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…

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…

For some unfathomable reason, companies have a larger hiring budget than retention budget. They're willing to pay more money to hire a new employee, than they would be willing to pay as a raise for an existing employee. OP was working as a junior at an IT job for a company. During OP's yearly evaluation, they asked their boss for a 5-10% raise, which was completely fair, as they had taken on many responsibilities since the beginning of their employment. OP's boss refused, giving a bunch of reas…

Just because someone knows how to reset the router, doesn't meant they're an IT specialist. For some reason, C-level bosses and upper management (the kind of bimbos who are incapable of any sort of ‘tech’ tinkering) seem to think that every person born after 1990 can handle the specialized career of an experienced tech person, even when it's not in their job description. It's for the good of the company, every employee needs to step up rather than watch their boss hire a professional...

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…

When someone has done you wrong, the best thing to do is to walk the other way with your head still held high… but it's certainly more satisfying to scorch the earth behind you as you go. When faced with the bullying behavior of their Karen boss, this IT guy realized he had enough and quit, seeking greener pastures—but, he also decided to (metaphorically) set fire to the building on the way out the door, scheduling a mass company-wide email to be sent from his boss's email address that exposed…

Though the days we fretted about exams are far behind us, we can still remember the bitter taste in our mouths as we bit our nails, staring gloomily out into the distance through our dorm windows, the background noise upping our stress levels. Being a student sucks, we get it. But that's no excuse to disregard someone else's time, much less a mentor who isn't actually receiving any money for doing their job. In this case, an IT mentor volunteered to teach students code, IT, and MVP. The team of…

New managers tend to make the same, common mistake of entering a workplace and attempting to prove themselves by ‘bettering the environment’, usually by changing policies that actually work. What then follows is a string of mistakes that either cost the company good employees, a lot of money, or the ‘environment’. In this case, a small AV company that dealt with thousands of NEC displays a year hired a new general manager who had absolutely no idea what he was doing, per usual. The employee in…

Companies often cheap out on buying software, instead opting to download a pirated version for free. If this were to come to light, the fines would be hefty, but a lot of companies get away with it. This one did not. An employee with no prior office experience was hired as a processor for a mortgage company. Her boss was extremely dismissive, as she looked down on her for having no experience. Her pride cost the company $30,000 in fines. What happened was the following: An unknown error popped…

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…

This dude told a hilarious story of email insanity, writing, “I witnessed this astounding IT meltdown around 2004 in a large academic organization…”

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…