“Red flags start appearing from the very first minute I arrive,” this employee wrote in one jaw-dropping workplace story.

We've all had the experience of being overlooked by an employer.

Talk about getting out while you still can!

This HR lady's blatant lie says just about everything one could say regarding the health of this work environment.

Venturing forth into the unknown is a challenging experience, and the comforts of the assured often keep us from starting that journey. The tug-of-war between known and unknown take place as a theme stretching back throughout human existence, with the desire for change, for “better,” causing us to seek out novel experiences—the fear of ending up worse off keeping them from pursuing them. This has been a commonly discussed topic on our site as of late, as it often plays significantly into our ci…

Here's a friendly reminder that the words "mandatory" and "requested" do not mean the same thing.

Some people want to have their cake and eat it too. But it's really not so much about the cake itself as it is the control over that cake; they want the cake to submit to their authority and stop questioning it all the darn time. The thing is, this cake-haver probably isn't qualified to tell the cake what to do, which is why they're so darn insecure in the first place… I don't really know where this is going or what this metaphor is supposed to mean, but people aren't cake—and you shouldn't try…

LOL

Having too much work to do and unrealistic expectations from your superiors about that work is a surefire way to make you hate your job… and your entire existence. This will usually happen in some sort of toxic workplace environment where middle managers have been selected and promoted on their willingness to enforce any policy they're told to rather than on any actual skills in operations, administration, or management. These middle managers are more than willing to pass any pressure placed on…

Go team

New jobs can be as exciting as they are challenging, but when you enter as a new manager, and you have a hotshot complex, this can be disastrous for a company and its employees. This boss in particular, who we'll call Steve, made especially unreasonable demands on his employees, essentially alienating them. Steve demanded that his employees come to an unnecessary in-person meeting out of state, on extremely short notice. Because it was so unreasonable, the employees knew what they had to do. Th…

Memes galore to help with the bore

Remember that episode on Friends, when Rachel lied to Joey about her boss wanting to ‘buy her baby’? This story has a similar plotline, except it's real. This particular boss began as OP's 'friend’ when OP was pregnant, alone, and stuck in a rut. The woman was offering OP an apartment (in a property she managed) and a job when she had neither. It was a no-brainer, and OP became her tenant and employee. Unfortunately, the woman was taking advantage of OP, and expected her to ‘give her her baby’.…

New management always finds a way to demotivate workers, usually via micromanagement, but in this case, the opposite is true. There are countries where labor laws are a dime a dozen, and in this specific one, employees have a certain amount of hours required to work each month; every hour short of that is deducted from monthly payment, and every hour beyond is paid as overtime. This employee used that to his advantage when his new boss decided to mess with him, attempting to deduce his salary b…

Stories like this are a dime a dozen, the reason for that being that many new managers make the common mistake of trying to change rules that work, for rules that don't. One man was working for a subsidiary of a fortune 500 as a manager of a dev team. Everything was working perfectly until a new security manager came along, and revoked the admin rights of OP's team. This led to a handful of problems, which were brought to the security manager, who waved them off. In fact, he replied to every em…

The employees maliciously complied to the point where the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars.