My company has the option to install email/teams on your personal phone, and almost everyone at the company, including me, is hourly.

I walked into work one day, and the CFO (a stereotypical workaholic) says to me:

CFO: “Did you see the email I sent you this morning about [whatever]?”

Me: “No, because I’m literally just walking in. I haven’t opened my laptop yet.”

CFO: “You don’t have a work email account on your phone?”

Me: “No?”

CFO: *Surprised.* “Why not?”

Me: “I’m hourly, and I don’t put work stuff on personal devices. When I’m not here, I pretend this company doesn’t exist.”

He wasn’t mad or anything, but he looked at me like I was an alien.

This happened around 2002–2003. There I was, an Army systems admin wearing many hats, knee-deep in green-bar printouts, Windows 95 floppy disks, old Cisco network equipment, and balls of CAT-5 cable.

I got a special request: the general wants to move from a desktop to a laptop. He wants everything to be EXACTLY the way it was on his desktop, to include how his files are laid out, the background, etc. Keywords to this (three times): EXACTLY.

I was given the laptop. I took it from bare bones to standard and added it to the network. I then copied (remotely) everything from his desktop to his laptop and arranged it EXACTLY as it was on his desktop. How to ensure it was EXACT? Easy, change the general’s password and log in as him (with his permission). Logged into his desktop remotely and his laptop sitting on my bench at the same time and arranged everything so it was mirrored perfectly. The job was done; it was EXACTLY as he wanted it. I was getting ready to take it over when… 

The little brown-nosing boss decided HE needed to take it over and set it up for the general. I told him this was a General-to-Bilko project with no deviations (warning: inbound s*** show).

Two hours later, my phone rings:

Me: “Networking, SGT Bilko speaking.”

Little Boss: “I’m here in the general’s office, and this laptop is not working!”

Me: “It worked when it was on my bench. What did you do?”

Little Boss: “I plugged it in, and there is no networking!”

I know the general’s office and know the jacks behind the typewriter desk were the original CAT3 phone wire from when the building was built.

Me: “Where did you plug the network cable in at?”

Little Boss: “Behind the typewriter desk!”

Me: “And you did not use the patch cable that was there for the desktop that was plugged into another jack?”

Little Boss: “No! I cut that one up and threw it in the trash.”

Me: *Banging head against hard flat surface.* “Okay. I’ll be over to make a new patch cable, and we’ll get this done.”

I head to the general’s office. The general is p***ed. He gave this job to me, but Little Boss decided he would look awesome by taking it over and setting it up. He’s p***ed that a Major wasted two hours of his time.

I made a new patch cable and started to plug it into the correct jack.

Little Boss: “I don’t want to use that jack; I want the one behind the typewriter desk.”

Me: “It’s a CAT3 phone wire. It was never intended to be a network jack.”

Little Boss: “I want it re-wired right now!”

Me: “Oooookay. Let me get the ladders, a spool of CAT5, and pop the ceiling tiles in the CSM’s office and three colonels’ offices to get to the signal closet. This is going to take a couple of hours.”

Little Boss: “NO! I want it done right NOW!”

Me: “No. This is a two-to-three-hour job. You need to go to each affected office and let them know I’ll be moving ceiling tiles and they’ll need to leave.”

Little Boss: “No! I want it done now!”

Me: *To Little Boss.* “Okay. You have a choice. Two to three hours of ceiling tiles or this patch cable. What’s it going to be?”

General: “Patch cable. Get it hooked up and get out.”

[Little Boss] leaves. I plugged in the cable, had networking, showed the general his layout, and had him change his password. I apologized to the general for the actions of [Little Boss].

General: “No, you did exactly as you were asked to do. Your boss hijacked this to earn brownie points. Thank you.”

Intentionally withholding some context from this, but this sequence of events at a previous role is the perfect example of how my experience as a whole was.

Operations is discovered to have not performed a procedure written by my predecessors decades before me. That same day:

Director: “Is this a non-compliance event?”

This would require self-reporting to a government agency in a specified time frame.

