I work for a national restaurant chain. There are a lot of perks to being part of a large company, but speed is not one of them.

It’s the Friday before a holiday weekend, and we had an accident where a knife damaged a refrigerator power cord, taking out the fridge and damaging the knife. I’ve alerted my boss, the regional manager, to this and submitted a ticket to our maintenance department.

I message my boss at 1:00 pm.

Me: “[Employee] says he can fix the power cord himself; it’ll take about thirty minutes.”

My boss finally responds at 6:30 pm.

Boss: “Don’t do it. We can’t pay him as a repair person, and we don’t want to assume the liability if he gets hurt.”

Me: *Internally* “Those are great points to have considered three hours ago when I gave him the go-ahead to repair it.”

Bonus, the company that we contract with for repairs called Sunday asking if it was such an emergency that we would want to send someone out on a holiday weekend.

My employer had manager meetings weekly, and their opening line was something to the effect of:

Employer: “How many write-ups have you done this week?”

And they would cheer when supervisors had any and give them kudos. They would look for absolutely anything they could use against you in order to fire you.

I was fired for doing what they told me to do, after twenty-six years, with only four months until I could retire. And this was apparently part of a trend: fire the “old-timers”.

I’m the author of this story, about working for my uncle for a ridiculously low “salary”. One day while I was working for him, I and several coworkers at his nonprofit were called into a meeting with a “consultant” that my uncle had hired. She spent half an hour or so giving advice that seemed pretty meaningless and generic to me — lots of buzzwords and platitudes — but no worse than any other consultant.

Then, at the end of the meeting, this happened.

Consultant: “You need to focus on consolidating for a while and not start any new projects because Mercury is in retrograde.”

Me: “I’m sorry, what?”

Consultant: “Well, it just makes sense, right? That’s why [Coworker] got overwhelmed and had to go home early.”

Me: “She has the flu!”

Consultant: “No, the energy just isn’t right for new things because of Mercury.”

I’m making $100 a week, but it’s nice to know that at least the company can afford vital resources like an ASTROLOGER!

And to top it off, my uncle gave me a lecture that afternoon about how I needed to be more open-minded. I’m so glad to be out of there now.

Related:
There’s No Room For Error When Working With Family

I didn’t buy my first car until after I graduated college in the mid-2010s. I was in a situation where I had the cash to buy a decent used one. I’d done some research online and found a local small dealership that had a car I thought was decent — a 2001 Dodge Intrepid — and asked my dad to come along because I’m no car expert.

When we arrived at the dealership, the owner started talking about the car and showing it to us, and then he allowed us to take a test drive. I got in, put the key in the ignition, and started it up. Immediately, my dad and I both heard something off.

Dad: *Glancing at the owner* “That doesn’t sound good. It sounds like there’s an issue with the timing belt or chain.”

Neither of us knew for sure if it was a timing belt or chain on this specific model, and it was in a spot that you basically had to take the engine apart to see, so we couldn’t verify even after opening the hood.

Owner: “Oh, we just got it. The woman who we got it from assured us that the timing belt was just replaced. It’s fine.”

Both my dad and I were wary, but we took it on a test drive and everything went fine. We negotiated with the guy, and I wrote him a check and drove the car home. I liked it a lot; for my first car, it wasn’t bad even for its age, and it suited my needs at the time. 

Exactly a month after I bought it, I was dropping my mom off at work before I went to work one morning and the car just died. No alerts, warnings, or lights, just flat dead. I’d just barely started the turn into the parking lot where she works, so I popped it into neutral and managed to get it into guest parking.

I called my dad, who drove me to work and helped arrange things with a tow truck so that we could get the car back to the dealer. The dealership also had a small shop, and when I bought the car, part of the deal was that if anything happened, the owner wouldn’t charge me for labor.

It took a couple of days and he reached out to me.

Owner: “It looks like your timing chain essentially disintegrated. I can try and fix it, but since I’m not charging you, this could take a while.”

Me: “What kind of time frame, and what are you thinking is going to be the process to fix it?”

Owner: “I’m going to have to see if I can find a new chain and get that on there.”

I went to a friend who happened to own a mechanic shop and asked their opinion on the situation.

Friend: “It’s not going to be cheap, but your best bet is going to be a new engine. Honestly, on a car that old, I’d see what you can get for it and just wash your hands of it. Unfortunately, you’re going to end up putting more into it than you paid, and with the way he brushed off your questions initially, I’d be worried about what else could potentially be wrong that they either didn’t verify or didn’t bother to fix.”

