Navigating a troublesome coworker in the workplace is a daunting experience. With them creating trouble at every turn and drowning you and your teammates in false reports to managers and HR, it's sometimes hard to know where to turn, constantly treading on broken glass-covered thin ice as you all wait for the coworker to either resign or get fired so that you can all return to a peaceable existence. It's wild how the presence of this one person can turn a team on its head , which kinda makes yo…

You find out a lot about someone when they attain a petty position of power, do they take up the mantle reluctantly? Or do they wield their tiny shred of power with impunity? Sometimes you might be surprised to discover how someone reacts , but more often than not the latter category is easy to spot from a mile away.

We talk a lot about mutual respect in the workplace, and this doesn't only apply to coworkers; it also applies to managers/owners and their employees. If a worker shows you respect by giving you greater notice than necessary that they will be leaving due to outside circumstances, you will do well to repay that respect by not retaliating. You might get away with it in this instance, but rest assured, after seeing how you treated their teammate, your other employees will never give you notice aga…

“So sue me,” is one of those phrases that works great amongst friends or family when there's a minor playful disagreement that no one is likely to sue anyone over, but is also often misunderstood and used as an ultimatum in instances where people actually might want to sue you. In these instances it's not nearly as great as a one liner or quip as people might as you're pretty much just reminding the person you're

Be careful when making commands of your workers, or you might live to regret when your ultimatum comes to fruition. Sometimes, just like this boss did when he demanded that his worker come into the office to give a presentation. This boss commanded that his worker come into an office for an “all-important presentation." As the name indicates, the presentation was all-important, so it was imperative that the worker come into the office to present it. Circumstances in the city made it incredibly…

While the “Carrot of Promotion” sounds like a great name for a Dungeons and Dragons item, it's not so great when it has been dangled in front of you to encourage you to do more work while working more hours and taking on more responsibility all under the promise that you might one day be compensated for it. Of course, often, employers fail to follow through on this promise and lead employees on for as long as possible before gaslighting them and pretending that this was never in the cards.

Sometimes, the only way to get a dumb and unnecessary rule changed is to follow it to the letter and prove to your superiors what you knew the whole time and show them that it doesn't work… Only then will they realize the error of their ways and relent. Of course, they're never going to admit that they were wrong and will just quietly sweep things under the rug and pretend that they knew it wasn't going to work all along.

Introverts aren't really known for being socially forthcoming. In fact, that's kind of the entire point. Rather than attending parties, drinks, and after-work hangouts, they'd prefer the relative silence and peace of their own company, often preferring only to engage with others over shared interests, activities, and hobbies. Let's be honest: for most introverts, engaging in the required social interactions at work is more than enough, and many won't feel a particular need or even the ability t…

Generally, the idea of managing something implies that you have some understanding of how that thing works and are, thus, capable of coordinating the operations of said thing. But, surprisingly, very few managers actually have a real understanding of the thing they're managing… and so their job mainly consists of talking to other managers who don't understand their thing very well either. Still, companies continue to think this is a good idea and continue to hire external candidates with no ind…

Job searching can be a painful process, and trying to stand out from a crowd through an electronic submission is difficult to do, meaning that you'll probably submit hundreds of applications to jobs—most of which you'll never hear back from. In a hundred submissions, you might hear back from a few—let's say 5%—so five interviews per 100 applications, which is a generous estimate. Of these five, you'll actually sit a first-round interview for three, hopefully getting asked to come back by two of…

Certain organizations, especially within certain industries, love to save on labor, and one of the ways they do this is by sending workers home from a scheduled shift when things are quiet to try and keep from being overstaffed. Of course, predictably, as soon as the manager has sent someone home, you'll end up with the biggest rush of customers you've ever experienced, ensuring that the rest of the day is going to be a living nightmare—and no one will be getting any breaks.

Working in a call center is a pretty thankless gig. Constantly dealing with less-than-kind customers who are frustrated at your company's refusal to help them with their problem with your product—which to be fair, is a known issue that the company has deemed to be too expensive to resolve. So, now you're bearing the brunt of that frustration on a daily basis because your wage for 20 years still costs far less than paying R&D to fix the issue.

Getting on with the daily grind can often be a wearisome chore, especially when you find yourself needing to do your coworker's tasks for them in addition to your own. It's not like you had enough to do as it was. Now you're busy going around picking up after them as well, and to make matters worse, you know, mentioning it to your boss won't do a thing to solve the problem and might even end up with you being labeled as not being a “team player.”

While it might be gratifying to send that email you've been desperately wanting to send or to verbally rebuke your boss for wasting your time—as with anything, it's always best to sit on it for a little while… Let that scathing email sit in your drafts until you've had a good night's sleep, and take some time to reflect on what it is you're saying and how other people will perceive it. Maybe, after a little reflection, you won't be feeling so hot-headed and will take a more diplomatic approach…

Some people want to have their cake and eat it too—this employer wants to put their cake out on the street with a sign that says “free” and then sue you after you come along and take that perfectly good cake home. Except cake we're talking about here is a human being If you wanted further evidence that some employers think they own their workers, look no further than the fact that this employer thought that they could lay a worker off and that they were just going to come back on their knees be…

No one likes insurance companies, and what is there to like about paying for a service on the off chance you might one day need it, only to have that service provider behave with hostility and suspicion when that day arrives, doing everything they can to get out of honoring the service that they were being paid all this time to provide. Sure, not all insurers are like this, but being left in the lurch when you're already in a dire moment really sticks with you, and people's fear of that happeni…