Me: “It’s possible that we violated [State Law] as I see the notes in the missed procedure that we do this for compliance. I don’t have any other documentation around why that is the case.”

Director: “YOU need to know this. YOU are responsible for understanding our permits and regulatory requirements. Get an answer ASAP.”

Me: “Will do.”

I understood the permits and requirements perfectly fine, just not this random procedure written with no documentation on reasoning. Cut to two days later, after tracking down documents dating back twenty years before my time.

Me: “I found documents which explain why that procedure was in place for Y regulation.”

I explain the document.

Me: “Not meeting Y regulation triggers a permit violation under condition X, which is a catch-all condition written expressly for instances such as the missed procedure.”

Director: “No. We’re not reporting that. You shouldn’t be wasting your time on this.”

I pushed back by asking if we should run it by the guy who would go to jail should it be determined we hid a violation or at least get Legal’s input. When my director said no, I made my manager aware of the situation.

Result: an HR meeting where I was told that all my work has to be done physically inside the facilities. A few months later, my director chewed me out for not being responsive when I was not onsite.

I already had one job offer with two more on the way when they let me go on a Monday for “lack of improvement.”

I manage a bakery. The owner is mostly hands-off and leaves me to run the show. After years of only taking a day off here and there, I’ve finally secured for myself a two-week vacation. 

The owner is going over the staffing spreadsheet, specifically the dates I am gone.

Owner: “Why have you booked all these people over the next two weeks?”

Me: “Because I’m on vacation.”

Owner: “Yes, but the place can be run by three people on the weekdays; you have four.”

Me: “What happens if someone calls out?”

Owner: “It’s their responsibility to find cover if—”

Me: “—Nope. Not their job. That’s my job, and I’ll be d***ed if I’m hunting for cover when I should be sipping long islands in the Bahamas. Unless… you’d like to find cover?”

Owner: “And why do you have five at the weekend? We can run the place with four!”

Me: “Have you not been listening?”

Owner: “I just don’t see why they can’t manage themselves better.”

Me: “[Owner], you pay them minimum wage, right? What do you expect?”

Owner: “I expect work ethic.”

Me: “[Owner], have you noticed how our staff turnover is quite low?”

Owner: “No?”

Me: “Trust me, it’s low. Do you know why that is?”

Owner: “…No.”

Me: “It’s because I make sure they don’t have to deal with mismanaged scheduling. The place can run on three people? Great. That means we need four. You’ve never noticed it before because I’ve always been here. Don’t rock the boat while I’m gone or you’ll ruin a good thing.”

He harrumphed but walked away.

I went on my two-week break. I came back, and the owner had ruined a good thing.

He’d sent someone home, figuring they were not needed. 

Two days later, a worker’s grandma died and they needed time off. [Owner] said no, and they upped and quit. [Owner] then had to cover, didn’t know what he was doing, shouted at everyone else, and they all quit too.

A year of zero staff turnover. He’s in charge one week, and I have to rehire EVERYBODY.

I work as a manager in a call center. I am nowhere near the phones and generally do not interact with customers. Rather, I am a knowledge repository for my staff and handle communication between our team and the client company for which we provide support.

We are a technical support team, not a sales or order support team, and the devices which we support are very complex consumer electronics. Most of our support time goes to professional installers, and we rarely speak to customers firsthand. In short, my job is to know our policies like the back of my hand, and to know the products we support better than anyone except the designers that engineered them.

A secondary part of my job is to coordinate our online chat team, which is generally pretty hands off other than right as the shift ends, when I generally jump in to monitor any active chats and make sure they close up quickly. I don’t want to keep my guys here any longer than necessary. They like it better, and it cuts down on overtime hours for the entire line of business by a lot. This means I generally rack up fifteen to twenty minutes of overtime a day, though some days it can be as little as zero and others as much as an hour. My direct boss knows all about this and is generally all for it.

One day, however, the guy who was in charge of all the support teams (we work with many brands) sent out a memo that management should never be getting overtime. I brought this up with my boss, as this would seriously impact my team, who arranged a meeting with the big boss. The big boss proceeds to tell my boss that no, I cannot rack up any overtime hours.

