The proverb “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush” postulates that you're better off with what you have or are able to get now rather than what you might be able to get in the future. Reson being that While working for an emergency telecommunications company, this worker fell into the all-too-common trap of taking on additional work with the promise that it would eventually lead to more pay. Spoiler alert: It didn't. With the proverbial carrot dangling just in front of them indefin…

Sometimes you can't just tell people things—they won't listen. It takes actually experiencing the negative result that you were warning them about for them to admit they were wrong. Predictably, this happens all the time with unreasonable egotistical bosses who are eager to prove themselves… This developer, working for a financial services company, developed various tools and scripts to compensate for the company's other shortcomings, sometimes inadequate customer solutions. This saw them worki…

This employee worked in the contracts department of a major software company, which they refer to as “MidSoft Inc” Continual foolish decisions that thought of nothing but the bottom line and cost-cutting measures, driven by the ravenous interests of private equity investors, reduced the company's senior development team from 12 to one soldier, “Sam.” While the ledger might have looked better for a time, the immeasurable loss of institutional knowledge and literal lifetimes of experience would g…

It's common knowledge that you'll often never be appreciated for your job when things are going well—or even great. Your boss and employer assume your high performance is just a given and merit to their management rather than a credit to your own talent and efforts. But, as soon as something goes wrong, they won't blame themselves, even though that will make the most sense based on their logic. No, they'll suddenly come around asking questions, trying to figure out what went wrong, and looking…

When it's your job to ensure important information is protected, and someone insists that you delete it, even if it's the client themself, you'd be right to pause for a moment and reassess the situation if something doesn't sound quite right. Clients tend to woefully overestimate their abilities in the matter they're contracting you to handle, so they may be asking you to do something they don't fully understand the implications of. This tech support specialist worked for a small organization,…

There's something about stories of time in the military that just really tick all boxes. For one thing, you have archetypical authoritarian figures aplenty who have a very real and absolute authority over their subordinates, the kind of power that a overstepping assistant retail manager or wizened doctor's office receptionist would salivate buckets over. The thing is, in this type of environment, you're going to be ordered to do things that you don't agree with or that just plain old don't make…

It feels like the more specialized someone is at one thing, the worse they are at others, and the more educated and specialized they are, the more surprising the things they can't do will be.It's almost as if living your life with a singular drive and focus leaves you as a not-very-well-rounded individual, probably one of the reasons celebrities are being consistently picked apart in the landscape of the modern social media levels of exposure they're placed under. We're quickly reaching a point…

If you've ever worked a job that relies on timesheets, you know how this goes… Management (usually of the upper variety) wants to keep better track of how and where staff are spending their time, they pressure staff to charge out more hours to jobs, trying to keep them from posting “unproductive” uncharged hours. Suddenly, clients are getting charged more hours, and therefor paying more, for services implement The really interesting thing about management wanting to better track

There's this thing that happens every now and again in organizations where someone, usually high up on the food chain, decides that everything—every decision, order, expense, or report—needs to pass across their desk. They do so severely underestimating the gravitas of what they've just requested, with little comprehension of just how many things they're going to be handling, dependent on their pen stroke to proceed. Of course, maybe not right away, but at some point, things are going to begin…

If you're in a line of work that frequently deals with emergency break-fix scenarios where you're effectively permanently on call and might be expected (or required) to spring into action at a moment's notice at any time, having an expectation set that you'll never work overtime doesn't really work. Yet, that doesn't stop petty managers from setting petty rules for their frontline staff who are handling these types of situations. But, to be fair, it's not as if they really understand the indust…

Everyone who has ever been stuck working on a company laptop that is frightfully unsuited to its task knows the pain of receiving a decrepit hand-me-down of a machine from the IT department, and anyone who has ever been issued a company computer will be able to tell you they've had this exact experience. So, there you are, desperately attempting to remain efficient whilst enduring higher load-processing times than when you tried to play flash games on your parents' dial-up internet and navigati…

At this point in the story of the history of the office worker, it should be common knowledge that being a productive worker doesn't mean being tied to a desk for 8 hours a day between the hours of 8 AM and 5 PM. In the yesteryear of the evaluation of working performance, previous generations would have sat stoically at their desks and, whether or not they were actually doing anything of merit to contribute to the company, their ability to have their behind in that seat for eight hours a day wo…

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…

There are a lot of confusing things happening in this story, like how this night shift worker became integrated with their company's development team, contributing significantly to the point where the higher-ups were using their reporting dashboard for their reports. Yet, at the same time, there was somehow no one willing to stick up for them when their head was placed on the chopping block for seeking increasing compensation for their constantly-increasing responsibility and contribution. Stil…

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…

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…