People work jobs to get paid—it's as plain and simple as that. It's not something we're doing out of goodwill because we care so much about our boss that we want to fatten his wallet up for him. While our bosses might wish that this was the case, the arrangement of employment is based on a simple transaction: The worker's time and skills are provided in exchange for a consistent paycheck.

This retail worker was weary from unkind customers---until this dude came in. In retail, you tend to remember the best of the best and the worst of the worst customers, while everyone else in between is just a blue. You'll always remember the customer who screamed and threw her bags on the floor like a toddler having a meltdown. But you also remember the kind souls who praise your customer service skills in front of your bosses, or the kind who are genuinely grateful when you help them. In a st…

As the slow march of time presses ever onward, it's not uncommon for change to occur—in fact, it's unavoidable. Small incremental shifts in policy and perception mount and build up into larger changes. Sometimes, you won't even realize how far things have gone until you take a look back at the winding road back to where things used to be. While these changes are usually for the better, sometimes things work their way into normalization that takes us back a step or two. We might not even realize…

Before streaming services existed, we had movie rental chains . Going to rent a video or DVD was a whole endeavor. In my family, we'd often do the usual Sunday morning activities, then go grocery shopping, and then stop at the video store near us to pick out a movie for that night. This was a big treat every time! Whether we picked a Disney movie or an old comedy flick, it truly was fun for the whole family. If they didn't go out of business before I was old enough to work there, I know I would…

The inconsistency of eyewitness testimony is something that is often discussed, owing to the fact that the mere recollection of an event changes the original memory that we had stored in ways that can cause us to convince ourselves that we remember something that never really happened. Beware of being so wholly convinced that you're unmistakably right about something. You should always leave room for the fact that you might have made some margin of error. After all, that's what a “mistake” is b…

This boss had no idea what he was doing, and the hordes of hungry customers don't care about poor management, they just want food. There are lots of industries where people are low-paid and treated poorly. Food service is perhaps the hardest of these. Unlike retail, your customers are guaranteed to be hungry. That means they're going to be less patient and eager to tell you about any mistakes you're making. They really don't care about the employees or anything else, because all they want is th…

Too often do employees give company's their 100%, only to get the company's 1% in return. It really sours your view on job searching. You want to find the job of your dreams and make a fulfilling career out of it, but if they people running it are just using and abusing you, then it might be time to move on to big and better things. That's exactly what this software administrator did, as explained in their two-parter Reddit post. Their initial post was from several years ago, when they were fir…

Getting time off work is often needlessly complicated, so many employers are skeptical of employees when they call out or request sick leave, believing them to be “just faking it” in order to get a day off. This attitude is prevalent within retail and service industry employers, which presents problems since employees are interacting with other people and even handling food. Most commonly employers will require sick workers to get a sick note from a doctor, even for a simple flu, requiring empl…

You never know what you have until you lose it. This saying is usually used when talking about heartbreak, but in this case, it's about a useful employee. A reddit post shared an epic return on a computer programmer who got fired. This person was fired because the nefarious manager that nobody liked said he could find someone who could do his job for cheaper and he needed to cut costs. The programmer was upset, mostly because he loved the job and had put a lot of his sweat and time into it, but…

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.

If you have ever worked somewhere that included a sales department, then you are familiar with the clashing of heads. Salespersons tends to have a little bit of a more inflated ego than the other employees. Why is that? Who knows? Maybe because they think they're the money makers since they're the ones making the deals. But the deals wouldn't even be able to happen if the product didn't exist, so maybe they should be taken down a peg. Well, that thankfully happened in this story we found on Red…

Quitting isn't usually as explosive as the movies make it seem. It's not usually just someone at their wits end completely losing it and leaving all the burned bridges in their path. Usually, people planning on quitting try to take the high road and will put in a two week's notice and try to wrap things up so there are no loose ends after they leave, etc. etc. That is totally out of professionalism and not because you have to. But sometimes, it really is that abrupt. When you are working for so…

Working a bad job can be literally bad for your health, with chronic stress from being overworked and mistreated causing all sorts of untold medical issues.

Rules are in place for a reason. That's what administrators will tell you. But sometimes rules are created that end up antagonizing everybody. When I was in high school, there was an inordinate amount of fighting. It was commonplace to witness at least one or two student fights per day. Not a lunch period went by without a scuffle. The school responded to this by implementing two rules. One was a zero tolerance policy, so if your bully hit you, the two of you would both get suspended, even if y…

Vigilantes in the movies and comic books are usually decked out in their own DIY suits that are cool and edgy. They train themselves and can do all kinds of martial arts and parkour moves. They rid their community of evil citizens who use their laser eye vision to rob banks or something. In real life, however, it's not as flashy and theatrical. Vigilantes in real life are just like this Reddit poster. His uniform was a blue vest and his cover up job was “cart-pusher.” His main enemies were enti…

There are a lot of things that could happen during the interview process that might make you lose faith in it. You'll find yourself completing endless applications that you'll never hear back from, getting ghosted after first-round interviews, even completing three rounds of interviews during which the interviewer insists you tell the owner of your current company that you intend to leave, only to ghost you for a month before confirming that they went another candidate; you might even successfu…