Fine. I get out at a reasonable time every day. I have zero issue with this.

So, the next Monday, I log out right when my shift ends. Turns out three of my guys were there for an extra hour with last-minute chats. Tuesday, nearly the same story. This continues all through the week. We are bleeding overtime hours for support staff, with most of my team getting nearly an hour of overtime per day!

This goes on for a pay period when Big Boss comes back and tells us we were told to reduce overtime hours, and that we had somehow racked up even more than we had before.

My Boss backed me up and told the Big Boss that no, we were told to reduce Management overtime hours, and that I had indeed not racked up any overtime. Big Boss asks why overtime hours increased, and I mentioned I used to stay to make sure my team had the support they needed to get out as early as possible.

Big Boss goes, “Well, that makes sense. Keep doing that, but add any overtime to your Friday Lunch so you don’t rack up overtime. I explain that I can do this but will still probably get a bit of overtime on Fridays since the end of the shift is obviously after lunch.

Again, cool. Long lunches are nice. This works well for a few weeks. I am making sure I zero out my overtime, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they regretted doing any of this. We were approaching the busy season and getting more and more long chats and calls. I made sure to get Big Boss to email and CC me and my boss this instruction directly.

Sure enough, a few weeks later, on Monday, I’m there for a whopping hour and thirty minutes trying to get one guy out the door. Tuesday for an hour, Wednesday for an hour and fifteen, and to top it off, two whole hours on Thursday. It was a TERRIBLE week for the last-minute chats. I tallied up my make-up time for my lunch. Five hours and forty-five minutes, plus an hour for my normal lunch.

I normally worked four hours, one hour lunch, then another four hours. So that Friday, I came in and explained the situation to my boss; he was cool with me working for only two hours and fifteen minutes the whole day, because I was doing exactly what the big boss said to do. So, an hour into my shift, I went on my six-hour and forty-five-minute lunch.

While I’m enjoying most of day siesta, the entire line of business is burning down. Chat is so busy we have people waiting thirty minutes to speak with someone. Calls are so busy we have fifteen calls waiting. On days like this, I normally jump in the queues as I do not need to document every case like our Tier 1s have to, and I’m very good at my job. I can usually knock out a fifteen-to-twenty-minute call for a Tier 1 in five minutes or less. I can easily handle four to five chats at one time, seriously taking a load off that team.

Now I alone could not save this shift, no way. We were due for a hiring class and were working on onboarding new tier 1s at the time. But man, does it look bad to the Client when one of your key players is absent all but two hours and fifteen minutes of one of the busiest days ever for our line of business.

I get back in, settle down at my desk, right as the rush is clearing up. The damage was already done, and we were manageable for the rest of the day. Right at the end of my shift, I look and notice that there is no one on a chat, and no queue, so I immediately log out and thank my team for working hard that day.

Then Monday comes. I get to meet with the Client, Big Boss, and my Boss for our weekly meeting. The Client is furious about how, on Friday, one of our best assets was on a super long lunch break, and Big Boss puts me on the spot and asks why that was. My response was rehearsed.

“According to Company policy established and agreed upon on [date we met with the Big Boss], I am not to accrue overtime hours. Any hours over eight worked within the work week must be made up during my lunch break on Fridays.”

Big Boss began denying it when my boss stepped in, and was like, wait, I got an email about this. He pulls up the email Big Boss sent and shares it on screen in the meeting.

Client is p***ed, and the Corporate Rep begins ripping Big Boss a new one on the phone. After ripping into Big Boss, the Corp Rep speaks to me, telling me to accrue as many hours as needed to make sure my job is done, and that if my company wants to retain this line of business, Big Boss is not to interfere with my generally very successful management without consulting them and myself.

Since then, Big Boss has continued to try to interfere and change how I run my line; however, every time so far, the Corporate Rep has had my back. They are extremely happy with my work and know I do a great job. Heck, they even pushed through a large raise for me when Big Boss was blocking my Boss’s attempts to get me more money.