1.
My wife was let go after she announced her pregnancy to her manager, and approximately when she would need maternity leave. She was told that they’d rather replace her than deal with a pregnant employee and all that goes with that.
A well worded letter from out attorney got her one year’s severance, and two years medical coverage for her and the baby.
Scrappy_Larue
2.
Banned smart phones in the break room to force us to talk to one another and build camaraderie.
Ends up we didn’t like each other that much.
laterdude
3.
A manager once explained it to me….”everything needs to be organized, labeled, and free of clutter. That way if you’re replaced the next person can take over without missing a step.”
She was replaced the next day. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
PigBeenBorn
4.
Boss Pitched a sales incentive trip to Cancun if the team hit the goal. My team exceeded the goal, and then they cancelled the trip. 2 people quit, I accepted a position with their main competitor, and less than a year later, they closed in bankruptcy. Karmas a beach.
lifecoachannalisa
5.
Small business. 20 employees +/-. Boss made a big speech about austerity measures and no raises this year. A week and a half later he drives up in a brand new Silverado with all the bells and whistles. Expensed to the business of course. He would hate to have to pay taxes on those profits. One of the less subtle members of the staff took a literal sh*t in front of his office door.
DentedAnvil
6.
During the 2016 election cycle my boss told us if we didn’t vote for (a particular candidate) we would be fired. I’m still lying about how I filled out that ballot. It’s not that I didn’t already know the kind of person she is but it reaffirmed my belief that the biggest danger I personally face is the forceful nature of extremists.
PS – It doesn’t matter what side she or I was on. Threatening someone’s livelihood over personal beliefs is appalling.
ThisIsWhatLoveIs
7.
Fired the girl who was in her third trimester of pregnancy three days before her maternity leave was to start.
hisloyalconcubine
8.
She actively tried to ban friendships. If co-workers became friendly she would schedule them so they would NEVER see each other. “You’re here to work! Not to socialise!”
She also banned everyone from coming into the workplace when they were not working.
It was a pub. She banned socialising in a pub.
She became insanely paranoid when she learned four people were in a WhatsApp group. She said the only reason people who work together set up group chats is because they wanted to talk trash about her. She was actually kind of right
ohboythisisit
9.
One of our CAD drafters had to get brain surgery last year. He got through it with no issues and has been working since with the occasional doctor meeting. He’s not necessarily the fastest worker, but he gets the job done and I haven’t noticed a difference before and after.
Last week, during a meeting, our boss said to him, “…ever since your surgery you haven’t been as capable, I can’t trust this project to you.” I have wanted to quit for a while, and this pushed me overboard.
deathmethod
10.
Had a boss everyone loved, then she got transferred to another store and the new guy that replaced her decided the schedule that we’d all gotten used to needed to be “shaken up”. He posted the next week schedule that was completely different than it had been under the previous manager, got a bunch of complaints from people saying they can’t work x days or y times and it SEEMED he was receptive since he took that schedule down. Then suddenly BAM, he just reposted the same exact schedule and said f*ck everyone.
Oh, we had some people calling in sick from time to time under the old manager, but this new manager has pretty much half his crew every single day calling out because of his sh*tty tactics.
Here’s the first thing to learn about being a good manager…you don’t need to “shake things up” for people to be better workers. You don’t need to “put your mark” on anything if it’s working just fine the way it was.
Paranitis
11.
I work in a big corporate building. The same older lady came by everyone’s desk towards the end of the day to collect the trash. Just the sweetest lady ever and every time she’d walk to my desk she’d give me a big smile and ask me how my day was and chat for a minute as she got my trash (usually I’d dump it in for her). I had some rough days but she has a way to cheer me up and send me home on a higher note. I know I’m not the only one either.
So then a few weeks back our work implemented a new policy to ‘cut down on trash usage’. It’s no longer allowed to have a trash bin at our desk and we have to walk across the room and use the community trash to throw anything away. Not a huge deal but the real reason they did it is so they can cut down on cost… ie the cleaning crew.
Sad to say that I haven’t seen Sharon since.
schimsl
12.
This school wanted to switch to Chromebooks. So what did they do? One summer while teachers weren’t working, they removed every single Windows station and replaced them with Chromebooks to be issued to teachers. They were told to “figure it out”.
When teachers came up and asked how they could teach Photoshop, programming, AutoCAD 3d modeling, etc., admin basically googled their program name plus “Chromebook extension” and told them “see? There’s an extension for it and it works!” I don’t think I have to add that it did not work.
They ended up bringing back the desktops for most teachers.
zomgitsduke
13.
Try working in IT. That attitude is just the standard state of being.
It’s a job where if you work absolutely perfectly, you’re totally invisible and only appear on the radar when something f*cks up.
