Everyone is going to have bad days, but when your bad day is also someone's first impression of you, they're probably going to think you're just like that all the time, and at the very least, you can't blame them for being cautious in ensuing encounters with you. Similarly, when you're new, it's always best to follow the rules, whether or not those are written company guidelines or unspoken social agreements and the status quo of the existing team. Coming in and rocking the boat will earn you s…

Some people just don't respond well to rejection, even when that rejection comes in the perceived form of an employee handing in their notice even if they've never treated the employee well or cared much for them in the first place. Anyone who has been around the block a couple of times in their career will know how this goes. They'll say it's about betrayal and the fact that you're leaving your ream high and dry with a touch of “How could you do this to us,” this might be followed by silent tr…

Who hasn't received an eyebrow-raising message from a current or former employer? You know the kind of message we're talking about. It's the kind that makes you question if this person is fit to be your employer at all. Sometimes, it's an audacious demand that they are in no position to make. For example, I once had a boss ask me to fill in for a security guard position when I was an intern despite the fact that I was woefully unqualified to do so. Other times, it's an invasive question your bo…

Getting fired is never a pleasant experience, but there are still some ways for it to be done that are better than others. If your manager has even a tiny shred of respect for you, then they will sit you down in their office, tell you the reasons they have to let you go, and send you off with a good luck wish. However, if your manager cares about no one but themselves, they might not even bother to fire you, and get someone else to do their dirty work for them. That is roughly what happened in…

Working in the human resources department means you have likely seen some things no professional wishes to see. Perhaps you love managing teams of employees and making sure they are taken care of day in and day out. However, we know all too well at this point that working in HR means you are protecting the company at all costs. The employees? Sure, you may care about their well-being a little bit but only to a certain extent. At the end of the day, your job is not really about protecting them b…

No one likes a lunch thief, especially if it's the boss's nepo baby son. This employee worked in a small office of about ten people, so when it became clear that there was a lunch thief among the team, it was pretty easy to figure out who the culprit was. However, to ensure that there was proof, the Redditor had a plan. He brought blue food dye to work and left a few drops in a coworker's half-eaten yogurt. This coworker had complained that the mysterious lunch thief had eaten almost all of her…

Whatever happened to keeping your eyes on your own paper, Karen? This entitled coworker thought it would be a good idea to confront another employee on her team and give them a hard time about the frequency of their breaks and the lack of extra responsibilities they take on at work. It turns out that the Redditor was going to the bathroom frequently because of a medical condition that HR was already fully aware of. As for the extra responsibilities, this was an intended line that the Original P…

“Math is important.” “You're going to use this one day, so you'd better pay attention.” Welcome to today's edition of “Is your employer smarter than a 5th grader…” These are things we were told in school, and it's clear some people didn't listen. That's all well and good; it's not like you're actually going to use differential equations in your everyday life, but it stands to reason that having a base understanding of the way the world works or even having the ability to accept that there are t…

Finding a job is hard enough, it is impossible to imagine how it must feel to get hired and fired on the same day. To go through the emotions of excitement and relief of finally securing a job, only for those feelings to quickly change to grief and despair when it is yet again taken from you. I feel for the employee in this Reddit story, who even after they secured a job, arrived on their first day, and signed a contract, still got fired by the end of the day. After OP (original poster) got hom…

This boss was very specific with her words, so one of her employees followed them to a T. Next up, read about these super weird resume red flags, like one “had a skills section…only thing listed was ‘calculator.'"

There are some pretty embarrassing ways to get fired from one's job. Typically, everyone worries about the reaction from the person getting booted. Will they make a scene? Will they get hostile? Will they call their boss out on their complete lack of adequate management skills? However. more often than not, we come across stories where the people doing the firing should really be the ones who are embarrassed. Here, we have an employee who logged onto a Zoom call with HR. Just when they mentione…

“Rules for me but not for thee” is a phrase you'll see bandied about whenever there is an unjust application of rules by undeserving leaders in instances where they are making themself an exception to their own rules without any explanation being given. This hypocrisy will earn them the ire of their subordinates, who are disgruntled at the lack of fairness and the fact that they're having their own conditions worsened.

Getting fired is one thing, but not receiving your final paycheck is a whole other ballgame. Here, we have a former employee who was unjustly dismissed by his former boss after calling out the rampant and consistent wage theft practices at the company. Now, he is considering filing a class-action lawsuit along with several mistreated former employees because his boss tried to get away with never sending this guy's final paycheck. It's easy sometimes to accept this kind of treatment due to the v…

Imagine going through the entire job application, interview, and salary negotiation process only to discover that your actual job has far more responsibilities and expectations than you were anticipating. This new hire spent thousands of dollars relocating to a new city in order to be a communications assistant. He had negotiated his salary to reflect the typical range for a position of that nature. However, after beginning the job, he learned that he was the head of the entire communications d…

Colleges and universities should really offer students a course in job searching, because there are people out there who enter the real world with no idea what they should look for and how, and they end up making mistakes that could have been avoided. After a few classes in resume writing and interviewing, one of the lessons in job searching should be about the process of accepting a job, and the terms that should always be written in the offer letter. For example, the pay – Never accept a job…

Some lessons are only learned the hard way, as these bosses found out after making a critical mistake. Backing up your creations, whether it be writing, data, or video files, is crucial. It's an easy thing to overlook: you think to yourself, “Oh, I'll back it up later.” But the first time you accidentally lose four days of work on your video edit, or find yourself staring at a blank Word document that used to be 15 pages long, you realize just how important it is to have redundancies. Suddenly,…