content to do things by the letter when you can hire the guy who w…

It's often said that you shouldn't meddle with things you don't understand and, by extension, you shouldn't mess with the people who handle the things that you don't understand either. If you've managed to get a contractor in to handle something you can't or aren't willing to do or understand, and they deliver on that product, you'd do your best to pay them the agreed price. After all, we've already established you don't understand that thing, so why are you so certain you've got the upper hand…

It's often said that when going for a job interview, you should be kind and courteous to everyone you meet; famous anecdotes about not holding the front door to the building open for the person who ended up being the hiring manager reinforce this idea. Why, then, don't we extrapolate this idea and apply it to our daily lives—both professional and personal? When one lives their life in this way, they negate the chance of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, like this sor…

There are times in your life when you go out of your way to accommodate someone only to have them throw it back in your face and blame you for their stupid unrelated problems. It's like planning your birthday gathering at your favorite restaurant only to have that entitled friend complain that you're excluding them because they don't like that restaurant or have devised one of the dozens of other reasons to make your birthday about them. So, you let them pick the location for your birthday, onl…

Sometimes in life… the low road is the right one. This Karen brought a metaphorical knife to an actual nuclear arms race when she decided to go toe to toe with this IT guy and blamed him for all of her stupid nonexistent troubles. As readers have pointed out in the comments: It's never a good idea to pick a fight with the guy who writes code when your job is easily replaced by a single line of it — that's just begging for the unfortunate outcome that has occurred for Karen here. After the repea…

We all have a “Dave” in our life. The thing is — Dave can sometimes be wound a little too tight…

That'll show 'em.

Once in a while, something pops up online that is entirely unorthodox and a bit out of left field. This “avant-garde” take on a job interview description is exactly that. A little zany and unacceptable, it has defied our expectations of the performative qualities that a job interview normally offers. You'd usually expect a job interview to tediously lay out all of the things you might expect from a role but in a crap-coated manner of corporate speak that seeks to make light of all the terrible…

These are the types of "leaders" who will gladly tell you that "It's just business" when they're laying you off or refusing you a raise. Yet, when you find a better opportunity and give notice, they take it personally, acting as if you've betrayed them. Suddenly, "It's just business" isn't valid, and the employer wonders why all these employees end up "Turning against them," utterly blind to the fact that they are the common denominator.