They Overworked Her To The Point Of No Return
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“I worked at a retirement home that was severely understaffed. I was doing the work of three people while working 12-hour shifts with a thirty-minute break.
We were so short-handed that I didn’t have time to take out the garbage. My main duties were prep, setting tables, washing a ton of dishes, and helping the chef. It was impossible for me to do all of this by myself. The other guy in my position that worked opposite shift did nothing, so I had to pick up his slack, too.
The final straw for me was when I had fallen too far behind work because I was doing too much and couldn’t lift the garbage bag to take out the trash after spending three hours washing dishes. It had gotten so heavy, I couldn’t lift it.
After a few attempts, I asked my manager if there was a guy available to help me. My manager gave me a dirty look and said that it was my job to take out the trash. I was livid. It was my job, but unlike the idiots he hired, I actually did my job so that nobody would have to pick up my slack.
This was the only time I asked for help. It was the only time I couldn’t do something on my own. I complained to management about my co-workers not doing their job and the issue was never resolved. His snide comment pushed me over the edge. I didn’t show up for my next shift.
Forget that place.”
He Did What He Needed To Do, But It Wasn’t Appreciated
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“I had worked for an assisted living facility for almost three years. I was a PCA/Med tech/Mentor and also in charge of the activities calendar. I was never written up or reprimanded, and was considered a leader of my shift. About a year ago, I witnessed a supervisor physically assault one of our residents and reported it, and THEY decided to hold off on reporting the incident to The Office of Aging (reports have to be made within 24 hours in my state) because the supervisor in question was a personal friend of management. I say that because this person got away with a lot of terrible things prior to this so that became general opinion among us all.
They grilled me for hours, tried to twist my story and not quite demanded I change it, but I remained firm. Long story short, the supervisor was fired and the facility received violations for failure to report abuse. After this, I was treated like absolute garbage. I was written up seven times in two months for things I didn’t do, or things that didn’t necessarily warrant a write-up. My concerns about residents and staff weren’t taken seriously. I was told I was easily replaceable and on thin ice for my ‘poor work ethic’ all while doing four people’s jobs on a day to day basis. They made it very very clear they were trying to push me out.
What was the final straw? Throughout all that I stayed. Throughout all the bullying and the harassment, I stayed devoted to the company. Christmas time rolled around and right before that, I had gotten a second job that was also healthcare related, but not a competing facility. I expressed my plans to work part-time for them and full time for this other facility. Well, during Christmas time, we all got a nice bonus as a thank you for all of our hard work and I was basically denied that bonus and asked to put 4 weeks notice in because I was ‘not allowed’ to work for any other healthcare facility and those who put in notice to leave before January are no longer eligible for bonuses.
When I questioned them about this nonexistent policy, the PRESIDENT of the company told me he ‘just changed it’ and asked that I work those last four weeks until they could find a replacement for me since I had multiple roles (and me suddenly leaving would mess with THEM). I never showed up the next day and when they called me, I told them to go off themselves and never looked back. It wasn’t about the monetary bonus, it was the simple fact that I worked so hard for them, put in so much time, put up with abuse for doing the right thing, just to be told I didn’t deserve the bonus because of a made up policy and their clear vendetta against me.”
She Drove Away The Hardest Worker
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“My manager told me I don’t take my job seriously and didn’t work enough hours. She said that after I had covered two shifts for a ‘sick’ coworker, ALONE, while we normally have to do those shifts with two or three people. I worked 12 hours straight even though I’m legally not allowed. I was one of the best workers in that stupid store, always made a tight schedule for myself and then getting ahead of that schedule at least half an hour. I always helped co-workers, even though they never returned the favor. The previous manager thought I did great and promoted me. But the new one demoted me immediately just because I didn’t let her talk to me like I was a child. I’m getting angry all over again.
Anyway, I went up to her at the end of a very exhausting shift, telling her I had to leave five minutes early because I had to catch the bus. (I normally don’t take the bus, but my bike was busted). That’s when she started with her regular routine of patronizing me and telling me I can’t just ‘abandon my coworkers.’
I looked right into her eyes and said, completely straight-faced, ‘I resign, I’m done with your incompetence as a manager and a human being. You’re working this store and everyone working in it into the ground. I’m going home, see if you can find ANYONE who will cover my shift tomorrow. You’ll find that I’m the one who always covered shifts if necessary. You’re not gonna last another week.’ She screamed after me that I couldn’t just talk to her like that. Whatever.
I got a call two weeks later. Apparently, she had quit her job because 50% of the staff resigned their jobs after I did. The old manager came back to keep the store running while they were looking for a new one. He asked me if I would PLEASE come back. I did, but only until the end of my contract.”
He Was Great At His Job, So He Was Punished For It
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“I sold cars from 2011-2013.
I was pretty good at my job. I had six different 20+ car months and averaged 17 cars a month. I attributed these stats to the fact that I truly took care of the customer and knew my stuff inside and out. I never pitched a vehicle that wouldn’t suit their wants and needs, always fought for a deal that was fair to them and the dealership, was courteous of their time, etc.
The thing that really made me stand out was that I devoted A LOT of time into product knowledge. No one in my dealership knew the cars like me; specifically, no one knew the features or how to operate them. My customer surveys were almost always perfect. I spent as long as it took after they picked up the car to show them how all the tech features in the car worked. I got their phone paired, set up their navigation, door and seat settings. Everything.
My dealership took notice of this around the same time as the industry did. At the time, not many salespeople really cared about post-delivery customer service. I always knew that’s what would bring a customer back to buy another car, or at least give me a referral. My dealership figured that out, too.
So they started something called the ‘Technology Clinic’ that would be held every other Saturday morning at 9:30 am. I was volunteered by my Sales Manager. I would not be paid for it, even though my job was to sell cars and that’s how I made money.
