As a waiter or waitress, you're going to spot a few awkward dates during your career. Just think about how many times you've been out to eat and you end up overhearing a couple bickering . Sometimes it's an older couple who seem tired of each other's company. Other times, it's a couple on a first date that's going badly. If you as a diner are able to listen in to their conversation, just imagine how much info their waiter can get from eavesdropping! The waiters and waitresses of the world gathe…

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,…

Turning a power-tripping authority's own methods against them b y adhering rigidly to their strict rules—turning the authority they love so much into their own downfall or to be “Hoist with their own petard,” as Shakespeare would have put it. And there's a reason why this theme is so pervasive throughout history and intriguing to us through to the modern day, the poetic justice of someone's own misuse of authority against them by turning their orders into a perfect act of defiance.

We all want to have the best experience while being out and about, eating at restaurants, and enjoying life. That is why we can all probably recall times when those experiences don't go as planned, and we end up annoyed in certain situations. When going out to eat, for example, you expect the dining experience to provide you with a pleasant service, in which you are greeted a certain way, you get your food in an acceptable amount of time, and overall leave the place feeling content. When one of…

This boss has an odd incentive structure, and it is not at all favorable towards his hard-working employees. When you go to an interview at a movie theater, I imagine they ask you about your customer service qualifications or your background working in retail. They probably don't ask how much snow you can shovel… these employees had to find out the hard way that it was part of their workplace requirements. U/SparkleFritz had a boss who insisted that when it snowed, the employees should be the o…

"After that every morning when Bessie comes in she throws her tantrum screaming about how lazy young people are, no one wants to work, all the usual boomer greatest hits."

We are firm believers that hourly employees should get paid exactly the amount they are due for their work, not a minute less or more. Clocking in and out of a job is the perfect way to track the hours and make sure employees are getting paid exactly what they are owed. That means, of course, that as long as an employee is physically on the job, they should be getting paid for it, and they only clock out when they are entirely off the job premises. The fact that the workers in this Reddit story…

When there are changes in management at a workplace, the whole vibe can suddenly shift. A new manager can change a workplace without even trying, although, as these people shared, a lot of managers try their hardest to act in charge at their new place of business. While we're on the subject of hiring new people, read about the HR folks who were surprised by these odd resumes, like one person whose “ resume had a skills sectio n...only thing listed was ‘calculator.'”

Some managers insist that their workers would take any opportunity to slack off, and this attitude is especially pervasive in any industry where staff are frequently off-site and operating in a multi-site environment, like in delivery or maintenance scheduling. Meanwhile, these same managers are comfortable at their desks obsessing over this single point and trying to thwart their workers from slacking while achieving very little themselves. This cynical view prevents them from taking any feedb…

Trust that the employee knows how to do their job.

Moral of the story: karma always catches up with you. This man has been a night auditor for hotels for the past 19 years. When he got assigned to a new hotel, he went about his work just like he'd done for the past 19 years. But he was instantly met with Karen , a longtime employee who had been getting away for years with handing her work off to other coworkers. And she's not even in a manager-type position, so she has no authority to tell anyone what to do. But she's gotten away with it for so…

"I had exceeded legal driving time [so] they had to make sure I went home early for a few days." WIN!

"Put those union dues to work"

Here's exactly how not to write your resume! You can look online for any number of how-to's and resume templates. But these recruiters and HR workers gave some surprisingly candid answers when asked about the red flags that give them pause while they're shuffling through resumes. Back when I was last job hunting a few years ago, I kept coming across this one strange tip to fill your resume with keywords. The tip advised to write a bunch of strong buzzwords, then put them in the smallest size fo…

They always say that you should fake it till you make it, and it's no secret that a little bravado will get you a long way. Sure, there might be an inverse relationship between confidence and competence—since you need to know enough about something to know how much you don't know, which makes you less confident as a result. But a lack of competence certainly doesn't stop people from getting jobs when there's confidence on display. But what do you do when you fail so epically upward that you fin…