I was desperate to start a new job after my husband and I were both laid off last year. When I was offered a new role, I knew it would be a step down from what I had been doing, but the manager and the team seemed great, and that part has not changed. However, since my manager, Gary, was so busy, he basically offloaded me to another manager, Jane.

I was supposed to be the connection point between my team and Jane, but it quickly became Jane micromanaging me. She would ask me to work through lunch, move/cancel vacation days, call at 11 pm on weekends, and order me around on phone calls. She also made nasty comments about my weight.

Jane: “You’re big for your race.”

The list of personal slights was so long that it filled three pages. I would talk back to her, and she did not like that, which provoked her more.

I only stayed because we needed to pay the bills. Finally, I had a mental breakdown on a Friday afternoon after she yelled at me for something trivial.

Jane: “You scheduled a meeting without including someone from my team!”

I didn’t know about that person. I was dealing with a family tragedy and couldn’t take it anymore. I told Gary about the situation with Jane, and he was sympathetic and not at all surprised, considering half her team had quit. He immediately offered to move me to a different team under him. I was thrilled.

Well, it turned out that going to the new team didn’t help. Jane continued to order me around from afar. When I ignored her emails, she came to my desk one day and started talking loudly.

Jane: “You’re not qualified for this role.”

Gary overheard and finally told her off, but the verbal abuse did not stop. After two months there, I abruptly wrote my resignation letter, stapled the list of Jane’s offensive comments to it, and CC’d everyone.

Gary offered a bunch of accommodations to try to keep me, but seeing how she was still provoking me from afar, I told him:

Me: “The only way for me to stay would be for her to go.”

He did not have the authority to let her go. Her manager was in a different country, and despite several HR complaints from at least five people, nothing was done. So, I left loudly and without shame, telling everyone exactly why I was leaving.

Times were very bad for three months. There were nights when we would eat slices of bread just so we could pay the mortgage and emergency expenses from a health crisis and a funeral. Even after my husband found a job, we were still catching up on bills, and we still are.

I spent months applying to five to ten roles per day, sometimes over twenty. Last month, I saw a public memo about a bigshot from a former company joining the company I had just left. I used to work closely with this guy, so I texted him.

Me: “Congrats. Let me know if you need any insights on the new place.”

We had a quick call where I told him some of the ins and outs and where I thought they could innovate. After this call, he asked me to join the team as his Chief of Staff. I accepted.

Imagine Jane’s shock when we had our first all-hands call. All the VPs and above were asked to welcome the new bigshot in a giant conference room. In the bigshot’s speech, he breezed over the fact that I would be his Chief of Staff, along with a few other key names.

I now sat two levels above Jane, and apparently, within the three months I had not been there, the other half of her team had turned over. Every single person had left.

Gary was excited for me and said all sorts of nice things. However, Jane took the classless route and sent the bigshot an email saying that I was an unqualified idiot, that I used to work for her, that I had tried to get her fired, and that she suspected I had lied to get ahead. She didn’t even try to be fake-nice.

The bigshot forwarded me her email.

Bigshot: “What is this about?”

I was so nervous and excited! Little did Jane know, I had been a director at the bigshot’s competitor company and was already a level above her, so two levels wasn’t a big leap. I had also worked with him for five years.

I had an hour-long call with the bigshot and told him she was bad for the company culture and was a nasty person in general. However, the evidence he needed was Gary confirming that her whole team had turned over, my prior resignation letter, which was still sitting on my desktop when I logged in upon my return, and a few other nasty emails she had sent to her recent staff, which they were happy to share with us.

Bigshot fired Jane on Friday.

I’m a physician, and my coworker is also a physician. We practice nephrology somewhere in the USA. We make a lot of visits to eight dialysis centers located along an interstate, and it involves a lot of driving to see the patients while they’re on dialysis. The system we work for pays us mileage plus a good salary.

Originally, we submitted our own mileage reports, and they always approved them. We were not trying to maximize the money; we both just wanted about $1,000 a month to offset the wear and tear and gas costs on our vehicles. We were actually just photocopying the same report each month, signing it, and turning it in. The original company we worked for was totally fine with this arrangement.

Well, the system was bought by another system that apparently believes all its doctors are thieves. We were told we were scamming them and that, from then on, a middle manager would review our billing and use Google Maps to calculate our mileage each month. This person would make sure we adhered strictly to their reimbursement policy. It starts from the office each day, no matter where you actually started; it doesn’t pay you to drive somewhere if you didn’t see a patient and only went to sign forms for nurses; and there was other stupidity.

Now, I don’t like being accused of thievery, especially when I was sure we’d been underbilling for the mileage just to keep things easy and simple.

These people didn’t know me, but I had an Excel sheet containing all my patients, their clinics, and a schedule that allowed me to drive out and see them all using as little time and mileage as possible. It was really efficient.

So, I dove into their travel policy and reconfigured my schedule, not to minimize mileage, but, within their policy, to maximize it. As a bonus, the new schedule actually had me home each day for lunch on the days I did dialysis rounds, so it saved me a little money and improved my mood.

