I work at a chain sandwich shop. Our jerk manager fires a coworker for putting too many olives on sandwiches. How many slices did he put? Like twenty on a foot-long sandwich. How many is the correct number? Five for a foot-long and three for a half-size sandwich.

This leaves just [Manager] and me in the store. He then goes on break for twenty-five minutes while I get slammed with a bunch of customers.

Me: “Can I get some help, please?”

Manager: “No. On break.”

I go on break later that day, and [Manager] gets slammed.

Manager: “[My Name], come back to work.”

Me: “No, on break.”

At the end of my shift, [Manager] informed me that I was being written up. I walked out. I got a call a week later from the owner begging me to come back. Seven of the ten employees had been fired or made to quit by that moron.

I go to the local chain thrift store frequently to donate stuff. I usually just drop things off at the counter and never bother asking for the donation receipt they offer.

One day when I go in, there is a table near the entrance with paperback books on it, and the sign says, “Special: five books for $1.00”. I rummage through it but can only find four books that interest me. I take them up to the checkout desk, fully intending to pay $1.00 for only four books, even if she rings it up as 80 cents.

Cashier: “That’ll be $4.00.”

Me: *Pointing* “The sign on the table says they’re five for a dollar.”

She informs me, in a voice that a high school librarian would be proud of:

Cashier: “They’re a dollar each. You have to buy five to get the special price.”

So, I simply walk over to the table and select a book at random to add to the four already on the counter. I am holding a dollar bill, but she informs me:

Cashier: “It’ll be $1.06 because of the state tax.”

I’m now positive she is a retired high school librarian.

There is a penny jar next to her, but she doesn’t offer to pull six cents out for me.

I probably have six cents in my pocket or another dollar bill, but I don’t even check. I take a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and hand it to her. She asks me, escalating to a world-class high school librarian voice:

Cashier: “Don’t you have anything smaller?”

Me: “No, ma’am.”

She gives me $18.94 back in change and then turns away from me, not even offering to put my purchase in one of the paper bags that are stacked behind her.

I immediately place the fifth book on the counter.

Me: “I’d like to donate this book. And can I get a donation receipt, please?”

She has no choice but to completely fill out the receipt for my donation and sign it. She values the donation at 20 cents, and I don’t bother to point out that the thrift shop values the books at $1.00. After she gives me the receipt:

Me: *Very nicely* “Could I have one of those paper bags to carry my books out, please?”

She gave me a withering look, so I just told her to have a nice day and walked out with the four paperbacks.

I work for a government department. We have offices and locations all over the state. I’m based out of a city that’s about a two-and-a-bit-hour train ride to our head office.

At the time, I was working on a team that had members working remotely all across the state, looking after policy, process, and quality assurance. Our old manager had gone and gotten himself promoted for being genuinely brilliant at his role. So, our new manager was hired in from the glorious world of banking, and he was here to “whip us lazy public servants into shape”.

A few days after he began his role, [New Manager] called us all to a teleconference to inform us that he wanted all of us to be at the head office at 8:00 am the next morning for an all-day in-person team meeting. He wanted to see us in “meat space” to “size us up”, understand what we were doing, and see where we “weren’t keeping up with the private sector”.

As I mentioned, due to the nature of the work we were doing, we were all across the state. In-person whole-team meetings were rare, and if they occurred at all, they were booked weeks in advance. We were all adept at video-conferencing LONG before the global health crisis.

Some of us tried to tell our new high-flyer manager that almost none of us were in the same city as he was and that being there on such short notice would mean travel expenses, meal allowances, overtime, etc. He didn’t seem to care, and he told us in no uncertain terms to “just be at the head office tomorrow at 8:00 am” before abruptly hanging up.

Now, I should explain something. I’m one of a handful of union delegates in our department. I know our rules back to front, specifically the sections dealing with travel, allowances, and overtime. So, I engaged malicious compliance mode. If [New Manager] wanted us there, fine, but it’d cost him.

I quickly went about emailing my team what [New Manager] had done by requiring us to be in the head office at 8:00 am and what we had to do.

Because we’d have to travel outside of our normal work hours, our workday clock started ticking the moment we left our homes and only stopped once we got home.

Some of our team travelled overnight. They were entitled to overtime to travel, a dinner allowance, and accommodation for the night, and the same for their return home. As someone travelling in the morning before 7:00 am, I was entitled to a breakfast allowance, lunch allowance, and if I got home after 9:00 pm, a dinner allowance also.

I left my house at 5:00 am to catch the only train that would get me there in time. The train was running slightly behind, but I made it in time. So, the first three hours of my workday were down and I’d done no work.

After a brief period of us introducing ourselves to [New Manager], he proceeded to spend the next four hours telling us about all of the things he’d done at the bank, how he’d made so much money for them, where they’d sent him as a holiday bonus, how we were all stuck in the past in the public service, how the work he’d seen wasn’t up to “private sector standards”, etc. He had all the cocksureness of a finance bro who had always failed upward because others had picked up his slack.

By 3:00 pm, my entire team was in overtime pay territory, and [New Manager] was just warming up with his non-charm offensive. Another three hours went by with [New Manager] verbally patting himself on his back, deeply in love with hearing his own voice, but all I heard was, “Cha-ching! Cha-ching!”

[New Manager] decided that 5:00 pm was a good time to finish up. He stopped mid-sentence, looked at his watch, unceremoniously said, “That’s all for today. Go home now,” and walked out.

After I and a few others gave awkward shrugs to each other, we all packed up and started to make our separate ways home after doing no work all day.

