"After all, I was just following orders."

What is it about landlords and pushing everything to the absolute limit when it comes to financial recompensation? Damage one little corner of a 15-year-old carpet or a horrifically sun-faded curtain, and suddenly, they're quoting you for full replacement and the consequential loss involved with that replacement—purely as a means to keeping your entire deposit, money that they feel entitled to. Meanwhile, your time and your things are valueless to them and they will be slothful about anything t…

It's hard to forget your first disastrous job experience. Here, we have a 17-year-old server who already had enough with this job before things really escalated. He put in his two weeks' notice because he was tired of repeatedly being given closing shifts that required him to stay nearly two hours after he was supposed to be off. On one night in the midst of those final two weeks, the server was asked by one of his managers to help out his coworker behind the bar, who was clearly out of their d…

There is nothing like proving an unnecessarily strict authority figure wrong. Here, we have a terrible teacher who never failed to remain biased when grading the essays and assessing the arguments of her students. It got to the point where this Redditor knew he was not going to perform well on the essay portion of his final exam due to her biases. However, when he learned that there was potential for extra credit on the final, he started hatching a plan. The extra credit assignment was as follo…

It's often said that you should never stoop to someone else's level and, instead, take the high road and go on to live a better life, beating them through their inability to affect you. Well, truth be told, that's not really all that much fun, and it's not very practical at times since it doesn't really solve the immediate problem at hand. And when that immediate problem at hand is your daily at-home parking situation—well, it's kind of hard to just walk away and ignore it since, you know, you…

Some workers just never properly learn Zoom call etiquette . A lot of folks got really proficient at using the video call service when we all had to work at our homes for a while a few years back. But others are still new to the app, and aren't quite sure how to run a meeting. For example, it's common etiquette to mute your microphone if you aren't speaking. It's not enough just to stay quiet, because there's bound to be background noise, like kids running around, dogs barking, or cars revving.…

Has anyone else had the sneaking suspicion that their professor was doing the bare minimum when it came to grading essays? Of course, if students are encouraged to try hard, shouldn't their teachers lead by example? In an ideal world, yes… but this is far from an ideal world. Here, we have a college student who was assigned short weekly papers that ultimately amounted to just 10% of the grade (each paper was 1% and was graded out of 10). After the first six weeks of the course, the student was…

Family is difficult, perhaps even one of the most difficult things—even when the relationships are fairly “traditional” and straightforward. Let's be honest, though: what is straightforward? Is there even really a straightforward when it comes to family? The reality is that there hardly ever is, and the ones that pretend

When asked to choose between a single work-sponsored lunch or a permanent raise , why would you ever choose the lunch? It's a long-running joke that companies love to provide pizza Fridays instead of doling out much-needed raises (which could, in turn, let employees buy their own pizza, or you know, more important things in life than that). The company only has to shell out a few hundred dollars for a pizza party, and it does raise employee's spirits for a few hours while their stomachs are ful…

Parents should be careful when lecturing their kids. Teenagers , in particular, are likely to twist their words and expose the parenting flaws at play, and honestly, who can blame them? Especially in this instance where we have a young 13-year-old whose mother couldn't stand the fact that her kid was constantly on her phone… as so many kids are in this day and age. It goes beyond the technology dependence, though. The entitled mom was infuriated that her daughter wouldn't clean the house and ba…

A double-edged sword cuts both ways, and you could probably get a paper cut from a double-sided print job, too. Cutting costs might seem like a good idea, but really, you're probably just going to slice right through other important things like customer satisfaction and, by extension, your company's profit. After all, as the old saying goes…You gotta spend money to make money. Overly inflexible policies are almost certainly a double-edged sword. When you demand rigid adherence to rules, leaving…

Group projects can be absolutely infuriating if you're doing them alone. As one commenter in this thread pointed out, some professors feel strongly that working on group projects is the closest that students can get to real-life experience. That's probably true, but it doesn't make it any less infuriating to try to coordinate schedules with three or four other busy college students. Everyone has jobs, sports, family to care for, studying, and other activities that can make it hard to find time…

Working with people who live in a completely different time zone than you do can become extremely challenging. You might be fine with it at first, thinking you would be able to find hours during the workday that works for both sides. But then before you know it, you are answering emails and setting up calls late at night because that is the only time you can get any work done with the other side. When an employee does find themselves in a situation like this, it is important to set up boundarie…

Is it really even petty revenge when you revoke your recently ex-employers' access to your personal software that you paid for and were only using for your work out of goodwill? At that point, you're just reclaiming what was rightfully yours, to begin with, and since the company had been effectively leasing your software license, you might as well go ahead and send them a bill for however long they had been using it, too . It's not your fault if they can't properly invest in the resources neede…

Finders keepers! It's a rule that can be the best or the worst, depending on if you're the finder or the person who lost something valuable. Finding a $20 bill on the ground is amazing, because there's no way of proving who really lost it. But being the person who went to do laundry and suddenly realized that $20 bill had flown out of their pocket makes you really dislike the “finders keepers” rule. This 8-year-old found themselves on both sides of the rule, starting with a standoff with their…

When maintaining million-dollar machines is the singular focus of your work, you'd hope that your manager would leave well enough alone and trust you to know how to do your thing. Alas, when it comes to new management, leaving well enough alone is something that is never in the playbook, a “one-size-fits-all” approach taking precedence over logical reason. This machine operator worked at an aerospace manufacturing company, executing an efficient routine by starting work early to ensure that mac…