For example, since they started and ended the mileage at the office no matter where I actually began and finished, I started my day at the clinic close to my house but far from the office. I ended my day at the one on the other side of town by my girlfriend’s house, where I’d usually hang out after work anyway. Midday, I’d go home for lunch, get a nap or a nooner, and then see a couple of people in town so I’d get paid to drive back. Then, I’d head out for the regular visits scheduled for that day.

Altogether, my average mileage, far from being lower as they expected, was actually 90% greater. On top of this, they were paying a middle manager to take a deep dive into all our billing, examine the locations, and compile the reports. She said that just processing the two of ours took almost eight hours; an expense they never had before!

I used to work as a supervisor of a security team at a large industrial facility. I had a good relationship with the manager (we will call him Dave) until he appointed his friend as a middle manager (we will call him Steve) between the supervisors and himself.

I did not have a good relationship with Steve at all, and suddenly, Dave started rejecting ideas, suggestions, and requests out of hand. The friendly guy I used to sit down and chat with regularly became standoffish and outwardly hostile at times.

The staff all noticed this as well and would frequently comment that they didn’t know what I’d done to Dave and Steve, but it was clear that I was being “bullied” all of a sudden.

It’s entirely fair to say that I couldn’t do right for doing wrong, and every little thing I did or did not do resulted in a lengthy email conversation with Dave and Steve. There is a lot I could add to this, but for the sake of brevity, I’m going to move on to the point of my story.

The site we had to patrol was about five square miles, so vehicles were provided to allow us to patrol effectively and carry equipment and personnel to the required locations.

Part of my duties at the start of each shift was ensuring that the vehicles had not been damaged during the previous shift and that all vehicles contained the required levels of equipment.

The first patrol went out the moment our shift started, and as this was a regulatory requirement, it could not be delayed or skipped.

This was the start of a night shift, so it was dark. Very dark. We had Maglite torches, but after six years of use and abuse, they weren’t exactly brilliant.

I didn’t find any new damage, so I recorded that the vehicles were okay and noted their mileage on our check sheets.

The next night, when I came in, I had an email from Dave with a very angry tone, demanding to know why my team had damaged one of the vehicles during the previous night. Apparently, the vehicle looked as if it had been reversed into a wall.

I immediately went to check the vehicle and found… two extremely small divots in the rear bumper. I found them not by looking, but by feeling the bumper. I simply could not see them at all using the light available to me at the time.

I then asked everyone on my team, and all of them insisted that they had not even used the vehicle. I checked the vehicle check sheets and found, true to my team’s word, that the mileage on the day shift’s sheet was identical to the mileage on the night shift’s sheet.

The vehicle had not been moved.

I sent an email back to Dave informing him that the vehicle had not been used by us and apologised for missing the damage; however, the lighting had made it extremely difficult to spot.

This was my last shift before my scheduled days off, so I was certain that Steve would be pushing Dave to punish me for “something” by the time I returned.

Sure enough, on my first day back, I was summoned to Dave’s office for what we British politely refer to as a “b*llocking.”

Dave insisted that he could see the damage in the dark and could actually spot it from about ten metres away. For context, all of my guys had been shown the damage, and every one of them, without fail, had said, “Where?” when I pointed it out at close range.

Not only that, but there was now additional damage that I hadn’t spotted, and my team was supposedly responsible for that as well!

Luckily, my boss had included a photograph of the damage I had missed, such as a very light scratch.

For Dave and Steve, however, this was enough to justify being punitive towards me and my team. They told me that unless a culprit was found and named, I would be held personally responsible and would have to “pay the insurance excess to get it fixed.”

Dave also insisted that the lighting was more than sufficient to spot any damage to the vehicles.

I told Dave that this was ridiculous and that he couldn’t enforce financial penalties over damage to a vehicle that had, again, not been used by my team.

Dave was insistent, though:

Dave: “It is your job to report 100% of the damage on the vehicles, or you will be held responsible.”

At this point, something clicked in my mind. Luckily, Dave decided to back up his instruction with an email, which Steve was CC’d into.

The next shift, I refused to allow my team to use the vehicles until they had all been fully checked: inside, outside, underneath, mechanically, and for equipment levels.

Each vehicle took about two hours.

I photographed every single small bit of damage I found, no matter how insignificant it was or whether it had been reported previously. Remember, the instruction was to report 100% of the damage, not 100% of the unreported damage.

I sent it all in an email to Dave, with a text description of the nature and location of the damage for each photograph.

There were 162 photographs in total.

The first patrol could not be skipped, so I had to send one of my officers out on foot to patrol the site. This meant that the site patrol took nearly three hours, and he was not available to fulfil other duties afterward.

It’s worth noting at this point that my team also saw this as a direct attack on them, rather than just on me, so they were fully supportive of the measures I was taking.