I ended up reaching out to a junk place and sold them the car for like $150. In the interim of getting that handled, I went to an actual car dealership and got a different used car. When I showed up to transfer stuff to the junk people, the dealership owner then tried to convince me to buy another car from him. I just told him I’d gotten my car situation handled and left.

Where to start? There are two people I consider the worst I’ve worked with. Ironically, I was warned a few years before about working with one guy, and people I’ve spoken to since who know him either change the subject or discuss how awful he is. I saw him regularly berate people in the middle of the office, telling them he could do a better job, they were not up to it, and on and on.

The other guy was my first experience of working with someone bad. I was part of a manufacturing engineering and facilities management team. It was a good team — so good, in fact, that initial plans to outsource the facilities management aspect of our team would prove more expensive than keeping it in-house. It happened eventually, though, and we were split along the line of where we were working at the time. We rotated through responsibilities: six months in facilities management and six months in manufacturing engineering.

This was how [Manager] became our manager. [Manager] was one of the manufacturing engineers with whom we had little interaction other than seeing the outcome of his projects. As part of the wider team, he had come to nights out with us and seemed like an okay guy — chatty, friendly, and so forth. That didn’t translate into our team. First, he stood at 5’6” or thereabouts and suffered from “small-man syndrome”. It didn’t help that the shortest member of our team topped six feet tall, so he always had to look up to us.

And so we come to the things that made him a horrific person to work with.

The stories of [Manager] are endless. Suffice it to say, after he became our manager, a team that had worked well for almost eight years was bickering, arguing, and fighting amongst themselves any time he interacted with us.

[Manager] demanded respect, and if he felt you didn’t pay him the respect he was due, he’d remind you of his position. That said, he didn’t respect his team. Here are some instances.

1) A secure storage project went off the rails. The team had to work an entire weekend to resolve the problems he caused, while he had his son christened and had a big party. His boss was invited to the event, and when he found out what was happening with the project, he stopped the christening and ordered [Manager] back to work.

2) One of the team earned an innovation award and bonus; [Manager] “forgot” to approve it with payroll for six months. A meeting between the two in the workshop, while the rest of the team waited on the far side of the production floor, sounded like they were brawling and kicking the stuffing out of each other. [Manager] stormed out and we went back.

The Team: “Paddy! What happened? We told you to keep it cool.”

Paddy: “I was sitting on my hands the entire time and never left my seat. [Manager] was slamming cabinets and banging doors, yelling and screaming about how I made him look bad with my complaints.”

The award was paid soon after.

3) One day, I was stuck on my own due to illness and holidays. The machine that was the heart of each production line started acting up, so I had ten production lines with the same problem. Nothing I did fixed it, so I called for a service engineer. In the meantime, I was able to apply temporary fixes that would keep the lines running, but it meant I needed to cycle through each line making constant adjustments. [Manager] turned up and started shadowing me as I moved from line to line. As I turned to go back to the first line again, I saw that all the lines were shut down.

Manager: “You can’t handle this. Call a service engineer. I don’t understand this at all; the machines were working when I bought them.”

(Note: the most recent machine installed was five years old.)

I responded, raising my voice slightly to be heard over the hiss of compressed air from the machines.

Me: “I have; he’ll be here shortly.”

When the problem was resolved a few hours later, [Manager] cornered me in the workshop.

Manager: “If you ever talk to me like that again, I’ll fire you on the spot!” 

Me: “Like what?” 

Manager: “You raised your voice at me. Respect me or leave. You wouldn’t talk to [Vice President] like that.”

Me: “Yes, I would, so they would be able to hear me.”

Manager: “Well, you don’t talk to me like that; I’m your manager.

There were other stories — far too many — so I found a new job. Two weeks into my four-week notice, Paddy quit with no notice. He emailed Human Resources, explained why, and left. Speaking with him a few months later, he said the company had contacted him immediately to find out why and he explained. [Manager] had seen a copy of what was said and told us it was all lies.

At my exit interview, which [Manager] forgot to arrange with Human Resources, I told them everything that had happened. In less than eighteen months, [Manager] had destroyed the team.

The week after I left, there was a first round of redundancies. Guess who was the first marched to the door? [Manager].