During the 2008 recession, I wound up employed at a scrubs store in a local mall, and I spent nine months in what I can only call a comedy of errors, some of which are mine, in that I stayed for way too long and tried to make the best of it.

1) My hiring manager quit under accusations of theft. Two more were promoted to manager and quit within days of one another, also accused of theft. This affected me in that the manager who hired me quit before I showed up for my first day of work, and I was not in the system to be paid. Getting me into the system was its own mess.

2) We were down to a total of four staff members with no management and no clue what to do other than open every day, make deposits, and open the tills. (I was trained on the fly by the most experienced coworker on how to handle this.)

3) We four came together, worked out our availability, and by some miracle, got every shift and break covered.

4) Inventory? What inventory? We didn’t know how to scan stuff in, so boxes of shipment were simply opened and put on the floor. Remember: we had nine months of this, including fall, winter/Christmas, and spring sets arriving and not being logged upon arrival because we didn’t know how.

5) When the lights started burning out, we had no way to replace them. The store was very dark by the time some sort of area manager deigned to show up.

6) We had no contact information to call said area manager, and though she promised to leave her number, she never did. She essentially gave us a ladder and long, skinny halogen light bulbs and told us to climb up and change them ourselves.

7) The area manager showed up one day with a fifth employee to help keep us running, got her into the system, and left again. We tried training her and working her in. She proceeded to steal money from the tills — every day — to pay for her lunch until the area manager fired her again.

8) At one point during her employment, our resident thief came to work sick. I worked with her for a full eight-hour day before she admitted she had tested positive for tuberculosis. I was exposed, but my body managed to fight it off without my lungs breaking out.

9) For reasons that boiled down to us being way too honest and loyal for our own good, none of the rest of the four of us stole or did the company dirty for the entirety of the nine months. We could have simply shut the shop down and let the company eat a $1,000 fine per day for not being open until they paid attention, but instead, we did what little we could and tried (a futile endeavor) to get the company or the area manager to do something to fix our situation.

10) Our harshest lesson came when the area manager finally got us a new manager. As soon as the new manager got their feet under them, they proceeded to force us out. A new staff was hired, and the four of us were given four hours per week and told that if we wanted more hours, we would have to “work harder to earn the privilege of getting more hours” and that we were going to have to actively compete with the new employees. (It may also be pertinent to know that the manager and all of their new hires were nepotism hires.)

I learned a lot of bitter lessons from that job.

I’m full-time hourly at my job (which we all know means work weeks are forty hours and then you go home). However, my job requires me to work overtime every few weeks during busy seasons because it’s just the nature of the job.

On Monday, my general manager flipped out on my coworker asking why she hit overtime last week.

Coworker: “Well, you worked me six days straight, and on all of those days I was expected to work a full eight-hour day. If you don’t want me hitting overtime, don’t work me six days straight.”

Fast forward to Tuesday. After [Coworker] told me about the conversation she and [General Manaer] had, I was told I’d be working seven days straight — Monday through Sunday). I mentioned that I would hit overtime, so [Coworker] said I should work it and tell [General Manager] the same that she told him.

I was told, “No overtime unless it’s approved.” My happy ass said, “That’s fine! Friday will be my day off then, so don’t contact me about doing work-related things.”

Today is Friday. I took the day off. I was blown up about work things that they needed help with and were “so important,” and I enjoyed my day on the couch searching for a rental for my vacation coming up at the beginning of the summer.

Either pay me the overtime or don’t complain when things don’t get done.

In the first half of the eighties, my first job was working for a newsagent at a local train station.

After every shift, we counted the money and checks we’d received during our watch. These were put in special paper pouches, which were then placed in our strongbox. A couple of times per week, the strong box would be emptied by our boss, and the pouches were taken by one of us to the deposit box outside our local bank. One summer, the bank reported that an entire pouch was missing from the last deposit. That pouch had contained roughly 10,000 kroner.

Everything was, of course, searched, and our second-in-command, a very nice woman in her fifties, who had taken the money to the bank on that day, was blamed. Nothing could be proven, but we could tell that the suspicion really got to her.

Over the winter, everybody working in the newsagent somehow learned that our boss had a mistress at the other end of the country. Then, we noticed that money was never taken to the bank until at least two days after we put it in the strong box. We worked out that our boss took part of a day’s earnings and used it to pay for some of the earnings from the day before. This went on for quite a while. None of us doubted that something similar had happened the year before and that one day, our boss just got tired of doing this every day. He then just let one pouch go missing.

