I was working for a temp agency in the 1990s, and they sent me to a “business center”. It was a small mall in the 1980s and had now been turned into four or five businesses in the same space, sharing the general facilities — lunch room, copy machines, etc. I was brought on as a tech as these businesses really weren’t big enough to have their own IT departments. I was told that the previous guy in the position, “Joe”, had left for a more stable job, and everyone in the place was sorry to see him go.

The first week I was there, I started finding problems with the guy. I came into one place and was told a computer was acting up. The business owner looked like she was about to burst into tears.

Owner: “When the last computer did this, Joe said it was broken and I had to get a new computer.”

I fixed the problem in five minutes with a free antivirus program and set up the rest of the computers in that office, as well.

Me: “What did Joe do with the old computer?”

Owner: “Oh, he took it home for parts since it wouldn’t work anymore.”

And all that week, I kept running into things that were really simple fixes, but good ol’ Joe had either taken all frickin’ day fixing them or announced that the machine was borked and had to be replaced. And Joe was apparently the designated recycler.

One owner said Joe was always in the office, working on the system; he’d be all day working on that computer. It turned out that before he’d left, he’d tried really hard to convince the owner to turn that tower over to Joe, and Joe would replace it “for free”. But the owner decided not to do that; he told me he just didn’t trust Joe all that much.

After taking a look at the computer, I could see why Joe wanted to take it with him; it was full of adult material grabbed from the Internet. After I showed this to the owner, Joe became persona non grata at that place.

It gets better.

It turned out that Joe couldn’t hack it in the real world and ended up going back to the temp agency. He asked for his old job back, but no, I had that position. So, he came to the facility and tried to bug me into quitting. I reported him to the agency, and he was written up and told not to return to the facility for any reason.

And when he did return to the facility, I informed building management, who called the police. Upon seeing the po-po, Joe took off like a cheetah, trying to exit the building through the back door — but failing because it now had a lock on it due to a break-in a few months previous.

After he tried (and failed) to resist arrest, the cops called in a request for his records and found out that Joe was wanted for suspicion of dealing. I had been talking to the cops at the time, and upon hearing this, I had my own suspicions. I went to check that computer that Joe had spent so much time on.

Sure enough, hidden in the files was a partial record of Joe’s activities back when he’d worked there. I printed out the file, handed it to the cops, and told them I’d send them anything else I found on the computer.

The next day, the feds showed up and took the computer. Joe went to prison for five years.

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.