toxic-work-environment

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Maybe this doesn’t happen to everyone, but it surely does happen to a lot of us. One day, you get your dream job, or your dream partner, or some very good opportunity, and sadly, things start to happen to you, and you can't perform at your best. The worst possible outcome is that you get fired or lose the opportunity; hopefully, something less bad happens, and you can learn from the experience and not let your sabotaging urges win.

Employee gets fired from his dream job because took 5 holidays in his first month and wonders if there's anything he can do to reverse it: 'It’s just a bad month. But I don’t know what to do. They are saying this will be a final decision.'

When we pay for something, the transaction is clear: I give you money, you give me what I paid for. With gifts, something more elusive happens: For some people, receiving something as a gift creates a sense of entitlement that masks an underlying dependence on what was given to them. Some people defend themselves from that feeling of dependency by treating what was given to them as something they were owed.

University library employee reports increasing student entitlement towards loaned laptops since 2020: 'I've had more than one patron demand I get them a different laptop because the one I grabbed from the cabinet didn't look nice enough'

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Back when I was in high school, I was terrified of something like this happening to me, the classical story: the boys make a bet to see who can ask the ugliest girl out, and it turns out I’m the oblivious girl thinking she has a chance with the high school heartthrob. Well, this story doesn’t involve that kind of heartbreak, but it does involve someone giving a long, controlled performance to get the information they wanted.

Employee pretends to be friendly with coworker for months only to extract important information about the workplace: 'The friendship part might have been real at first, but somewhere along the way it started feeling more like a project to him'

Anyone who has worked at customer service knows this: there is always a customer who arrives at the very last minute, and then makes you wait for him to finish, and you end up closing the store 45 minutes late because you aren’t allowed to say you need him to go asap so you can close. I genuinely don’t know where these people come from, nor why they don’t seem to have any empathy or understanding of the phrase ‘we’re closing’.

Entitled customer demands employee to open the store even though he was warned it closed in five minutes: 'Like do some customers need to be hand held now or what?'

When anonymity turns to exposure I just found out there is a rarely used literal antonym for anonymity, it’s nonymity, which means ‘with a name’, of course. So what this company conducted was probably a ‘nonymous’ survey, only they forgot to disclose it. I’ve had the temptation to be really honest in one or two of those surveys, but I always held back because there weren’t many people being surveyed, and it would be really easy to discover who wrote what. Of course, it would all be perfect if w…

Employee finds out his anonymous feedback was never anonymous and is being called to have a personal meeting with the manager: 'It turned upside down when my manager called me out in front of the entire team and mocked about the review i gave'

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I was about to make malicious compliance my new religion until I came across this example of it going the exact opposite way it was expected. Maybe it’s time to give up on our mischievous endeavours and turn back to old, regular, direct communication. When something like this backfires, we get two problems where there used to be one.

Manteinance employee maliciously complies with his manager's new rule and in an unexpected turn of events, his manager loves it: 'As you can tell from the title, this did not go how I was expecting'

Some things we can only figure out in retrospect. People often act in ways we deem incoherent and irrational, and only after everything ends can we see the underlying motives for their behaviour. Becoming too close way too fast with someone might be a cause for concern.

Resentful manager goes from bonding immediately with new server to sabotaging her every move: 'Looking back, it suddenly made a lot more sense why she seemed to go from friendly mentor to treating me like public enemy number one'

I think there is something to say here about a road paved with good intentions, but anyway. Sometimes we analyze a situation and come up with the best solution we can think of, and we end up breaking something that was steadily functioning. The key to success might be communicating our plans to fix the thing instead of doing it as a surprise, but well, everybody makes honest mistakes, and it even feels unfair to call a situation like this a mistake.

Employee spends months thoroughly organizing communal folder in secret, only to wind up causing office chaos: 'I’m sitting here, staring at the perfectly organized, color-coded, and searchable directory I created, terrified to say anything'

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Manager wastes company resources building a case against an employee he personally dislikes, ends up getting put on a PIP himself

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'I had such high hopes for this company, but now I just feel disgusted': Job candidate left stunned after business manager spends 95% of the interview bad-mouthing his coworkers and colleagues

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Boss enforces "clean desk policy," throws away everything on employees' desks after 6:00 PM: '[My] colleague had a framed photo of her kids taken three times in the same week'

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27-year-old employee refuses to assist the new hire she trained after she gets their dream promotion: 'I wont help her anymore'

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Micromanager puts employee on PIP for doing her job instead of letting her boss do it for her

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Mom retires after advocating for higher salary for 18 years, replacement quits after one shift, ex-boss now offers double the salary for her to return: 'If a company doesn't give you what you deserve, believe me, you'll find another one that will'

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'Good luck finding a replacement for me': Employee resigns after manager downplays his work, prompting four other employees to quit

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Employee confronts upper management for mishandling his schedule, boss refuses to be held accountable: 'They threatened to fire me if I expressed myself “that way” again.'