You'd think being the grocery store employee who hands out free samples of food would be a pretty sweet job. No retail job is safe from the crazy customers of the world. But there are few things more universally adored than free food. If you go to certain grocery stores on weekends or at certain hours, some provide free samples all over the store. You can walk between the aisles and sample what are usually the weirdest foods you can think of. I've sampled a strange brownie-flavored dessert humm…

Oftentimes in our lives, a weary, exasperated manager with sagging eyes will give us an order, desperate for us to follow it without asking questions. Depending on the dynamic of our relationship with that manager and the nature of the request, we might be more than happy to follow their direction—or we may, instead, choose to follow the literal meaning of that direction but not necessarily the intended purpose of the direction. This “malicious compliance” to their request will help balance the…

One employee's bad habit was starting to impact everyone at the company. There are two types of workplaces: the kind that punish you severely for being even a minute late , and the kind where people routinely stroll in 20 minutes late without a care in the world. Lots of places that are strict about tardiness are retail places or other places that do shift work. Meanwhile, lots of offices allow their salaried employees to come and go as they please, so long as they're getting their work done. W…

Are you familiar with the saying 'This could have been an email'? For those of you who don't, this saying refers to times when employees are asked to attend a meeting that could have definitely been avoided by simply sending an email about the topic. Well, as much as that saying can be true on some occasions, the amount of useless emails people get from their colleagues is unreal sometimes, and we could all agree that answering them can be the most annoying part of the work day. This brings up…

Workers often leave their companies for better opportunities not because of the company itself, but because of bad management . The management structure of a business has a lot to do with an employee's day-to-day life. Some people have bosses who are micromanagers who want to hold their employees accountable for every minute of the day. With your boss breathing down your neck 40 hours each week while you're trying to write your emails and do your tasks, it's easy to get sick of the scrutiny. Ot…

Time, in a sense, is a resource that we spend doing different things, which is why when we talk about “spending time” on something, there's a literal sense to it. Through the sheer course of its slow march, the way we spend our time through the things we do, the things we think about, and the way we prioritize our responsibilities and personal interests goes on to shape who we become, what we know and what skills we possess. It might be a facile generalization, but for those familiar, I like to…

There are always going to be certain things that are best off communicated to only their intended audience. For example, you'd probably hate to accidentally send your parents a text detailing your weekend plans with your friends or other intimate details about another personal relationship. No matter what age you are or how close you are to your parents, certain things are better off left undisclosed. The same goes for an employee-employer relationship. Professional decorum relies on certain th…

Why do new managers always feel like they have something to prove?

This woman found out the hard way that she got what she paid for. She just didn't know that she was paying for something in the first place! U/OneGlassOne had an excellent tale of malicious compliance to share. They and their coworker work in a line of business that deals with commercial imports. They write that people need to fill out lots of paperwork when importing items into the country, probably in a similar way to declaring your valuables at the airport. This woman told the original poste…

It's hard to escape the conversation surrounding AI and the growing likelihood that we may soon find our jobs replaced by it. Yet, while some have attempted it, most seem to be falling short of success. While AI is proven to be effective at handling superfluous and repetitive work, it doesn't yet understand the subtlety and nuance of specific tasks, often lacking necessary details or fabricating information and then confidently reporting it as fact. So, at the very least, even where there is ef…

How can a new hire identify that they are boarding a sinking ship? Usually, employers are very careful when they are in the process of hiring someone new, so as not to let them see the true colors of the company, and hide everything that might deter the candidate from the job. So how can someone know that the shiny new job they are after might not be so shiny after all? I wish I could have a straightforward answer, but the truth is, many people end up accepting that new job and only start to se…

There's a difference between being cheap and being frugal.

"The customer is always right" is an attitude that is purveyed throughout customer service... People will love to remind you at this point that one full attribution of the original quote is also reported as being “The customer is always right in matters of taste” meaning that or that customer service representatives should seek “to satisfy the customer regardless of whether the customer is right or wrong.” Both lend to the idea that the customer is not necessarily right about all things, just a…

We can't control everything in life, as much as we all like to try. We can do as much in our power to control who are the people we surround ourselves with, what we do for a living, what we do to help others, and more. But there are always going to be things that happen to us that we do not expect, and do not want. The Reddit story down below is a reminder of all that, and it is the perfect example of the balance between the choices we make and the things that we cannot control. The employee in…

One trucker managed to waste an entire weekend… all because they couldn't get the help they needed. U/thedavecorp had an intriguing malicious compliance story to share with the internet. It all went down when they were at work, which for a trucker, can be almost anywhere. The original poster (OP) notes that this was before the days of GPS tracking, so they were really on their own when they got stuck with a flat tire. For many people, getting a flat tire can ruin their day. But it won't take mo…

One person recalled a decade-old story about the time a customer came and had a total meltdown because Nintendo Wii had just launched, and it was understandably out of stock. People get really frustrated when things don't go their way, but some folk take it too far. I don't know what happened in this particular man's life to make him so bitter, but it's no excuse… retail employees deserve respect, just like anyone else. So, back to the story — the employee in question was working in a store sel…