I am talking to an employee we are letting go, and he isn’t taking it well.

Employee: “Why are you firing me?!”

Me: “You’ve been engaging in illegal activities on work property.”

Employee: “That’s a lie!”

Me: “I caught you doing heroin in the restroom.”

Employee: “What happens in the restroom is private!”

Me: “You’re a liability, and we need to let you go.”

Employee: “Whatever. I’ll just clear out my locker and go!”

Me: “I’ll come with you.”

Employee: “That’s an invasion of privacy!”

Me: “It’s procedure for the manager to witness the locker being cleared out during the exit process.”

Employee: “Why?!”

Me: “Because I need to be there in case there’s anything illegal in that locker.”

Employee: “There isn’t!”

Me: “Then there should be no problem.”

Employee: “F*** you!”

He stormed off and made a mad dash for the locker, but security escorted him out of the building. As suspected, once we opened the locker, we found enough drugs in there to warrant a call to the police.

That ex-employee is now in prison for dealing — and dealing from the back of our warehouse nonetheless!

I’ve never met anyone so determined to dig themselves into a hole. It all started when I was picking up my daughter from school. I parked on the street with the driver’s side of the car on the street side and the passenger side near the sidewalk.

[Daughter]’s car seat was behind the driver’s seat, so I had to stand in the street to buckle her in. Then, I opened the driver’s door, got in, and reached for the door to close it. I had almost closed it — it was only a little ajar — when a Honda Civic plowed into it so hard that my door sliced into the Civic’s bumper. The other driver backed up until I could fully open my door again, and I saw that the Civic was maybe eight inches from my car. Who drives so close to parked cars?

Usually, I would just exchange information and that would be it, but the guy got out and had a huge attitude. He started lecturing me.

Guy: “You need to look around before opening your door! I had no time to react!”

LOL. If I had taken more time to get in, he would have hit me.

He definitely could have avoided me. The street was not narrow, and there was not even a sidewalk on the other side. He had plenty of room.

We started to exchange information, and I thought I smelled alcohol on his breath. My husband soon arrived with our other daughter because I called and let him know what had happened. The guy tried to give my husband the whole “Women drivers, am I right?” spiel, and my husband verbally tore him a new a**hole.

My husband confirmed that he also smelled alcohol, so we called the cops. The other guy was all for it. He wanted the cops called and wanted to talk to them. Cool.

My girls ran around the schoolyard as each of us gave our statements. Mine was pretty cut and dry, so soon, my husband and I were just standing around while the cops talked to the driver of the Civic. Not long after, we overheard him fail the breathalyzer.

He was arrested, and I’m driving a rental until we see if my car can be fixed.

As I was walking through the entrance of the electronic goods store where I worked, a guy ran out with a box in his hand, smashing me to the ground before running off as fast as his legs could take him.

I fell hard, injuring myself, and had to go to hospital. When I came back to work, I was called into the manager’s office to find a Human Resources representative, my manager, and the district manager waiting for me.

District Manager: “Well, [My Name], I’m guessing you know why we called you in today?”

Me: “Is it because I got hurt at work?”

District Manager: “Yes. As you know, we have a strict policy that employees should not put themselves in danger by, among other things, trying to stop a shoplifter from leaving our premises. You needlessly put yourself at risk in breach of that policy.”

Me: “I literally walked through the door and got clocked by a guy leaving at speed. I didn’t try to stop him at all.”

HR Representative: “No, that’s not what happened. You tried to stop him and got hurt because you couldn’t follow our safety protocols. I am afraid that we have no choice but to let you go.”

Me: *Crying* “Are you kidding? I need this job. I got hurt at work. I have a family…”

HR Representative: “Stop it with the crocodile tears. You broke the rules and you know it.”

District Manager: “The policy is clearly stated in our employee handbook, and you ignored it. This is on you.”

My Manager: “What made you think you could even stop a guy twice your size? If we allowed you to stay after that, we’d be responsible any time an employee decided to just have a go.”

District Manager: “Here’s your final severance payment. We just need you to sign these forms and you can leave.”

He shoved a bunch of forms at me, one of which was an admission that I had broken corporate policy and tried to stop the shoplifter. 

To cut a very long story short, I refused to sign it, they threatened to withhold my final paycheck if I didn’t, I said I would get a lawyer, they said the incident was my fault, and I finally walked out crying.

I couldn’t afford a lawyer, even after they finally agreed to mail me my final paycheck, and they refused to submit my medical expenses through the corporate insurance scheme because I had “broken policy”.

Three years later, I am still paying off the debt I had to take on to get through that period and cover my healthcare. I still have no health insurance because I can barely afford rent. Living the American dream.