I got to the train station pretty quickly and saw that a train was leaving soon that would get me home around 8:00 pm… or I could catch the all-stations train and get home closer to 9:30 pm. You know what? No matter how fast I could run, I just couldn’t catch that earlier train. D***, I’d just have to catch that all-stations train and be on the clock for another hour and a half, plus have my dinner paid for. Such rotten luck!

I submitted my claims the next day: four and half hours at double rate, my train tickets, my taxi fares to and from the train station, and my breakfast, lunch, and dinner allowances. For me alone, it was close to a $500 expense claim. The rest of my team followed suit and ensured that they claimed everything, too.

[New Manager] tried to fight us on approval for the claims, but he quickly learned that, unlike in the world of banking, most public servants are union, and we’d raise living h*** if he denied our guaranteed allowances.

His all-day [New Manager]-fest symposium blew a good $6,000 hole in his budget. Needless to say, while [New Manager] was our manager, he never required us to attend an in-person meeting again — video-conferencing was just fine.

He only lasted six months before “leaving for new opportunities”.

He just went back to his old job at the bank. Guess he was the one who couldn’t keep up.

I work at a chick hatchery and incubation facility. On a Friday, my boss pulls me aside.

Boss: “You’re on holiday starting next week, for two weeks.”

Me: “Erm… I wanted to use those two weeks during summer with my family.”

Boss: “Nope, it has to be done now as it will be too busy then.”

My brother has been inviting me to his workplace, so I start the following Monday. Two weeks later, I call on Sunday to talk to [Boss].

Me: “I’ve found another job paying 40% more for fewer hours. I’m not coming in ever again.”

Boss: “But you gave us no notice!”

Me: “You got the same notice I got for my holidays.”

One month was the required notice I was supposed to give.

During my interview, [Boss] had told me the starting and finish times. So far, so good. Then, when I was signing the contract, the daily hours were less by an hour and thirty minutes.

[Boss] was using a government incentive for new businesses where he’d get a contribution toward the employee’s wages if they worked less than eight hours per day. Well, he was screwing us, and I kept records.

When legal threats came saying I owed the company a month’s wages, I replied with records showing they owed me that much plus two weeks. I never heard from them again.

My bookkeeper reminded me of this now that she’s retiring; I’d forgotten how she came to work for us. She’s been our “Mother Hen” and office fixture for so long!

Close to twenty-five years ago, I was estimating and quoting a metalworking factory expansion job about 100 miles from my home and shop.

The owner was berating a fairly young bookkeeper about how a computer glitch was her fault, and he was using completely inappropriate language.

When we went to the job site, he explained how she “only” had a local college degree in bookkeeping and business, and if he didn’t keep her on the back foot, she would want a raise and benefits. He mentioned that she had to keep the job because she was a single mother.

We cut steel and installed it, so I saw this girl cry, work through lunch, be the last one to leave her department, etc.

I talked it over with my then-girlfriend (now wife) about poaching this trained girl since we desperately needed a resident bookkeeper/comptroller — like, needed one five years ago — but if I did, it would burn bridges with a customer.

I don’t think I did anything that wasn’t goal-oriented for me and my business. We had serious issues with taxes and compliance at the time.

My girlfriend went to the job site with me, sat with this young lady, and slipped her a business card, not knowing if she would want to move from a city to the country and such.

[Bookkeeper] had worked there for five years, got no raises or benefits in those five years, and desperately wanted another job, but knew the boss/owner would kill her job reference since she had seen him do it before.

My girlfriend rented [Bookkeeper] a little place for cheap. She started with us and untangled the last three years of mess in about three months. For the first time ever, the monthly reports were on time and the tax paperwork was done on time. She even managed to talk the IRS/state revenue out of most of the fines and penalties.

She quickly became “My Girl Friday” since she killed problems in minutes that had plagued me for years, thanks to actual education and experience, along with being sharp as a tack.

[Bookkeeper] met her husband here and had her wedding lakeside here, they built a house here, they had two more kids here, and she spent twenty-five years working here. She’s been the High-Grand poo-bah of the office! Killer of paperwork dragons!

She and my wife have become great friends since they both lived “city” lives at one point and we are all country folks.

I kept a professional distance, so I was quite surprised when [Bookkeeper] broke down in tears at her retirement get-together, saying she owed her entire life to us.

Well, no, she doesn’t. I was more than willing to throw money at the paperwork monsters to get the tax/compliance people off my a**! She saved the company! She doesn’t “owe” us anything; she earned everything and she worked hard to get it. It’s my good fortune to have been in the right place at the right time, and the right time in her life. I’m sure with her intelligence and willingness to work and learn, she would have done well once she got away from that A-hole.

I knew the customer I poached [Bookkeeper] from got into all kinds of tax, employee pay, and state/federal regulation problems about six months after she left. But I just found out that when [Bookkeeper] was working with the state and federal tax people, she leaked about his shady dealings, when we dealt with labor relations people she leaked about his shady dealings, and so on. She knew exactly where to point the investigators, and they didn’t disappoint.

I’ve seen her use the innocent lines, “My last employer did this this way,” or, “My boss is going to be very angry that I messed this up,” when talking people out of fines or penalties from back when she didn’t even work here! So, thinking about it, I know how she worked it into conversation without actually “snitching”, and they ran off, foaming at the mouth, and left us alone.

Sly girl! But our sly girl!

[Bookkeeper]’s former boss lost the company within eighteen months of her leaving. It’s still there and producing, just under entirely new owners and management.