LOL in work tears

Quitting a job is stressful and can lead your imagination to anticipate a myriad of possible terrible outcomes. The worst case scenario would probably be your current boss being secret best friends with your new one, prompting them to call your new boss and tell them not to hire you before firing you on the spot. Yes, it's unlikely can happen while working in small towns and close-knit industries—or when you're leaving a company to work for their major supplier. Still, despite wild imagination,…

What is it with people constantly trying to blame someone else for the thing that they themselves are most guilty of? This hypocritical finger-pointing is just a vapid means of projection that these narcissistic robots employ whenever they feel threatened. This thread was posted to Reddit's r/AITA (Am I the A--Hole) subreddit by the coworker scapegoated by the others, Redditor u/Maleficent_Shoe3791. She had been doing all of the work to make up for their lazy behavior, and they still tried to b…

There's nothing better than loving your job—there's nothing harder than the dawning realization that you're going to have to leave. We all get surprisingly comfortable with our routine—it's just something in our nature. Branching out into uncertainty feels risky, making us shudder at the thought of trying new things. Companies—rather, the people who run them—are the same way, and for that reason, they will be more likely to leave you in your role if it means less change and less new uncertainty…

This boss is really stretching the definition of what it means to be a salaried employee. Salaried work can be wonderful or a strain on your work life , depending on the company you work for and your managers. For some workers, they're able to put in two hours of work per day and still get paid for the entire eight. But for the majority of salaried workers , it means you're going to work 40+ hours a week. If you have a project due at the end of the day, and you're not finished by 5PM, your boss…

Dealing with conflict is never pleasant. That's why some of us choose to avoid it at all costs. We'd rather bury our heads in the sand than deal with an obvious glaring issue or unruly person. This presents a problem when that conflict-adverse person is in charge of a team and will inevitably have to deal with conflict at some point. Unfortunately, sometimes they'd rather just let one of the team members go unchecked than deal with the issue, allowing and enabling their negative behavior toward…

There's no shame in ditching a new job once it's clear it won't work out. We're constantly told that a bad reference (or lack of one) will follow us for our entire life and hurt future job prospects, but that's not really true. Still, not everyone is going to be able to do this. However, when you're 17 years old and still living with your parents, you have the freedom to look for something else—which is good because you're often going to attract a lot of employers looking to exploit your lack o…

A mistake usually goes unrecognized until well after that mistake is made… and your importance to an organization is often not recognized until well after you're gone. Not so in this case, the decision to identify the least efficient members of their organization backfired spectacularly—all but negating one of their most important clients and making it very clear how important that “inefficient” member had been. You might think that this decision-making process might have considered that one pe…

There are two types of people: those who can be on time, and those who cannot ever manage to do so.

Remember when your parents used to confiscate your cell phone for not answering it? Thus leaving you with no cell phone to answer their subsequent calls with. You might not have been able to text your friends either, but not being tied to a requirement of constant communication and surveillance was freeing. It turns out that experience is not lost to the past, and you may be able to relive it (without clocking 88 miles an hour in a DeLorean.) All you need is a boss who is more concerned with ma…

You're not always going to agree with every decision your workplace makes… and it's especially gutting when that decision is to fire a well-liked coworker over stupid workplace politics. Maybe they got on the wrong side of one of the bosses, maybe they didn't support a foolish new direction or initiative, or maybe they were just the sacrificial lamb to make everyone sweat a little bit to keep them as productive as possible and keep them toeing the line. The fact is that watching a coworker get…

At some point in your life, your boss might ask you to do something that isn't entirely ethical (and possibly not entirely legal either), and it will be up to you to decide whether you will obey that demand. But, when your boss inadvertently gives you the authority to go against the business's policy and do the right thing, you might be more than happy to comply—especially if you don't like your job all that much in the first place. That's the chance that this worker had at the medical insuranc…

If you thought trust falls at summer camp were stupid, wait until you hear about the “no-show loyalty test.” This strategy, which is incredibly disrespectful to other people's time, feels like it's something taken right out of a book on leadership published by The Office 's Michael Scott.

Ah, the holiday season — a time of year best spent with loved ones over amazing meals and through the sharing of thoughtful gifts. Holiday daydreams often take you to a place beside a roaring fire, wrapped in a thick woolen blanket — its surprising weight offering a welcome embracing comfort. A warm beverage of choice in hand or in arm's reach (Irish hot chocolate for me, please) completes the mood. It should be no surprise to any of us that these holiday ideals, moods, and traditions just don’…

You should always be wary of the “walk back” as a manipulation tactic. Often used in sales and scams, the seller starts by offering something acceptable and slowly changes the terms of the deal to something that might have been unacceptable to start with but is now reluctantly accepted due to the sunk cost of invested time. Consecutive slight alterations to figures or terms should always raise red flags, and if something doesn't seem right you should always trust your gut instinct, just as this…

Have you ever gone above and beyond at your work and received no recognition for it? How about taking the initiative to fix a serious problem that's plaguing your workplace, only to turn around and be reprimanded by your boss? If yes, maybe it's time to seek out greener pastures, just as this worker did when their micromanaging new boss took issue with the fact that they were going above and beyond to fix a problem that had been plaguing the company. Some people just desire nothing but control…