I used to work a part-time job in a library with a not-so-nice boss. She was extremely demanding, my wages were ridiculously low, and the work was extremely hard since the library had a skeleton crew and we were barely enough to run the library. Just a few months after I started working there, I quit for a full-time job.

One of my friends came to know of it thanks to social media. She asked me some questions about it, and I didn’t lie; I told her it was pretty awful. Since she really needed a job, she applied. I gave her information about the dress code, what she needed to know, the tasks, and so on. She got an interview very early in the morning (before sunrise in January).

I offered to coach her in the morning before the interview. However, when she arrived, she was on the verge of tears.

My awful boss had called her while she was on the train to tell her not to bother coming for the interview. 

I invited her home for a coffee. I told her about my worst days there, what my boss had asked me to do, the back-breaking tasks, the lack of training on the tasks, and my extremely low salary (from which my boss once deducted around 10% for a mistake I made, which is extremely illegal in Belgium), even though my meager wage was barely enough for me to live. I spared no details.

I tried my best to lift her mood. Since I had followed a job-searching training course after I left college, I gave her my notes. We also pimped up her CV. When she came home, she was in a much better mood.

She found a full-time job in a toy library closer to her place. I was much happier at my new job.

Warning: this story will likely make you itch — BAD.

I once had an insane experience with a scumbag landlord, hereafter known as Mr. Scumlord. I moved into a ten-story complex only to discover bedbugs! Mr. Scumlord feigned ignorance and refused to take care of it.

Me: “The apartment has bedbugs in it!”

Mr. Scumlord: “That’s funny; I haven’t received any complaints.”

Me: *Showing him pictures* “They’re literally crawling over each other along the baseboards!”

Mr. Scumlord: *Blank-faced* “That’s funny; I haven’t received any complaints.”

Me: “I’m complaining now! You need to call an exterminator!”

Mr. Scumlord: “I’ve run this apartment complex for years and I. Haven’t. Received. Any. Complaints. Pay the rent on time. I’m not giving you a discount, and I’m certainly not shelling out any money for a non-existent problem.”

Then, Mr. Scumlord shut the door in my face. I stared for just a moment, and then I went nuclear.

I immediately went to talk to my neighbors in my hallway, and of course, they were all dealing with bedbugs and had been for months. They’d been fighting with their own treatments, but since the entire building was infested, cleaning one apartment just made room for them to migrate back in later. Mr. Scumlord would simply stone-face at them and reply that there wasn’t a problem, refuse to accept or acknowledge a complaint, and tell the tenants to use their own treatments if they wanted to be hypochondriacs.

We all cussed and discussed (pun intended) before organizing to submit multiple complaints to License and Inspections. Word spread through the complex, and I got to talk to a LOT of neighbors from other floors. I learned that there was a leak in a wall that had been slowly growing worse, and the tenant was terrified that their bathtub was going to crash through the floor into the apartment below. (They had already warned the tenant below, and both had tried to complain.) I learned that if you touched the hanging lamp in one apartment’s dining room while the light was on, you’d get a shock. 

The stories just piled up, and people got excited when I told them where to lodge their complaints.

I’m sure you can imagine how very, very, VERY interested the city became in the absolute flood of complaints from the entire building, complete with photographic evidence of the bedbugs from all of them. The floors were literally crawling with the little bloodsuckers, and the edges of the room were black with droppings of digested blood.

The city quickly sent an inspector, and I gave her the door code to come and go as she pleased. Mysteriously, no matter how busy many tenants were, there was nearly always someone home during her visits to let her in to discuss concerns and take photographs. She inspected that ten-story building from top to bottom and found tons of other violations.

She insisted on a very expensive remediation process. Mr. Scumlord was told that if he didn’t follow the process, the city would immediately condemn the entire complex, as well as slam him with an a**-puckering set of fees. She was already dragging him over some very hot coals about tenants’ rights and how he was personally responsible for providing every tenant in the building accommodation while the complex was brought up to code.

Mr. Scumlord was soon eyebrows deep in renovations and treatments. I heard he eventually just ripped out the flooring and replaced it because the infestation was so bad that it couldn’t be cleaned.

I had to bag up all of my clothing and wash them. I had to throw out my mattress and nearly everything I owned because within days of moving in, they were all stained with bedbug fecal matter. I got out of the lease and moved; luckily, a friend of mine had a spare room I could stay in. 

Many tenants couldn’t do the same, so on top of the renovations, Mr. Scumlord had to find them places to live and ensure that no bedbugs migrated with the families. He’s not bankrupt yet, but some other properties he owns are apparently under scrutiny, as well, so fingers are crossed.

Related:
This Is Why People Have Big Feelings About Landlords, Part 2
This Is Why People Have Big Feelings About Landlords