I’m the lowest-ranking manager at my store. I have had to stay at home for nearly a week with my small child because she is sick; as a single mother, there’s no way for me to work when she’s ill. 

After nearly a full work week, I go back to work.

Everything seems to be fine, but I get a call from one of the assistant managers asking me to come to the office. I think nothing of it, because I call the store manager into the office when I need him.

Me: “Hey, what’s up? Sorry it took a few minutes; I was with a customer.”

Assistant Store Manager #1: “You know that cleaning and stocking the mop closet is your responsibility, right?”

Me: “Yes, I know.”

Assistant Store Manager #1: “Well, I had to clean and stock it this week, and it’s not my job to do so. Do you see why this isn’t okay?”

Me: “Well, I stocked it on Saturday, so it couldn’t have been too bad.”

Since in my state we legally are closed on Sundays, it would have been stocked for the upcoming week.

Assistant Store Manager #1: “I don’t care; it’s not my job to do this. The closet wasn’t stocked at all.”

Me: *To [Assistant Store Manager #2]*  “You saw me stock it last Saturday, right?”

Assistant Store Manager #2: “Yeah, because you asked what supplies we needed to order.”

Me: *To [Assistant Store Manager #1]* ” I’ve been gone all week. How could I have ‘fixed’ it if I wasn’t here? What was the problem?” 

Assistant Store Manager #1: *Pauses* “Well, the mop closet stinks!”

Me: “And I told you I’m fighting with the floor staff to stop leaving mops in dirty mop water, but none of you will back me up, so it is what it is.”

I STILL got yelled at, even if I didn’t get into official trouble.

The bank I work at has been stuck in its ways for a long time. When I start, they are still doing things on paper that I’ve been doing on a computer for years. 

Manager: “Here’s a date calculator calendar for you to calculate the number of days between two dates. I don’t know what I would do without mine!”

Me: “Oh, I do that on the computer.”

Manager: “It’s so fast with this on your desk!”

My manager then puts a cross between a Rolodex and a yearly planner, about six by eight inches, into my hands.

Me: “Okay, thanks?”

I take it and hide it in the back of a drawer. I also show my coworkers how to use the Calendar app in Windows to find this information and they love it. Cut to the end of the year.

Manager: “Great news! We got the new date calculator inserts in!”

Me: “Thanks! I don’t need one, though.”

Manager: “You need to be able to calculate date durations. It’s simple to use!”

This little shrink-wrapped stack of papers had to be an inch thick. What a waste! I tossed it on top of last year’s calendar and forgot about it until I quit and cleaned out my desk. Sometimes I wonder how they managed to actually change when we locked down.

While emptying the junk jar in the coin machine that my store did not own, I found an actual silver, silver dollar. I took it home — with the intent to return it my next shift — to look up the worth for a charity the store was doing so we could give it to the rep separately. 

I got fired for stealing.

I was told, “That’s like taking a can of peas off the shelf and saying you’ll return it later.”

Umm, no. Not your property. You paid to have that can of peas on your shelf and stand to make a profit when it is sold. This is a coin that came from a machine that is what? A franchise? Like gumball machines? It is put out by a company that you pay to operate for a share in the profits of said machine? I think.

They actually told people that they had me on video stealing other things, which, frankly, no one believed. Funnily enough, they didn’t tell the union that. Hmmm, I guess they didn’t want to make accusations they couldn’t back up. I was two months from my seven-year anniversary with that company with nary a write-up.

That was the first time a union has ever been useful to me. They blasted the manager and got me severance pay, and I sat around living off of that, back pay, vacation pay, and unemployment for five months! They did ask if I wanted my job back, but no. I don’t want to work for people that are going to spread lies and accuse me of things I didn’t do.

I’m midway in my career as an engineer and am the manager for a design and drafting department of about twenty engineers, designers, and drafters. I came up in the drafting board era and my drafters still work on drafting boards, but it is the mid-1980s when PCs and Computer Aided Design are emerging. I have enough budget authority that I can purchase a couple of PCs and basic CAD software without my boss’s approval. I can’t afford to send any of my people to formal training, but I’ve got some very sharp and motivated designers and drafters who are able to get the basics from tutorials — hard copy books back in those days.

Everything is going well until my boss finds out about what we are doing. He is a generation before me and is very skeptical of computers and CAD. He demands that I keep the drafters “on the boards” and have the designers and engineers share two PCs.

We play a cat and mouse game over the next couple of years of me building up my group’s CAD capability while having my boss still think the drafters are doing most of their work at drafting tables. In reality, we have gone almost exclusively to CAD. A couple of the older drafters still prefer pencils and drafting machines. This actually works to my advantage as my boss sees drafters doing manual drafting and he thinks he has won.

Then, my boss’s grandson starts engineering school. Manual drafting is not even offered as a subject. Everything is computers and CAD. Suddenly, CAD is the best thing since sliced bread. My boss authorizes PCs for everybody, CAD training for everybody, and a demand that we phase out manual drafting as soon as possible.

I never met the grandson, but it was fine with me. He accomplished in one year more than I was able to demonstrate by actual example in over three years. We put the drafting tables in storage, rearranged the work area so everyone had a dedicated PC, sent every designer and drafter to formal CAD training, and sent productivity through the roof.

My boss took credit for “pushing the designers and drafters into the modern age.” Whatever works.

Part of my job is to audit the work area for compliance. We have a big external audit coming up, so if I can catch any little issue now, it won’t get brought up later and in front of everyone.

I notice an unusual blade sitting in one of the boxes. Anything unusual could be relating to an issue, so I question it.

Warehouse Manager: “Oh, that’s [Worker]’s. He struggles to use the other ones.”

Me: “The other safety ones?”

Warehouse Manager: “Yeah.”

Me: “The other safety ones that were put in place because we had a serious accident that sent someone to the hospital all because people left blades like this in boxes like that?”

Warehouse Manager: “Yeah.”

Me: “Okay, I’m taking this away with me. [Worker] can get used to the safety ones from now on.”

Warehouse Manager: “What? Don’t be a jobsworth.”

Me: “Seventeen stitches and the person still doesn’t have full sensation in their hand. Blood all over the place. You can have proper ones or you can take it up with [Senior Manager].”

Warehouse Manager: “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

He did, but of course, he didn’t tell the manager the full story. I reminded the senior manager that this would probably result in a lawsuit if someone injured themselves this time, as the company now had full knowledge and had failed to act.

He unsurprisingly changed his tone, thanked me, and gave the warehouse manager an earful.