We had a second-shift manager who also owned a business nearby. After a while, people realized that if you called him after dinner, you had to wait while he “came back from another part of the plant”.

They staked out the gate and called him, and sure enough, he drove in after a few minutes. So, someone tipped security, who set up surveillance. It turned out this manager was going to his other business and doing bookkeeping!

The manager in question was “allowed to retire”.

He wasn’t the only one, either.

I started my first full-time office job at a corporate America h***hole a week after college. It was an industry I hadn’t worked in before, and I needed to be licensed. The company that hired me paid for the licensing fees, study materials, classes, etc., for me to become licensed. The total cost was about $500. It was a sweet deal. They gave me approximately ninety days (paid) to study a textbook and pass an online course. I didn’t have to do any work for the company; I simply had to study and pass the licensing exam. It was pretty easy, and I passed on my first try.

My boss was super excited that I had passed, and I began training under an associate-level coworker who had just been promoted from the position I was in. [Coworker] was super great and helpful. She began training me on two simple tasks that I could do. The only rule was that if the client had a question specifically about their contract, I would ask [Coworker] or forward it to my team lead.

Well, I ended up getting an email from a client about their contract and I video-called [Coworker] to ask how to handle it. She walked me through it as I shared my screen with her. I wrote an email back to the client exactly how she told me to, and she read the email before I sent it.

A month went by, and everything was great. I was learning and getting more comfortable.

Then, I got a really nasty email from [Boss]. She CC’d my whole team into the email going on and on about how I could not answer contract questions and how she’d gone over this with me before. (She hadn’t; [Coworker] was the one who told me I couldn’t answer contract questions.)

Both [Coworker] and I tried to explain what had happened and that [Coworker] was the one who had written the email; I had just typed what [Coworker] said and sent it from my email since the client emailed me and not [Coworker].

[Boss] then called the team up in a video call and went on about how I didn’t know anything, I had just started, I really didn’t know how this industry worked, and answering contract questions was out of my job description. It went on for about five minutes.

I said, “Okay,” and got off the call crying.

The next day, out of pure pettiness, I simply did the absolute bare minimum. I don’t know anything, right, [Boss]? I still completed all my tasks and everything that was required of me. Anything more advanced that I would normally try to learn with [Coworker]’s help? Nope. I just forwarded it to our team lead and said, “Sorry, [Boss] said I can’t do anything outside of my job description!”

Work was much less stressful after I decided to listen to [Boss] (and what many others had told me before): don’t do anything outside of your job description!

[Boss] later fired me for being a whistleblower when I reported the company to the health authority for violating protocols for the global health crisis.

I sleep better at night knowing how much money [Boss] wasted on training me.

I was a notoriously picky eater growing up, and my family widely joked that I would starve when I struck out on my own. While I did flounder a bit, I started experimenting with recipes and tried out new restaurants around my new place. 

I developed a taste for Mediterranean and Italian food, which tends to use lots of spices. My husband and friends say I make awesome baked goods. And I’ve developed a vegetable soup using herbs, garlic, pepper, and sauteed vegetables that is always a hit. So, I joke that my “meat and potatoes” family just doesn’t know how to use spices and that’s why I was so picky. 

Tonight, I found out how right I was. My mom decided to make her vegetable soup. Sweet — this was a childhood favorite, so I was eager to have a bowl. I ate a spoonful and… all I tasted was salty butter with a hint of tomato juice. So. Much. Salt. 

I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I struggled to finish it. But I downed Tums and water to rinse out the salt in my mouth. I also didn’t ask for seconds. 

My parents really didn’t know how to cook.

One of the only things I ever got detention for in high school was regularly being late to class in my nightmare maze of a school.

When the school was first opened, it had five halls with an open-air courtyard between halls four and five. But then, they decided to expand the school by building four new halls. For some reason, these faced perpendicular to the other four, between halls four and five, with only one doorway on each side in and out of that area.

I had to go from hall five to hall one through the sideways, crowded mess of halls seven through ten.

I don’t know why they did it like that, but it was literally impossible to get there within the four-minute passing periods they gave us.

I was an IT contractor for a major European defence contractor many many years ago — think room-sized mainframes, eighty-column punch cards, and green bar fanfold listings.

One week, after being vetted by the local security service, I was working late at night in the building where IT was housed. The vending machine in our building was out of order, and I was feeling peckish, so I went to look for a vending machine in another building where people worked on radar, radios, sonar, jammers, etc. — so, loads and loads of very expensive electronic gear.

I was amused and amazed by the idea that I was wandering around in a building, where I didn’t work and had no real business being in, at 02:00, yet nobody challenged me.

Every six months or so we had these briefings, complete with Super 8mm movies, by the local security service where we were told to clean out our desks at the end of the day, to lock our filing cabinets before leaving, and to be aware of friendly strangers with certain accents trying to strike up a conversation. Obsolete listings were to be shredded — the same listings we noticed our end users were recycling as scratch paper.

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Bring A Bucket And A Mop For This Weak A** Security