When we're in preschool, kids are taught that hard work and dedication gets rewarded. If you take your nap, eat your snack, and listen to the teacher, you get to go to recess. As adults, our equivalent of 'recess' is a stiff paycheck at the end of the month, ideally with as many digits as possible. Unfortunately as we get older it becomes more painfully clear that real life isn't so simple.

Credit cards are insanely convenient. Nowadays, you don't even need to swipe your card to pay, you can just whip that little bad boy out, tap your plastic money on the terminal, and BAM, you've made a purchase. Old school folks have reluctantly accepted that everyone prefers to pay with plastic money, idealizing the old ways of counting cash and receiving change in exchange for goods or services. But with all that spare change jangling around in your pocket, wouldn't you rather...

Retail is a soul sucking industry that sends even the most level-headed employees into madness. After months, years, or decades in the same sales department, many retail workers grow apathetic; dealing with Karens, bad management, and a looping music playlist can do that to a person. Although, every now and then, a retail store is blessed with an overachiever, a real workaholic...

Who here works a full time job and is not interested in making any money? Nobody? No takers?! Exactly. The majority of the workforce isn't driven by passion, work-ethic, or altruism– we're driven by cold, hard cash. Anyone who says otherwise is either delusional or a professional recruiter. Although usually head hunters like to swoon their prey with pretty words and shiny pay-days, sometimes there's that dime-in-a-dozen recruiter that has the audacity to...

Memes to scroll in the break room

Top-tier employees usually go unnoticed by upper management. As a workforce, we go above and beyond to keep the company on its feet and it seems like the folks that reap the most benefits have the fewest qualifications. Nepotism ransacks corporations, leaving open the managerial positions for those with shared genetics with the C-level bosses, god-complexes, and an Associates Degree in Business.

Work can be stressful. There are a million reasons that we don't want to go to work, but most people put on their adulting shoes and go clock in anyways. Why? Because we like being able to pay our bills. However, when your work life starts to become a little too much to bear, some employees consider pulling the parachute and bailing on the workplace.

Although some fashionable folks cherish their clothing choices every morning, there are others who value comfort over all else, believing that dress codes are reserved for weddings, private high schools, and the opera house. The flip-flop and shorts crowd might even consider the suit-wearing types to be a bit stuck up, forcing their arbitrary dress code requirements on the casual masses in the workplace.

Women everywhere are accustomed to weird old men asking them to ‘smile more’. The classic back-handed diss has become so frequent in everyone's life that we've all learned to roll our eyes and move on with our day, well-aware that ‘smiling more would make us seem so much prettier’. I'll smile later when something's funny, but will never do so just because a random stranger suggested it as a beauty tip.

Innovation is never rewarded in the workplace. For some reason, bosses, managers, and supervisors feel entitled to the intellectual property of their employees when they're on the clock, but when an irreplaceable worker creates something invaluable to the company, suddenly it's like we're on the recess blacktop again and the school bully is trying to steal your jump rope because 'they saw it first'...

This story includes one overworked, tired cashier who despised the fact that he had to keep pointing out a strikingly obvious sign that read, ‘Leave your shopping cart outside’ to customers who did not go out of their way to read it. This story also involves a customer who worked at a liquor store and had to get a bunch of bottles for the upcoming holiday. So in simple terms, it included two minimum-wage workers who were not getting enough money for dealing with other people's messes on a daily…

When you're good at your job, your boss will inevitably ask you to do MORE tasks outside of your job description. Naturally, that never comes with a raise or recognition of any kind, so most employees wrinkle their nose at the prospects of overachieving. In this case, a hardworking manual labor worker was asked to do menial tasks that were so far out of his job description, that he decided to take action to ensure that he would never be asked again.

Back in the day, when mythical pensions existed and companies took care of their employees, workers would typically stay at their job and work for their company for decades, oftentimes riding out their first entry-level position all the way to retirement. Nowadays, celebrating a 2 year anniversary with a company is a huge accomplishment and most employees just don't have the same kind of loyalty anymore. In this case, one part-time employee had just celebrated his 30 year anniversary before...

Getting a good job is nearly impossible these days. One man learned that in today's America, you gotta be a little ruthless, a little dastardly, and extremely cunning in order to get everything you want out of a job. In this case, OP was a minimum wage worker who was living with his parents who hacked the system with a little white lie...

C-level management seems to forget that their ‘family’ of employees is really only working so they can get that money bag every two weeks. Despite their lofty claims that everyone's on the same team and needs to reach company goals, a lot of workers are starting to refuse to do more work unless they're financially compensated– as it should be!

Of all the many frustrating experiences that are waiting for you when you arrive at work, there is arguably none greater than a coworker who refuses to pull their weight. Without fail, their dragging of the chain will hold back the rest of their team, who will have to pick up the slack if they have any hopes of keeping projects on track and hitting KPIs—keeping the ever-watchful roving eye of management looking elsewhere and the team's heads off the chopping block. Still, after weeks, months—ye…