I arrived at my job one morning and noticed that one of my coworkers, “Joe”, wasn’t at his desk. That wasn’t like him, so I asked another coworker (“Fran”) where he was.

Me: “Is Joe sick, or something?”

Fran: “Ooh, you didn’t hear? He had his three-month probation review at the end of the day yesterday, and it didn’t go well. [Supervisor] told him that the company was going to let him go.”

Me: “Oh, okay. That’s too b—”

Fran: “I’m not finished. Joe looked [Supervisor] straight in the eyes and said ‘Firing me would be a big mistake. I know where you live, and I know where your kids go to school.'”

Me: *Aghast.* “WHAT?!”

Fran: “So, instead of merely getting fired, he’s now fired AND in police custody.”

I found out later why [Supervisor] had decided to let Joe go in the first place, because he had anger management issues. Go figure.

I am a social worker with a moderate-sized nonprofit compared to the city we are in. We serve individuals with disabilities on-site and in the community.

About a year and a half ago, our exec director retired after fifteen-ish years. They were an awesome person, but due to age and some health problems, had kind of checked out of running the organization. The new director came from a much larger for-profit organization and seemed to feel that money is king, and the only way to be respected is to be feared. She was a monster in every sense of the word.

Now, being a nonprofit, our pay isn’t fantastic, and the benefits aren’t stellar, but the one thing they were good at was the vacation rollover. We were allowed to keep two-hundred hours of rollover, and while it took some time to build up, those of us who had been there a while tried keeping our hours somewhere around there (this is our vacation and sick time put together).

The new director decides that our entire vacation policy is too generous, and one, cuts our accrual rate (I personally lost almost two full weeks a year), and the major kicker, tells us we can only keep eighty hours of roll-over.

Again, I get it, COVID hit us hard, everyone has to be expected to make some cuts somewhere, but see, the problem is, she told everyone this the first week of October, and we had to be down to eighty by January 1st. Anything over eighty just goes away.

We tried negotiating, we tried offering alternatives, and we asked for exemptions for a few months. She would absolutely not hear it and finally said the next person who asked about our PTO policy would be walked out of the building. So, my coworkers and I came up with a plan.

I will admit, this only worked because the rest of our administration team felt the director was horrible, and also lost their PTO time.

We all put in for vacation at the same time. Even those that really didn’t need to because they were closer to eighty hours anyway.

We literally had 85% of our staff off for weeks at a time. We worked it out amongst ourselves that we had just enough staff to ensure work was done to keep us compliant with the state, but anything above and beyond that ground to a halt. I also need to clarify that we are not an emergency service, so the clients we serve did not lose our essential support.

Well, our board meeting comes around in December, and the new director has to try to explain why there was such a drastic drop in revenue over the last month and a half. Apparently, she didn’t give a good enough answer, because the board started talking to the employees and senior management for the first time since the new director came on.

Let me tell you, we did not hold back.

After hearing the horror stories of some of the other stuff she was doing, the board promptly decided that having her in charge was (according to the all staff email that got sent out), “Not going to lead us in a direction that would lead to long-term success and stability for our organization”, and kicked her a** to the curb.

I am happy to say they found a new director who has already gone above and beyond what we could have hoped for, and our staff and, most importantly, our clients are hopefully on the path to many years of success.

I have the employee from Hell on my team. This woman couldn’t show up on time in appropriate clothing to save her life, generally had a bad attitude, half-a**ed every task, and would not shut up about her personal life.

We’ve basically been waiting for her to do something egregious enough to merit a third write-up in six months, which results in almost automatic termination.

On this day, she showed up late again, and I was already in the middle of gleefully writing her up. Instead of apologizing or at least getting to work right away, this idiot starts babbling about how she’s soooooo hungover and trying to tell everyone about her weekend exploits, but nobody paid any attention to her except my assistant, who rolled his eyes, sighed heavily, and turned away.

I had to take a call at that point, so I didn’t see what happened next, but a few minutes after I hung up, the head of HR came into my office with a goofy smile on his face and closed the door.

Apparently, this employee was insulted by our disinterest in her sad little life and marched into his office to claim that we were creating a hostile work environment by disrespecting her.

HR took her into the little office we use for interviewing people, listened to her rant, and said, “Okay, but you were late again today, so we’re going to have to let you go. Your paperwork is in process. You can hang out in here while we get everything together.”

I didn’t even have to divide up her tasks among the staff because they were so happy to see her go that they did it themselves before I had a chance.

Good f****** riddance.

Related:
This Just Isn’t Coworking Out, Part 2
This Just Isn’t Coworking Out

In 2020, I worked in a care home, looking after elderly folks, some of whom were bedbound. I was not trained to give medication or dress wounds.

The home was based over three floors, where carers were moved between on a weekly rota. Each floor had a nurse whose job was to medicate and dress patient wounds.

The nurses were all foreign and spoke poor English, and to be honest, they were bad at their job. This resulted in the non-trained staff dressing wounds and giving meds out.

At this point, I should say that the home manager was a complete waste of space. She spent most of her shift sitting in the office; the only thing she did was prepare medication to be given to the residents. These were put into trays with resident names on.

The trays were supposed to be taken to the residents’ rooms and the meds given to them. Because the nurses spoke poor English, it was often the case that the care staff would give the meds out.

Care staff started to notice that some of the residents weren’t reacting to the meds as usual. This started to get worse, and the care staff made the manager aware of this. Her reaction? The care staff weren’t trained to make such observations and should leave it to the nurses.

Most of us carers feared losing our jobs if we pushed it. But one carer, whom I’ll call Jill, was close to retiring. She decided to give one of the patient’s doctors a call, informing him of her concerns.

He came out to check on the patient. He was there when the meds were to be given and noticed that they were wrong. The carer who had called him said they were the same meds given every day.

The doctor asked one of the nurses to take him to the meds locker to check them out. The next thing we knew, a police car pulled into the home car park along with another doctor.

What was discovered? None of the special pain relief meds were what they should have been. Instead, they had been replaced with over-the-counter generic pain meds.

As would be expected, there was an investigation as to what was happening.

It was discovered that the manager was replacing the meds and selling them. She was sacked, and the residents dispersed to other homes. Most of the staff left the company. The last thing I heard the manager was convicted and spent time in prison.

The care company was closed three months later.

We hired this lady who, during her morning training process, seemed pretty high-strung, but nothing too hard to deal with.

Midway through the day, we were in the break room. She gestures at two large, full bags of Starbucks beans next to the coffee maker and asks everyone in there:

New Hire: “Whose are these?”

Coworker: “Oh, those are free for anyone to use. The company buys coffee for everyone.”

New Hire: “Oh, cool.”

As she’s leaving for the day, she takes this very literally and puts both bags of beans in her purse as she goes home.

There is a hubbub the rest of the day as everyone is confused about why there is no more coffee. Eventually, it gets put together that she took them.

She comes in the next day and gets called into the manager’s office. Ten minutes later, she was storming out, angrily. She did not come back.

Me: “Yeah… not surprised. Decaffeinate the entire office, and everyone will turn against you. No coming back from that…”

Coworker: “She should have started small time, sharpies, and binder clips from the supply closet. But nooooo, she went straight for Fort Knox.”