Just a few weeks ago we did a major office move. My department worked back to back 12-18 hour days to get everything moved over, which we managed with less half a day’s down time (and we were moving the company’s main data center).
By the end of the final weekend after carrying 30+ servers (plus cabs) up four stories, re-cabling 200+ desks and literally moving trucks worth of gear I got home and my legs just wouldn’t work any more. I still have the blisters on my feet from walking about 30 miles in two days…and I was still at my desk at 7am the next day to run around the office fixing teething issues.
Then, a few days ago the country chief got the whole office together to thank everyone for their hard work. He had a stack of envelopes with ‘thank you’ card £50 vouchers in them. Everyone who volunteered to help with the move got one…including the people who ‘volunteered’ to have an early snoop around the new office, spent 30 minutes on site and did precisely f*ck all.
You know who didn’t get a mention, or an envelope? Anyone in IT. The people who were there working unpaid overtime until 2am for weeks.
Paulius2444
14.
My boss is looking to retire in the next 3-4 years. He told everyone that he wanted us to come up our visions for the company and it’s future over the next 5, 10, 20 years.
We’re a small office of about a half dozen people but we’ve been growing and so everyone brought up growth projections and succession planning once he retires, etc.
His son is the heir apparent and has a precocious 8 year old so in my 20 year version I even included the grandson joining the business and grooming it to become a legacy company.
My boss went last and we were expecting something acknowledging some of our thoughts or at least an expression of appreciation that the company he founded would live on well past his retirement, be in good hands, etc.
Instead it was brutal and short. It was something along the lines of “I do everything around here anyway so I should just sell the company to fund my retirement and you can all find other companies to work for in a few years.”
Mood killed. Meeting ended.
jmarsh642
15.
Company consisted of something like 1,200 employees at the time, and rented out a big conference center for a Christmas party. At the opening of the party, the CFO was giving opening remarks, and asked – expecting cheers – if everyone liked their Christmas bonuses.
He got booed.
See, of that 1,200 people, a bit over a thousand were in customer service. No one in customer service got bonuses, only people in the ‘corporate’ departments got bonuses. And our awesome CFO decided to rub everyone’s noses in it, because clearly the Chief Financial Officer of a company would have no idea that 80%+ of his company didn’t get bonuses.
At the same party, the CEO made an announcement that the company would be closed on friday (Christmas that year was on a Thursday), and everyone got a day off. Now, he had literally just finished making a speech about how everyone was important, and everyone was part of the company, no matter the department. He had shoveled sh*t hard, trying to make CS happier.
The next day, we all got a memo that Customer Service still had to work on that Friday. We apparently didn’t count as ‘everyone,’ and the CEO just hadn’t realized that the announcement wouldn’t apply to anyone.
January saw a 60% attrition rate.
Onequestion0110
16.
I was one of a large number of programmers working on a project at CSC. We had a deadline coming up in a couple months and they over-promised to the client and then asked us all to work extra hard to meet the deadline, and asked us to work 50+ hour weeks. Which we did – and then some: some of us put in 70-80 hour weeks to meet this deadline.
But once that deadline was met, suddenly there was another deadline they needed to meet. And another. People got tired, had lives to lead, and scaled back on their hours. Most of us were still working 50-60 hours a week, but not a lot more than that.
Once they realised we weren’t killing ourselves on their project any longer, there was an All Hands meeting where the managers told us that they were incredibly disappointed in our lack of professionalism because so comparatively few employees were now working more than fifty hours a week.
One of our harder workers stood up and said, “Look, I have three kids. I’m driving an hour into and out of work every day, I’m taking care of my family, I’m trying to get presents for Christmas, write out Christmas cards, decorate and clean the house for everyone we’re having over for the holidays – I’m having a really hard time just getting to fifty.”
And the manager looked at her and sneered, “If it wasn’t Christmas, it’d be because it’s Easter, or Memorial Day, or because it’s summer and it’s nice out. You’d always have some excuse.”
There was dead silence in the room.
When we left that meeting, we didn’t talk to each other, but every single worker on that project put in exactly fifty hours a week after that.
Then came Christmas – raise and bonus time! Every worker on the project got a 1/2 percent raise; the managers got a five-figure bonus. We were pissed.
For management, the pain came after Christmas. First week off the year, four programmers had better jobs lined up and quit. Three more the following week. Five the next. We hemorrhaged 3-5 programmers every single week for over three months. It got to the point where the managers had to schedule a meeting every Monday at eleven to discuss that week’s resignations and rearrange the surviving staff.
F*ck CSC
FlannanLight
17.