One day, I knew for certain that my pouch from the day before was missing from what I was asked to take to the bank. After my shift, I called the district manager and told him what we thought was happening. I didn’t want to end up being blamed for money going missing just because my boss needed his extramarital affairs financed.

The district manager showed up within the hour, went through everything, and sure enough, close to 10,000 kroner was missing. My boss was fired on the spot.

I recently started a new job in a highly technical field. Since I’m one of the very few women in my new department, and I’m also on the younger side compared to most of the other employees, I make a bit of an extra effort to dress a little more professionally and formally, as I find this (unfortunately) does make a difference in people taking me seriously.

Today, I’m wearing a very modest and work-appropriate dress that happens to be red. My manager’s manager approaches me before a meeting, and I’m a little worried about why; since he’s always very busy, I wasn’t expecting to speak with him today.

Big Boss: “I have never, in all my time working here…”

I’m getting really worried now!

Big Boss: “…seen anyone in our department wearing a dress! Let alone one with so much color! It’s great!”

Me: “Oh, um, thank you?”

Big Boss: “Yeah! Thanks for helping me realize we should really liven things up around here! I can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone on our team wearing a dress before.”

Me: “Well, dresses can be really comfortable… Maybe you should try it sometime?”

He chuckled and wandered off.

It was a strange conversation, but at least I wasn’t in trouble, and I learned that the big boss actually has a good sense of humor! He was actually a great person to work for, and we got along well ever since that day.

My former company messed up royally, and the resulting exodus was glorious.

My own manager was, to put it bluntly, a monster in a human suit, and even that description probably insults monsters.

The final trigger for just about everyone was the end-of-year reviews. Water-cooler whispers around the lower-rung staff said that everyone who wasn’t management got reviews that were less than stellar, regardless of how hard the employees worked. Many were denied raises entirely and were given a story about how the company simply couldn’t afford to give out raises this year. Some were given chump change and were told that this was the best management could do. By chump change, I mean that some people got $0.05 more per hour, and those were the naïve or desperate who busted their a**es in the hopes of earning recognition. This set the staff on a low simmer.

The true slip-up happened when Human Resources sent a number of emails to the wrong people: the supervisors. In our company, supervisors were doing management work without management benefits and with a laughable increase in pay. The emails blatantly instructed anyone of (actual) management rank and above to spin the exact story we were fed. The email acknowledged that the company was facing record profits, and to prove it, management and those higher were being given incredibly generous (hush money) raises.

This switched the simmer to a roiling boil instantly. The supervisors were hardly even a step above the rest of us, and they had already been having a negative reaction to the nonsense-level workloads that had been dropped on them. Within twenty-four hours, everyone below management was in stealth-mutiny mode.

By the next week, everyone who was not in upper management was starting to take turns “having the flu” as we did interviews at other companies.

Within a month, the company began hemorrhaging employees. Surprised expressions quickly turned into full-on panic.

I had been a bit slower at getting my new job, so by the time I was giving my resignation, management was practically throwing suitcases of money at staff in order to retain them. No one was taking the bait.

Boss: “You know, [My Name], your commitment and loyalty to [Company] haven’t gone unnoticed by upper management, so I’m proud to tell you that all of your work finally has paid off.”

They pushed a list of benefits, and increased pay, at me. These were all things that I had been trying to get for years.

I pushed the list back.

Me: “I don’t think you understand; it’s too late. I’m leaving the company. This is my last day employed by [Company].”

Boss: “What can we offer you to get you to stay?”

I gave them an icy stare.

Me: “Literally nothing. I’m leaving. Let’s be clear. You tried to deny me paid time off for my honeymoon. You told me to put my dying dog in a freezer and to either grieve later or to get over it. You and I both know that anything you offer me now would just turn into a lie within months.”

I stood up from the table.

Me: “You lied to us a few months ago about how all of this—” *tapping the paper on the table in front of me* “—wasn’t possible to offer us, and the fact that you are offering it now proves that you were all deliberately been screwing us over. You are soulless, stupid, and incompetent, and I don’t even need a job reference from this s***show of a company.”

I spun on my heel and walked out, closing the door on their sputtering attempts to reply.

I won’t deny that that felt really, really good, considering how long I had been biting my tongue. The job prospects had been horrible until this point, so my only regret was that I couldn’t get a job opportunity lined up earlier.