We're all going to make mistakes in the course of our lives, but it's pretty safe to say that we'd all hope that our mistakes not be immediately able to be quantified by a dollar value on a price tag directly attached to our error—and certainly not one equating to many (many) thousands of dollars. Still, usually when your superiors are the ones making a mistake like this, it's not often it works out in your favor, the typical response is for them to bury their heads further in the sand and cont…

Dealing with an endless stream of customer complaints is no way to live your life... Repeatedly pushing that boulder of someone else's problems up to the tip of the hill only for it to roll down again every time the ungrateful person on the other end of the line hangs up. The futility and thanklessness of your efforts is only rewarded by statistics on a screen that you hope are high enough to keep your micromanaging supervisor off your back. Of course, the beauricratic inertia that customers fa…

You'll encounter this often: Some middle manager in your organization decides to start tracking everyone's metrics and efficiencies, completely and obstinately oblivious to the irony that they themselves are doing nothing productive by doing so… They'll further add to the irony of their entire existence by implementing new procedures for staff to follow that do nothing but add to the inefficiency and make every task more painful and less efficient. Common examples of this would be, say, replaci…

Earlier in my career, working for a retail organization that also had a workshop providing maintenance and break-fix work, I received some sage advice from a wizened and weary mechanic who had been dealing with unruly customers for far too long. “Bend over backward to solve their problem today, and they become your permanent problem.” See, there are plenty of people in this world just looking for the attention of someone, and if you make it your problem to help them, they'll identify you as som…

One of the worst parts about shift work is being sent home early—despite all the memes and jokes to the contrary. Sure, when you're a student, you might gladly raise your hand to be sent home early since you probably don't want to be there in the first place and would rather be out studying or partying. And you're young enough and in enough debt already from your student loans that it's hard to see how a few hours working is going to make any difference… That or your parents are paying for ever…

It sometimes happens in life that there's a discrepancy between your own abilities and what you imagine them to be. This overestimation can have wildly different repercussions, but sometimes, it just earns you a role in management. See, that unearned confidence seems to translate really well in interviews with people who have no idea that you don't know what you're talking about, meaning that the false bravado can land you a job you were never really cut out for. (Cue managers everywhere lookin…

Strict managers should always be careful when they're enforcing new policies. Chances are they have made enemies by micromanaging so much already, so if they're going to be difficult and require team members to comply with even more unnecessary rules and regulations, they just might comply… maliciously. That's what happened with this 30-person team of consultants , who were instructed by their micromanager to submit detailed reports about their work progress every day to ensure that productivit…

“You're going to stay here until it's finished,” is a command usually reserved for unruly children who are refusing to eat their vegetables at dinner. It's not the sort of thing you'd expect to hear as an adult at work.

Being a fast food worker means you have to take a lot of heat from a lot of unruly customers. To have to deal with an unruly manager on top of all the other nonsense can be too much for some people to handle. This worker confronted his supervisor after he was giving the new employee a tough time on a busy day instead of helping the team out productively (what a concept!). Instead of listening and learning from his team, the supervisor took the opportunity to chastise the Redditor for talking ba…

Some ideas are better in theory than in reality.

Demanding customers are the worst, but let's be honest, we've all probably been one at some point. Sometimes, you just need to put a little pressure and weight behind your requests in order to ensure your needs are heard through the muffled din of tedious bureaucratic process. This is true now more than ever with more and more corporations choosing to employ fewer customer service workers, relying on automated systems to weed out requests before anyone ever needs to lift a finger. Of course, by…

Ask and you shall receive, ma'am! If you're a customer and you don't get exactly what you ordered, it might be worth it to make sure that your instructions were clear before you throw a tantrum because, in this scenario , we have an entitled customer who got exactly what she asked for and ultimately could not get upset with anyone but herself. Essentially, she called in an order with the most vague instructions for a pizza with everything on it. The worker on the other end of the phone call tri…

The world of small-time amateur musicians and semi-professional audio/visual techs is no joke and, like any small niche hobbyist community, is handled with deadly seriousness and rigorous hierarchy—with out-of-control egos abound. To a degree, this is fair… poorly engineered audio/visual setups are one of those things that can go hilariously and disastrously wrong, and even small mistakes or technical hiccups can ruin events and severely hamper their intended purpose. And I promise you; it's in…

Not one of us is as infallible as we'd like to think. Draw a line in the sand for where you think you've been right or wrong in disagreements in your life and then take a couple of steps backward. That perspective will probably show you that you're not really as “corect” as you might think and that line is probably closer to where you're now standing. After all, we're all determinately fastened into our own narritaves and tend to have

For the purpose of readability on this one, keep in mind that “MNC” is likely “Multi-National Corporation,” and “grandfather” is likely just a translational error of the author referring to their boss' boss.

Why do some bosses think that wearing a suit in exceptionally hot weather is a sign of professionalism? The reality is it is nothing more than a silly rule that makes employees look and feel miserable. What about employees who have to walk to work or who come into an environment with poor air conditioning? They are going to sweat like crazy and ultimately will come across as anything but put-together and professional. Let this story serve as yet another argument for employers to focus less on h…