Former teacher. The administrators at my school were usually pretty chill, but had a habit of randomly coming up with minor rules that they would enforce for us (male teachers had to wear ties even on jeans day, etc.). Overall it wasn’t bad, except for the time an administrator made a crucial mistake… they banned staff from drinking coffee in front of students.
Now if you’ve never worked in a school, you’d think this isn’t a big deal. When you spend nearly 100% of your day in front of students, it definitely is a big deal.
First we tried to find any loophole we could. Energy drinks? Banned the next week. Tea? Banned two days later. It was chaos.
Eventually, we realized they couldn’t fire an entire school’s worth of teachers and aides, so we ended up doing the one thing that private schools fear most: we formed a union.
Realistically, it was more of a weird pseudo-union focused specifically on civil disobedience regarding the coffee issue, but it ruffled feathers nonetheless. The administrators caved to our “demands”, allowed us to drink coffee again, and even bought each of us a reusable coffee mug as a gesture of goodwill.
And that’s the story of how a handful of school administrators almost accidentally created a teachers union over a complete non-issue.
Son_of_Leeds
18.
New principal came in. It was like he forgot what being a teacher is like… he made us sub constantly on our plan periods instead of getting around to calling a sub. If we weren’t subbing, he would come into our rooms as we worked on plan time things and go over ridiculous things that could have better been sent in an email. He fired the lunch supervisor and made us supervise lunch. Then he started giving us a hard time about using the bathroom between classes because if we were in the bathroom, who is supervising the halls?
It boiled down to us working before and past contract hours with zero breaks. No bathroom. No lunch time (you can’t eat and supervise). I went off on him one day because he accosted me for going to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom to change my tampon. I waved a spare tampon around in the hallway in front of God and students and told him I’d had enough of this and if he had time to drive to McDonalds for lunch (he had a fry box in his hands) I could be spared two minutes of supervision to change a tampon.
To add insult to injury, the staff banded together and we documented these things to get him fired. The next person comes in and decides that action of creating unity with the staff needed to be dismantled so she changed where all our rooms were and in most cases what we taught (regardless of our certification). I quit. I couldn’t take it anymore. Kids are my number one in teaching and when a school dissolves into politics and bull sh*t nonsense it just isn’t worth it to me. I could get treated like sh*t in any profession and probably get paid more.
lustywench99
19.
I work in a very quiet dull office with no vending machines or drink machines. We have a water cooler and the branch manager’s old coffee maker from the 90′s as the coffee for the entire office (30+ people).
My friend and coworker “Sue” took it upon herself to stock a filing cabinet with treats for when people forgot breakfast or lunch. Sue did this on her own money and included items such as oatmeal, nuts, crackers, soups, all great stuff. She just asked you put a quarter in a cup when you took something. Remember, we have no vending machine. To buy food you’d have to drive to buy it as we’re in the suburbs.
Our branch manager decided that too many people were distracted by going to her filing cabinet and getting snacks so he told her to remove all of it. We still do not have a vending machine.
:’(
OliveFortunetelling
20.
I worked at a family owned market that was well known and loved by locals. The owners were a lovely couple that took care of their employees and would bend over backwards for their customers. They were very active in the community and highly respected. They had a few core employees and would hire on temp staff during the summer and holidays. The temps were mostly highschoolers and college kids that were home on break. They would bring back the same people as long as they could and the kids would try to stay as long as they could. The pay was well above market for those positions, we could shop the and get a 75% discount, after six months you got two weeks paid vacation, and the owners would close the store a couple days a year and host a party for all of the employees. It was the best job any highschooler in the area could get. I lived right next to the store and my parents were friends with the owners so I was given a job there. All my friends were jealous.
After working there for a few years, the couple decided they wanted to retire to spend time with their daughter and her children in another state. Many tears were shed and they had a huge retirement party where they introduced their son to everyone and told us he was taking over. They gushed about his prestigious business education and background.
As soon as they were gone, the son decided he was going to remake the store in his image. He fired basically all the staff, most of whom that had been there for 10 to 15+ years. He then staffed the whole place with homeschool kids and junkies. He cut the discounts and vacations. He hired some old highschool friends to manage the place so he could take the profits to go party and get coked out.
The shop went from having the same staff for years to having to retrain an entirely new staff every other month. No one wanted to stay. Managers were reporting perfectly good product as damaged and taking it home. Shelves sat empty. Locals stopped shopping there. The place became a corpse of what it had been. The original owners had enough of their friends complain to them about their son that they came back for a short time and tried to make it right, but it was too late. Their original staff had all moved on and vendors had stopped doing business with the store. They decided to close the store, sell the property, and move away permanently. Last I heard, the son was in trouble with the IRS and his wife divorced him when she found him banging a stripper.
Waffle_Maestro
More info: Reddit, H/T BoredPanda