I live in the USA, but I am on vacation in the Caribbean. No one from work has my actual phone number, and my work phone is obviously switched off.

I suddenly get a barrage of messages from my boss on my personal Facebook and Instagram.

Boss: “I need you to work tomorrow!”

In reply, I just send back a picture of myself at the beach.

Boss: “I’ll pay for your ticket back!”

Me: “Nope.”

I blocked him. When I got back the next week, he tried to reprimand me, but he stopped when I said I would go to Human Resources with the evidence that he had harassed me via my personal social media accounts while I was on my first vacation in five years.

I am an assistant IT manager at a warehouse. Near the end of 2018, my direct boss decided to implement a new employee monitoring system that he had designed himself. The new system worked by monitoring the metrics and numbers of every warehouse employee logged in to company software and comparing them to minimum company standards. If an employee fell below these standards at any time, the system would immediately send them a notice of termination, essentially firing them on the spot with no room for error. Human Resources expressed their concerns about how the system would potentially be too unforgiving, but the new manager just laughed and told us that if the employees didn’t want to lose their jobs, they just had to not fall below standards.

The system was officially implemented and activated on New Year’s Day. On its first day, the system demonstrated that it was indeed working very well — perhaps, even, a little TOO well. Every single warehouse employee who logged in to the system was immediately fired by it because their existing numbers had not been imported from the old system, meaning that they were below the system’s standards by default. We literally could not get anything done in the warehouse that day, as you would be instantly fired the moment you tried to do anything that required a hand scanner. (Basically, if you tried to do anything in the warehouse, you immediately lost your job.)

The company bigwigs ordered the software to be disabled immediately, but it was too late; the software had fired the entire warehouse day shift, which accounted for close to two-thirds of our warehouse staff in total. We had to shut all warehouse operations down for an entire week while my department worked with HR and the bigwigs to fix the software and get everyone in the warehouse reinstated with back pay. During that time, we could not sell or ship out any items, nor could we purchase anything or accept any incoming shipments. Our clients were absolutely livid over the shutdown, and at least three of them, including our largest at the time, pulled their contracts (and I honestly cannot blame them). Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do to change the automatic unilateral termination aspect of the software, so we ended up scrapping it altogether.

Of course, my boss lost his job over the whole debacle as soon as we reopened the warehouse. As it turned out, configuring a system to unilaterally fire employees without any warning was a direct breach of the company’s termination protocol (though it was far from the only reason why the company dumped him). According to the higher-ups, my boss admitted during his exit interview that his software instantly and unilaterally firing everyone who logged in with no failsafes to stop it was actually intended by design, and he had also intentionally implemented it without migrating the old system’s data. However, he refused to reveal why he did it in both cases. I strongly suspect there was malicious intent involved. The company sued my now ex-boss for the damage he caused due to his negligence, and he quickly settled for an undisclosed sum.

The damage had been done, however. Between the shutdown and the clients bailing on us, the lost revenue from the incident went well into the eight-figure range, and the damages continued to add up in the following years, which was only further exacerbated by the global health crisis. Even the company’s settlement with my ex-boss only served as a small and temporary buffer. We’ve only recently been able to stabilize and get back into order just a little over five years later.

Meanwhile, I was promoted into my ex-boss’s position once we opened back up. The higher-ups still needed a monitoring system, so my first assignment after my promotion was to find one. It did not take long before I found a system that my previous job had used, which logged metrics at the end of each day rather than continuously throughout the day. More importantly, it could not unilaterally terminate employees but would instead make notes on any employees who were below standards. Our termination protocol was also modified to allow us to use these notes for documentation purposes, but we could not use them as the sole basis of termination, and all existing requirements would have to be met before anyone could be let go moving forward.

Related:
Those Responsible For Sacking The People Who Have Just Been Sacked, Have Been Sacked

I get a call from my boss during my day off.

Boss: “A temp just quit on the spot. I need you to come in and cover.”

Me: “No can do, I’m afraid. It’s my day off, and I’ve already had two whiskeys.”

Boss: “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

Me: “I’m not going to get into my car to drive to the store.”

Boss: “If you’re coherent enough to have a conversation with me, then you’re okay to make the drive.”

Me: “So, you want me to risk a DUI to cover last-minute on my day off? Do you want to put that in writing for me so I can show it to Human Resources?”

Boss: “…”

Me: “That’s what I thought. See you Monday!” *Click*

I come into the office on a Monday and see my boss putting together a remote-controlled inflatable shark in a closet in the office manager’s office.

Boss: “Good morning!”

Me: “Uh… whatcha doin’?”

Boss: “Just giving [Office Manager] the morning he deserves.”

Me: “…”

Boss: “Okay, fine. [Office Manager] spent all weekend drinking and doing blow and getting me to do the project work that he should have been doing… again.”

