toxic-workplace

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‘Why are people this miserable and pathetic?’: Entitled customer yells at a customer service agent for something he couldn’t possibly have influence over

Force majeure This is the typical discordance that emerges when we think about a problem by looking at the bigger picture rather than its every detail. We’d like to think that upper management takes every part of the company into consideration when they make big decisions like laying people off, but sometimes they don’t, and they

Upper management fires 4 employees from the same team without letting their manager know beforehand: ‘Had I been asked I could have pointed leadership to the actual underperformer on my team’

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‘Your job is not to coach people’: Boss tells front desk employee to stop helping customers with their mistakes, regrets it when chaos ensues with incorrectly filed forms

Giuliana Tiscioni

It’s time to RTO It’s hard to think it’s all for the best when you just signed the lease on an apartment 45 minutes away from the office you now have to return to. Some things we can’t predict, and

Company announces RTO immediately after employee signs a lease on an apartment 45 minutes away from the office: ‘My manager knew I was moving, I told him directly, he said nothing. HR knew, I updated my address in the system’

Was it fate or pure luck? The way the OP narrates the story is a bit messy, but to me, it’s profoundly revealing. It confesses a desire to be rescued from his position without necessarily having t

Underperforming employee covers another position when the worker goes on leave and turns out to be much better at it; another employee wonders if he was also hired for the wrong job: 'There's no analytics-person-goes-on-leave accident coming to rescue me'

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Fantasy job search. This employee should’ve gotten a job in acting; the way he pulled a performance and everybody believed it. I’ve exaggerated things on my curriculum when I was young, not to the extent of lying, but there were some exaggerations here and there, and I still didn’t get hired!

Employee lies on his resume and gets hired at a high-paying IT company, and now struggles with his day-to-day and fears yearly evaluation: 'My buddy basically taught me everything I know and helped me learn as I go'

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‘I genuinely feel like I’m watching a real-life Mean Girls spinoff play out in real time’: Employee notices his colleagues are constantly aggressively gossiping about everyone else, and they are also doing it to each other

I’ve read this kind of story many times from different angles, but something seems to happen around the quiet workers, or the quiet team members in general. I think it gets especially difficult in places like work because there are many employees, and managers often can’t keep track of everyone. The ones who get noticed are the ones who make themselves noticeable

Manager realizes he is losing a very valuable employee only after she leaves and asks for recommendations to identify “quiet performers” before they walk out: ‘Is it just asking better questions, or is there something structural that actually works?’

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I think this employee was very clever about how he pulled this off. Obviously, I don’t think the tactic is bulletproof, but it definitely worked for him. I also loved the figurine’s involvement and how, years later, it turned out to be a treasure for other reasons.

Man employs a very peculiar tactic involving a figurine to get both a raise and a bigger commission at work: ‘So for the next week and a half I randomly started removing things from my desk area (very whimsical) and finally that item’

I admit it: I have a complex relationship with ChatGPT, and by complex, I mean I use it to think through pretty much most of my decisions. I’m a writer, so I’m used to developing ideas through text in a couple of languages. I also write short stories, and every day I write in my diary; still, today, I asked ChatGPT for help with writing a WhatsApp message.

Employee starts prompting his boss as if she were an AI chatbot to get the responses he desires and it works: 'I try different prompts in my chat to see which wording of a question will give the affirming answer I want. I then bring up my decision to her'

Personally, if I were put in this situation, I wouldn't know what to do. What this employee did was far from perfect, but it was an honest mistake. Not everyone can plot the most perfect act of malicious compliance every time they're wronged, although I wish things worked that way.

Employee trains a very young colleague that then bosses him around: 'He had the audacity to try to yell at me and say, I will cut the files if they are correct. You need to do your job and make sure that I have the right measurements. I lost it'

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Sometimes our managers are so spaced out that they don’t notice their employees are having an awful time working at their companies. You might even resign without another job secured and block them everywhere, and they still wouldn’t notice.

29-year-old employee leaves his job as a specialist at a small planning and design firm and his ex-boss instists on him leaving a review on a popular local job review site: 'He wanted a review? Fine. Let's comply'

It's funny how we act around timid personalities. We project all kinds of dark character traits when, in reality, we don’t know anything about them precisely because they are so reserved. I’m glad this employee found out about her coworker’s real personality in the best way possible. Her finding out he wasn’t so evil after all wasn’t that shocking

Work "enemy" turns out to be the only one to have employee's back when he needed it, worked 6-8 extra unpaid hours for him and refuses to accept a gift in retribution: 'I approached him about it and he told me basically he was busy and not to bother him'

Sometimes being good at something doesn't guarantee people will notice it. You might be the best at what you do, but people are definitely more likely to see what's overtly shown to them.

Calm employee discovers his quiet competence made his good work invisible: 'People who get noticed are the ones who create urgency, send 14 Slack messages, act stressed, then get praised for solving the same issue they made everyone aware of'

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70-year-old employee is interviewed for a higher-paying position only for it to be given to an employee 40-years-younger: 'It’s not like I didn’t know the reason I wasn’t chosen'

People taking the most twisted road ever to find out about something will forever fascinate me. This sounds like a spy story from a TV series, and I really hope he finds Spanish interesting for reasons other than understanding when his coworkers speak in private, because all that effort being wasted on it is ludicrous.

Spiteful employee spent two years learning spanish to hear what his coworkers were saying about him during lunch and was confused when he found out what it was: 'I wanted to crawl under my desk and evaporate.They weren't mocking me'