There was a super insecure manager a bunch of years ago. I didn’t report to him, but occasionally worked alongside him.
I had been working with one of our customers for a few weeks on a feature they had requested. It was something out-of-the-box, so understandably, if you didn’t know the context, it would be rather confusing.
Manager is set to run a meeting with them, and asks for my help as the technical expert. No problem. We get into the meeting, and the customer asks some technical questions. Before I can get a word in edgewise, Manager proceeds to pull the most inane shit out of his ass for a good 10 minutes–clearly knowing nothing that’s going on, but not letting that stop him. After the customer is sufficiently confused, and Manager is starting to look a little panicked, he finally turns to me.
I figure I’ll try to save him some face, so I start my reply with, “I’m not entirely sure, but are you asking…”, repeating their question back. The customer is clearly relieved that I know what they’re asking, and I provide the answers. Crisis averted! The meeting ends and I head back to my desk feeling good.
Until Manager storms up to my desk and proceeds to scream at me, “IF YOU’RE NOT ABSOLUTELY SURE ABOUT SOMETHING, DON’T ANSWER! NONE OF THIS ‘I’M NOT SURE’ BULLSHIT! NEXT TIME THINK ABOUT WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE FOR US!” and storms off. Nice projection, asshole.
I was new enough to not have the presence of mind to respond, so nothing came of it (though he was demoted not long after–possibly the shittiest manager I’ve ever known) so it all worked out in the end.
I got a verbal warning for farting.
I reported the multinational company CTO for not being able to keep his hands off me (I’m a guy btw) and a load of other employees. That report came on top of other reports of abuse, fraud, and briberies.
Mind you, this company wa so about protecting whistleblowers that I had to sign a contract about it. VPs were outraged and vowed to protect me.
I made the report, week later called into an emergency meeting with the CTO and head of HR is there too and I’m fired. I sued, won, and in that time learned that the CTO was fired the next day because, amongst things, he fired me. Even so, they didn’t cancel my firing, didn’t rehire me, because now I was toxic.
Never trust anyone in big companies. Never trust their contracts, never trust their words.
Yeah the fact that they didn’t reverse course shows that the toxicity ran from the top. CTO wasn’t the only bad egg. I’d bet that legal got their hands on it and figured that making it right would be admitting to doing wrong.
It sounded like there were other sexual assailants in the company, and they were worried that you would out them.
I got in trouble at work because I sent an email to my manager about some new servers that were being installed, but didn’t appear we had access to the management console. I let her know the entire team will need access so we could properly support the machines. I was pulled into a conversation… How dare I presume my direct manager who only managed my team, have any idea what we do!
(Lost all respect for her that exact moment)
I was working in the military. An office job at HQ so we had to use our parade uniforms. I was working nights one week and didn’t have any clean black socks, I used white.
Around 8 in the morning I was walking up the stairs to leave and passed the Naval Admiral, who promptly chewed me put for wearing white socks and dress shoes.
My mind translated CCd as crowd-controlled and now I can’t get that thought out of my head. :-D
For documenting the accurate number of hours I worked, in a teaching lab. The department head didn’t believe that the lab I taught (as a grad student) needed the hours it was given. Keep in mind, I had to do everything for the lab: create the lab manual, design lab activities, get ethics approval, create lab lectures, setup and clean up the lab, and do all the marking.
Turns out, the department used that document to pay me. This was never explained to me, usually we just get paid the set amount of hours, and I was of the understanding that this was just an audit of my hours to justify what I was getting. Turns out I worked about an extra 30% of the hours set for that lab for the semester. As a result, the department couldn’t fully pay me until the following year because they didn’t have it in their budget to pay for that extra 30%.
I ended up getting an ear full from the department head, but he backed off when I told him I was simply doing what he asked and that I wasn’t inflating the numbers to get higher pay, since I had no idea they intended to pay me based on that audit.
Perhaps it’s coincidence, or perhaps it was petty revenge, but later that year at gathering of the faculty and grad students he announced that I had won a major scholarship (one that would’ve paid pretty well for a grad student), and had me stand up in the crowd along with the other winners. Then, immediately after the assembly, he runs up to our lab office to tell me he read the sheet wrong and I hadnt actually won the scholarship, he just read the wrong name. I spent the next few days shamefully having to explain to everyone that, no I didn’t get the award.
*edit: spelling mistakes.
I put an attorney’s name in the “assistant” field of a work order. That bitch called the manager to say she worked too hard to become a lawyer for me to call her a secretary, lmao
Weirdest would be that the CEO of the company I worked at then had one single runin with me in my entire tenure at that company and found that my facial expression wasn’t to his liking.
I’m autistic and by that alone have little facial expression, add the meds I take for anxiety and depression and it results in that I have no facial expression at all.
So it pretty much came down to him not liking my resting face.
Tried to fire me for no reason, couldn’t, because I’m in a protected class.
Managed to do so anyway by bullying me to no end until I accepted being fired.
Worst reason to be fired would be that I worked 48 hours straight on a weekend to implement vast network and server overhauls to then be fired for not being at work on monday morning.
I had the full clear from my boss and his boss and was not supposed to come in on monday unless something went bad with the upgrade (it didn’t).
Simply not being there when my bosses boss wanted me to be there was all it took.
