This person's boss had some feedback for them, but it was so vague that the employee was left baffled. Most employees have quarterly or yearly check-ins with their supervisors. It's a good way to manage expectations and address any concerning employee behavior before it becomes a major problem. This person worked on a team of scientists who seem to have some communication issues all around. This employee's boss tried to warn them that they were coming off as “contemptuous” when they spoke to th…

"Why are they good enough now?"

Who's next to walk the plank?

Many times in life you should be careful what you wish for. Especially in business, foolish ultimatums that you think your subordinates won't be able to rise to may only inspire them to call your bluff and look elsewhere for employment. Being underappreciated in your work really is frustrating, especially since it usually goes hand in hand with being underpaid. Employers often will downplay your contributions, whether consciously or subconsciously, instead attributing the company's success to t…

Remember going to a video rental store to pick out a bunch of movies? Long before streaming services and YouTube, if you wanted a movie night, you'd head to a movie theater or a video rental store. You could rent a bunch of movies and pay for them by the day. You'd gather all your friends, watch that new movie together with a bowl of popcorn, and then return it ASAP to avoid paying too much for the privilege of renting a video. Eventually, a lot of these stores began renting video games, DVDs,…

Being the source of some really ‘juicy gossip' at work is never a pleasant experience, especially if what people are saying about you is true. It can be surprising how much an office an look like a high school, with real-life adult mean girls who can really make your work life difficult if they want to. Like Mean Girls, sometimes all you want to do is give an entitled coworker a taste of their own medicine, and show them what it feels like to be the talk of the office. Well, that is exactly wha…

As a part of our professional lives, we're almost obligated to be amiable to our coworkers, clients, and associates, even if we can stand them… with every fiber of our being. The reality of life is you're not going to get along and vibe with everyone, nor should you, without distilling your personality and trying to people-please so as not to offend anyone ever. While getting along with coworkers and working well with them is an obligation… where does that obligation end? Once you're out of the…

They say you should never mix family and business, and this story might just be the perfect example of why. After his son struggled to find work due to a legal incident 15 years ago, a retired father stepped in to help. He hired his son at the family business, hoping to set him up for success. The father, now 74 and mostly retired, still enjoys working occasionally and earns a commission for his efforts. But things have taken a turn. The son, now running the business, has started withholding hi…

Being consistently overloaded with work in an organization where the expectations are completely out of touch with reality is a soul-sucking experience… always falling short, no matter how much time and effort you put in. Let's face it: if your team is “understaffed” for a long enough period of time, it's pretty safe to say that your employer has no intentions of hiring anyone else, and they consider it to be an ideal staffing level. It's only when productivity and customer satisfaction start s…

A not-so-gentle approach to mitigate a lack of parenting

Corporations always find a junior employee to do their dirty work for them.

We all have people in our lives who make us wonder how they managed to get this far without having a single drop of technological knowledge or orientation. It is truly amazing (and slightly infuriating) that certain people can completely avoid adapting to necessary technological advancements, and still get so far in life. More often than not, those people end up becoming our bosses, which then leads us to be assigned the fantastic task of helping them navigate through the easiest tech stuff. Af…

You don't know a good thing until it's gone: a phrase that is applicable to so many areas of life. And it fits quite neatly in the sense of employers This media designer slowly found themselves, over time, burdened with more and more responsibilities that were unrelated to their own actual role, over time eventually taking on the equivalent roles of “at least” four people. Finding themselves on the hook for their own materials and equipment as if they were a contractor despite, you know, being…

Don't you sometimes wish you could say whatever you want to your boss, without thinking of the repercussions? Perhaps we could come up with a workplace ‘purge day’, in which everyone could do and say whatever they wanted at work, and then all will be forgotten the next day. Some employees don't need a day like that, as they are not afraid to put people in their place, even their bosses. Take the employee in this Reddit story for example. If I were told by my boss that I have to accept a $1 rais…

Nobody likes to admit defeat, it is an extremely difficult challenge, to acknowledge that you tried your best, but there is nothing more you can do. In a workplace environment, this challenge might be twice as hard, because not only do you lose your pride, but you might lose your job in the process. It's much like what happened to the employee in this Reddit story. OP (original poster) tried their best to stand up to their toxic management until they realized there was nothing more they could d…

We've all made the mistake of lending money to someone we shouldn't have. Funnily enough, the best-case scenario when we lend a bad individual money, is that they simply never pay you back. The worst-case scenario is something like what happened to the employee here. This employee shared on Twitter a series of texts between her and a coworker after she made the mistake of lending that coworker some money. Instead of it being a simple interaction of the money and a simple ‘thank you', the entire…