This resulted in the site shift manager demanding answers. I was able to tell him about Dave’s instructions and explain why I was having to send officers out on foot.

I had (and still have) a great relationship with all of the site shift managers, so while he was frustrated, he understood the predicament I had been put in, especially when the instructions were shown to him in black and white.

This resulted in a financial penalty for my company.

Dave was off the next day, so I did the exact same thing again, with the exact same number of photographs, all taken again during a fresh inspection.

On the night shift after that, I came to work to find Dave waiting in the office for me. I was allowed to finish my handover with the off-going supervisor before Dave shut the door and refused to let me leave before discussing why he had received multiple emails totalling over 800 MB (I hadn’t compressed or reduced the size of the photographs) how the company had received a financial penalty, and why the regulatory body was coming to speak to him.

I reminded him that he had demanded that I report 100% of the damage to the vehicles and that this had taken time. I couldn’t allow any member of the team to use any vehicle until it had been checked, as there could be financial penalties involved.

Frustrated, Dave pointed out that many of the pictures were too dark to see anything anyway, so most of the photographs were pointless.

I apologised for the lighting but pointed out that he had said the lighting was more than sufficient to spot any damage, so he should be able to see the damage I had reported easily.

Dave insisted that I had deliberately misinterpreted his instructions and that he would be taking the matter to a disciplinary.

I informed him that this was no problem. If he could just let me know the date and time, I would inform my union representative, who had been fully apprised of the situation and was 100% behind my suggestion that I report every single tiny bit of damage to the vehicles.

Dave was ultimately left with no choice but to drop any attempt to discipline me, and he left Steve to deal with me from that point on.

Steve then took up the role of disciplinarian for the next three months, until I left the job. However, every time he tried, I was able to shut it all down due to briefings with my union representative.

I left the job in February 2019 and still, to this day, receive complaints from members of staff who remained there about how terrible the job has become because of Dave and Steve.

The company sends a shiny HR email, with the subject line in all caps: USE IT OR LOSE IT. We had to burn our remaining PTO by the 30th, or it evaporates into the sun.

The same day, my manager announces that due to quarter-end, “no one can take time off until the 1st.” I ask how to reconcile that; he shrugs and says to talk to HR. HR says talk to your manager. Cute loop.

So, I opened the handbook, because I am a petty librarian when annoyed. Page fourteen has this little sentence I never noticed. “PTO requests not explicitly denied in writing within forty-eight business hours are considered approved.” There is also a note that partial-day PTO is allowed in one-hour blocks. Thank you, legal team.

I submitted ten separate requests. Two hours every morning next week, two hours every afternoon the week after, a random Friday, 3 PM to 5 PM to watch a plumber, and one full day to visit my mom.

I sent the requests in our HR portal, which auto-emails the manager and CCs a shared mailbox nobody watches. Then I went back to my tasks and set reminders. Forty-eight business hours pass. No denial. The portal changes each request to approved, green checkmark, confetti GIF.

Monday comes, and at 9.58 I put a cheerful note in the team chat. “Heading out, see you at noon.” Manager pings me to hop on a client call; I reply with a screenshot of the policy and the portal approval. Silence. Then three dots typing, then nothing.

By Wednesday, our calendar looks like cheese. Half the team remembers they also have PTO sitting around and start filing it in little blocks. Meetings keep colliding with green bars.

Finance realizes that if we do not use the days now, they will be paid out at separation later, which they hate. HR writes a new post saying we should “coordinate,” but that approvals already granted stand.

My manager calls a huddle to ask why productivity has dipped. I say we are following HR’s instruction to use PTO. He sighs and says he never thought anyone would actually read the handbook.

I used every hour, took my mom to lunch, and my plumber fixed the cursed sink at 3.40 while I drank tea.

Next week, a new policy appears. PTO must be requested in full-day increments during quarter-end, and managers must respond within twenty-four hours. Thanks for clarifying, truly.

For context, I’m working as an engineer, and all my work is done on my work laptop. Because of this, teleworking is pretty much the way of working ever since the pandemic was a thing.

However, we got a new manager who decided that we had to have a mandatory team day at the office once a week. Basically, he wanted everyone on the team to be present that day. I don’t like the idea of mandatory presence at the office, but whatever; I usually go once a week to the office anyway for various reasons.

Fast forward to today. It’s our mandatory day, and I had been coughing since last night. So, I decided not to risk it and stay at home. I had the symptoms of some illness but felt like I could still work. Besides that, I don’t want half the office to be sick as well by next week and blame me for it.

So, I sent my manager an email to inform him that I wouldn’t be present at the office. Not much later, I got a reply back stating that “agreements must be respected” and that “mandatory days can’t be missed without a doctor’s note.”

So that’s exactly what I did. I went to the doctor the same day, and she gave me three sick days off. I took a picture of the doctor’s note and sent it to HR with the manager CC’d in. I still don’t understand why he made it such a big deal that I wanted to work from home for my own and my team’s well-being, but hey, three days off!