Me: “And the shark?”

Boss: “He confided in me that he’s terrified of sharks, and when he’s coming down from a weekend bender, he’s extra paranoid. I’m sick of it.”

[Boss] then tests this apparatus by having the shark “swim” out of the closet and aim directly for [Office Manager]’s chair.

Boss: “Perfect! Just needs one final touch.”

He taped a small note saying “I quit!” to the back of the shark and reset it into the closet.

Sadly, I had other duties to attend to down the hall, but around 11:00 am, I heard a blood-curdling scream coming from the direction of [Office Manager]’s office. I saw [Boss] chuckling to himself as he walked toward the exit with all of his personal effects.

Along with this stunt, [Boss] had sent plenty of evidence about [Office Manager]’s unprofessional behavior (including slurred and drunken voicemail messages from [Office Manager] to [Boss] demanding that he work at the weekend) to Human Resources, which meant that a day later, [Office Manager] was also walking out the door with his personal effects.

I work in IT. Some are surprised that I tended to shun cell phones for most of my career (I didn’t get one until about 2013), but a BIG part of the reason was that I knew that, working in IT, if I had one, my employer would expect me to be on call basically twenty-four-seven with no additional pay or anything. There was (still is) a social expectation that you answer your phone (or at least reply via text) no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Out on a nice date? Too bad, boss is calling. Dinner with the spouse? Too bad; the boss is calling. Driving your kids to some important medical thing? Too bad; the boss is calling. If/when you aren’t quick on answering calls or messages, it’s always a talking-to the next day at the office (despite the fact that 99% of your job can be done remotely, but that’s another topic).

It has always been this way for IT staff, and it won’t ever change.

Early in my career — around 2005-ish — I worked at an SMB (Small to medium business) of around fifty people. I did helpdesk and network admin, working for an “IT Manager” who had no real technical skills to speak of — didn’t understand IP addresses, how or why different versions of MS Office have slight variations in the user interface, how flexLM floating license checkouts work, etc.) — BUT was good with [Business Intelligence Application] so they were the IT manager and I was the flunky. This person spent about 80% of their time micromanaging my time and making sure I wasn’t idle for so much as five minutes of my day.

At one point, a person in another department who was working late had some trivial nonsense problem with Microsoft Excel that absolutely 100% could have waited until the next morning to resolve. He was annoyed that the IT Manager was beyond clueless to solve his issue at 7:45 pm and the regular helpdesk/networkadmin guy didn’t have a cell phone he could call for off-hours support, so he complained. He complained the next morning by storming into the IT office and berating [IT Manager] and me about how unacceptable the situation was, and then he sent a five-page follow-up email CC’ed to half the company (including the entire executive staff) about how intolerable it was that his dumb pivot table crap didn’t get resolved in the late evening.

A couple of days later, I got pulled into a meeting with [IT Manager] and the Human Resources lady. Reading the room, it felt like I was about to get fired or something (not for nothing but I was quite good at my job, and when I eventually quit a couple of years after all this, it took them over a year to find a replacement), but it was far worse. They wanted me to get a cell phone. I politely declined, which they were prepared for as they told me the company would pay for me to get a phone. I asked if I was going to get any kind of salary increase if I was going to be expected to actually answer it — my original employment agreement didn’t include any on-call stipulations — and was told there wasn’t any money in the budget for that. (That was a blatant lie; the CEO sent us the quarterly earnings every quarter.)

So, I said that I’d take a company-issued cell phone, and I’d even answer it after hours without demanding more pay, on ONE condition. I got to pick the phone and the carrier. They were delighted, agreed in writing, and were almost giddy as I got up and left the room.

I found a Motorola Razr (at the time, a new and very expensive phone) from a Japanese phone company. It had the right kind of compatibility to work on the North American cell phone network, but it retained a Japanese phone number and had an international roaming plan. I went out of my way to find the worst possible plan. Calling the phone would have incurred TWO-WAY international long-distance calling, plus the per-minute international roaming fees and all that, and based on some quick math, it would have cost them over $5 per minute in total to call me.

A day or two after the meeting with my boss and the HR lady, I requested the follow-up and presented the phone and plan I had picked out. It was clear from the body language that they couldn’t tell if I was kidding or not. The HR lady finally realized I was dead serious, and she asked why I picked something so expensive. I said with complete honesty:

Me: “I find it almost offensive that you want me to be theoretically on-call for an unlimited amount of time outside of the office, potentially disrupting literally everything I do outside of work hours, but weren’t willing to offer me even one penny in compensation. Well, if someone wants to call me for support after hours, somebody somewhere is going to pay for that call, one way or another.”

They thanked me and said they’d get back to me about it later. The topic of me getting a company cell phone was never brought up again.