I worked 48 hours straight on a weekend
Never do this. Always go home. Max out your overtime and go home. You will never be fired for not working 48 hours (unless you’re in the military or on a train or something).
If they want you to do that, they don’t have anyone else to take your place. Do the job at a normal pace and don’t let them rush you.
I decided to do it that way. Nobody pressured me, nobody asked me to do it.
For me it was the most logical way to get the job done without interruptions to my network and systems in the least amount of time.
If I had spread it out, I would literally have to have done twice the work taking more than twice the time working multiple weekends.
Fuck that.
If I had spread it out, I would literally have to have done twice the work taking more than twice the time working multiple weekends.
You wouldn’t have had to do anything but work normal hours. Ask for the resources to do your job, more people, etc. If you don’t get it, then the work doesn’t get done. Literally go home. You are hired to work a certain amount of time, not to do the impossible.
Lol, sure thing boss.
I rarely ever let an employer tell me how to do my job when I worked for companies directly, so sorry if I’m not going to accept some internet rando telling me how to do my job now, 15 years after starting to exclusively doing contract work.
It’s because I delivered results in difficult and impossible scenarios, I’ve been able to work for myself for the past 15 years, doing contract work explicitly because I can do the difficult and impossible, often alone. I wouldn’t have been able to get to that if I didn’t build a reputation as being capable of doing that.
This has allowed me to these days only work about 3-6 months out of the year and dedicate my time to my wife and personal projects the rest of the year.
I actually had a 2 year period where I did what you suggest and did the 9to5 thing doing just what the job required and that’s that.
It dumped me into a black hole of boredom and depression.
I found out I work best by going balls to the walls for predetermined periods of time and then going into full chill mode doing either nothing or personal projects once done.
Not everyone is best served with the same work (or any other facet of life) cadence.
You had boredom and depression from… working less? And asking for resources? Ok man, whatever.
Hrm, weird that that is the take away from what I said when I made it rather clear I work less now than I ever did before.
I had boredom and depression from having to be at work while not being able to do anything at any sort of pace I wanted.
If I have to be at work, I rather be busy, because being at work is what’s horrible for me.
So I eventually fixed that by not having to be at work for anything but the time required to do the work.
At home, I can be idle by watching a 200 episode show in the span of a few weeks without any feelings of boredom or depression.
Sitting around at work doing barely anything of interest, yeah, that 100% causes boredom and depression.
The thing is that it doesn’t matter that there are interruptions in the network.
It isn’t your job to make sure there aren’t.
If you are unable to get the upgrade done in the normal 8 or so hours a day (during the weekend) because there is too much work, that means management should have put more people on the project. If something goes wrong, it isn’t your fault, it is theirs.
Don’t break your back bending over for a company, that wouldn’t do the same for you.
That was not the reason they fired you, not being there on Monday morning, that was the excuse.
As you said the CEO wanted to fire you, so his chain of command was looking for any excuse to make it happen. You could have been there Monday morning and they would have found something else.
Sorry you went through that
Both of those sound very illegal and you should probably have spoken to a lawyer. I’m sure you wouldn’t have wanted to stay at those jobs anyway but you could’ve at least gotten a nice payout.
In the first case, I accepted being fired because it was attached to being paid out for 6 months and as you expected, I wasn’t looking to stay anyway. I had another job lined up already as I started to look for one right after he tried to fire me the first time, which HR halted as it was an obvious violation of my nations version of the peoples with disabilities act. I made bank of that idiot.
The second one, I wasn’t actually fired because of the obvious legal ramifications. And contrary to the first situations boss, the one there didn’t find this inability to fire me enough of a personal insult to make it his mission of getting rid of me.
I’m in this situation all the time. Simple solution if you’re worried about it: alphabetize them by first name. It’s fair and if people actually care about crap like this, they can fuck off in general. At least if you’re consistent with that, they can never complain. It’s insane to me that it’s a thing, but people are fragile and it matters a lot to some of them
I introduced myself to a new client (new job) and the boss didn’t like that the client joked to the boss that he better watch out for his job because I sounded like a better [what we did] than he did. Which I was. Which was why he hired me. But a month later I was working somewhere else.
Anybody who spends time doublechecking they’re listed where they want in a group email needs to be fired. The company is not in the business of “your ego”
the person bringing the complaint is the one disrespecting everyone.
I was written up for being too pessimistic. It was about 8 years ago, I was a project manager at a small retail company. I was in a small meeting with my boss and the owner of the company. I was telling the owner all the possible risks associated with this new project I was given, the major one being that we didn’t have enough time to complete everything by the owner imposed deadline. Calling out risks is literally one of the main responsibilities of being a project manager. Also the meeting went fine, no one got upset, it seemed everyone understood. A few days later I get called into HRs office with a write up for basically being a Debbie Downer. I was told to be more positive with my updates and stay away from any bad news. I was in total shock! A few days later I put my notice in and found a new job making twice as much. So it all worked out in the end. Thanks for the motivation Todd!
My GF is a pool cleaner and once got written up for sending a customer a picture of dead pigeons that were in their yard.
The customer called the office screaming that she sent the pictures “to be mean.”
Turns out these people had pest control out on their property to “remove” all the frogs because the frogs were “keeping them awake at night”, and the birds took the bait instead.
Yes, these folks were filthy rich and entitled.
I was born with glass bones and paper skin yet somehow I can still withstand more damage than a middle manager’s ego.
