When you want to make a demand to show how much authority you have, you're generally not going to be thinking with anything but your ego. This brainless decision-making is bound to get you in a whole heap of trouble. It's no secret that petty managers love to tell workers to put their phones away. Within certain industries, it's sometimes their sole managerial function; lord forbid they actually took the time to learn any other administrative or operational skills. The idea here is that treatin…

For context, the entitled coworker who had to wait because of a delayed flight was, in fact, the pilot. Our hero, the OP who tricked him into waiting for two hours, was part of the crew. You think the pilot would know when his flight is delayed, right? Wrong. That just shows you the VIP entitlement complex this man has. But for real, he deserved it for doing this...

Being in charge doesn't mean you have all the answers. In fact, it often shouldn't, and this means that while you don't know the answers, you are experienced in identifying people with those answers and knowing when to differ to their better judgment. Those in petty positions of power who are unable to get their ego out of the way and accept the expertise of their subordinates are bound to end up in embarrassing situations like this one. This venue supervisor refused to accept that the experien…

This person is not going to be making many friends at their office place. Every now and again, there's a post made to r/AmItheA******, and none of the commenters can agree on who's wrong in the scenario. This is one of those tales. U/NeopolitanGuy1 sparked the debate with their story about a parking space. Every workplace has at least one “good spot,” which is usually close to the entrance. It'll be hard to get that spot, though, because it'll be taken by whichever early bird gets to the office…

When we're in preschool, kids are taught that hard work and dedication gets rewarded. If you take your nap, eat your snack, and listen to the teacher, you get to go to recess. As adults, our equivalent of 'recess' is a stiff paycheck at the end of the month, ideally with as many digits as possible. Unfortunately as we get older it becomes more painfully clear that real life isn't so simple.

This person told a tale of their car repair debacle from 20 years ago, and you can tell it's an old story because they discovered the repair shop using a phone book. A real phone book! What a delightful throwback! For those of you who don't know, a phone book was a very big and heavy book with hundreds of pages. The white pages listed the numbers of people, and the yellow pages listed the numbers for businesses. It wasn't just numbers, either, it usually listed addresses too. Having your phone…

A birthday cake is dividing this workplace. That's because of two coworkers who can't see eye to eye about food. People eat all sorts of diets for all sorts of reasons. For example, if you go to the doctor and your cholesterol is high, they might tell you to stop eating eggs. Or if you want to have more vegetables and less red meat, you might start eating fish in place of burgers. Everyone eats in their own unique ways, and has their own specific likes and dislikes. But for some reason, people…

This service tech is used to driving to jobs in different neighborhoods, but they weren't prepared for this weather. In any job, if your boss has your back, it makes your life a lot easier. However, many managers think that their employees are always trying to be sneaky or deceitful. They have no trust in their decision-making abilities…even though they presumably hired them for such qualities. This person, u/EmuExternal6244, shared a story from a snowy day on the job. As a lead service tech, t…

Flexibility begets flexibility—treat workers with the understanding, trust, and respect they deserve and get the same in return. Particularly in a line of work where being a few minutes late means nothing, but the worker's willingness to stay late or work unexpected hours means everything, you'd do well to accept that them walking in the door a few minutes late isn't that big of a deal. That is unless you, their new supervisor, have a bone to pick with them over the fact that their self-determi…

Interacting with people constantly in any line of work opens you up to a number of strange experiences, and you'd better believe that police officers and other first responders have seen the wildest ones. Similarly, every job has a process that needs to be followed, even if that process is nonsensical and enforced by a power-tripping boss who also adds their own directives to it and demands they are followed to the letter. Take, for example, when this police officer was told that they needed to…

It's always perplexing when your superiors demand that you do less work, stop thinking for yourself, and just mindlessly follow your contracted tasks like a mindless drone. The fact is, you're making them all look bad, and while they appreciate your efforts, if they let you carry on being exceptional, you'll put everyone else out of a job. As we've scrawled on the pages of Fail Blog a thousand times before, too many bosses and employers prioritize the ability to follow orders without thinking o…

One thing employers almost unanimously do is encourage collaboration, promote synergy, and do deep dives into core competencies in order to close the loop on big data and growth hack deliverables… While no one is completely sure what any of this means , there's a chance that your boss has used one of these phrases in order to promote whatever thing they're pursuing, and it remains certain that collaboration is often at the forefront of company initiatives.

When apparent negligence and mysterious circumstances are working directly in your employer's favor, it's sometimes hard to imagine that things aren't actually working as intended. Longtime readers will know that I'm a big believer in Hanlon's Razor, the idea that you should "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." As with Occam's Razor, where the simplest explanation is the most likely, the simplest likely explanation for something is usually that they're ju…

Joining the workforce for the first time is a surreal experience. You start off bright-eyed and filled with wonder about what the world might have in store for you… ready to give it your all, dreaming of the drastic contributions you're going to make to society. But, the more time you spend working, the more the wonderous color drains from the dream, leaving behind a sad, beige, and grey world that looks like every house-flipping millennial's home renovation.

People work jobs to get paid—it's as plain and simple as that. It's not something we're doing out of goodwill because we care so much about our boss that we want to fatten his wallet up for him. While our bosses might wish that this was the case, the arrangement of employment is based on a simple transaction: The worker's time and skills are provided in exchange for a consistent paycheck.

As the slow march of time presses ever onward, it's not uncommon for change to occur—in fact, it's unavoidable. Small incremental shifts in policy and perception mount and build up into larger changes. Sometimes, you won't even realize how far things have gone until you take a look back at the winding road back to where things used to be. While these changes are usually for the better, sometimes things work their way into normalization that takes us back a step or two. We might not even realize…