Being the (young) company guy that I was, and being someone who truly believes in giving the highest quality customer service possible, I begrudgingly agreed. Not that my agreement mattered.
Here’s the thing about the car business. Saturday is the busiest day of the week. I always sold at least one car on Saturday and would often sell as many as three, just off of fresh customers. Granted, I worked at a huge dealership.
This clinic would often take up my entire morning, so I was missing out on a lot of customers. Over time, I came to realize that the other salespeople were turning and burning their customers; as soon as the deal was done, they wouldn’t go over the car’s features per the customer’s request. Instead, they would tell them about this nice little ‘Technology Clinic’ we had.
So basically, I would spend my entire Saturday doing other people’s jobs, for customers that were not mine, on deals I didn’t get paid on, during a clinic that I wasn’t being compensated for. On top of that, this clinic was supposed to be more in-depth knowledge of the features, not basic that should’ve been done at the time the car was sold.
So after two months of doing this clinic, having no support from managers to get people to do their jobs instead of pawning it off on me, I walked into the clinic and hit my breaking point.
There were 35 customers there that day when the clinic was supposed to only have 7-8 max. I spent my entire day doing other people’s jobs and giving these customers the basic service they were entitled to.
That day, the dealership sold 45 cars, 45 customers I missed out on. Everyone but the one new guy got a sale and I heard multiple salespeople telling customers about the Technology Clinic. Meaning two weeks from then, I’d likely have another 35 or more people in my clinic.
I waited until I had helped every single customer. They showed up to the clinic, it wasn’t their fault so I didn’t take it out on them. When they left, I went to my desk, typed up a letter of resignation and went to the GM’s office
I went to the GM and told him everything I’ve said here. I was going to give him a chance to make it right because, frankly, I made a load of money there until the clinic. He responded with, ‘We’ll talk to the staff and see what we can do.’
I responded, ‘No you won’t, so here’s what I can do.’ I put the resignation letter on his desk, shook his hand and walked out.
The following Tuesday, while leaving a meeting with their biggest competitor, I got a call from the owner of the dealership I just left. He offered me $200 per clinic I had already done, and for every clinic in the future, as well as giving me a written promise to make me a finance manager within six months. So I went back.
I stayed there for another year and a half until being a finance manager left me completely disillusioned with the car business.”
No One Should Have Been Breathing That In
“I worked in entry-level pipe services. At first, they had me rolling pipe and unscrewing thread protectors, which wasn’t so bad. After about a month, they told me I was going to get trained on scrubbing the threads clean for inspection, which involves something they called ‘solvent.’ I asked for the MSDS sheet since they didn’t give me a respirator and nobody else wore them ever. Straight out of the sheet: ‘Must use a respirator when working with any amount of this chemical.’
It’s a carcinogen; I was shocked.
I asked for a respirator and they said that, ‘they ventilate that chemical properly since it’s done outside and I don’t need one.’ Ok, cool. I went to Lowes after work and got a $30 one out of pocket because I’m not gonna sit over a bucket of solvent that’s evaporating in the sun, getting all over me and in my lungs without one.
I showed up to work the next day and just wore it constantly while I was getting trained on cleaning threads with solvent. I was immediately called up into the office of the big boss. I was asked why I was wearing it and I said, ‘It’s because the MSDS sheet says I am required to use a respirator when working with this chemical in any capacity.’
They told me I couldn’t wear it, and I kid you not, this is what he said: ‘If you wear one of those respirators, the other workers will wonder why they’re not wearing them, and in order to work in this warehouse with a respirator, we have to train every employee and test them to make sure that their lungs are good enough to breathe properly with a respirator on while exerting themselves.’
I walked out, grabbed my stuff, and just left. The warehouse was blasting mariachi music constantly and a good two-thirds of the workers were Latino guys who spoke pretty poor English. I was a white dude who had a high school diploma at the time, so I was fortunate enough that I could just walk away and find a different job. I feel bad for those guys sometimes.”
“I worked with a guy called Andrew at McDonald’s and he had worked there 5+ years before quitting. One day he got into an argument with a manager over whether they should clean the ice cream machine so we could serve ice cream or leave it off and say it’s broke and leave it until overnights could do it. Argument snowballed and eventually, the manager yelled ‘I’m a manager, do what I say! You’re too dumb to even be a crew trainer!’ Which wasn’t true, he was in university and was a month away from graduation. This manager was hired about 7 months prior, and it being McDonald’s, we didn’t have many good days but that day was Andrew’s last straw.
He calmed down, walked to the back to where we left our stock, then went to the bathroom. Moments later, Andrew walked out butt-naked wearing nothing but his no slip shoes and his car keys in his hand with his other hand holding a kid-sized cup over his genitals. He flipped her off and walked out the front door, and drove home.
I was impressed he stood up for himself but man come on… at least use a medium cup. Give us the sense of illusion.”
It Was Way Too Much Work For One Guy
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“I was working a job as maintenance/janitor. Each day, you stripped and waxed a section of floor. You had to use a scrubber to scrub the entire floor and then you had to buff the entire floor. You were also supposed to be collecting around 40 garbages and clean four stockrooms, four bathrooms, the break room and make a bailout of plastic/cardboard as needed using a compactor.
This was a 4-person job. A man-hour breakdown of each job worked out to four people. So one day, we had three people call in sick and management didn’t call in others.
So, of course, there I was, racing around and prioritizing these garbages to make sure each of the fullest ones were emptied. I tried to make the place look halfway decent.
I told management this was unacceptable to squash any notions of them doing it again. I told them to either pull in other people or call the backups, either way, it should never be a solo venture.
Fast forward a week. We had five people scheduled. Yay! That meant we could do some of the other projects beyond normal cleaning. But they, instead, pulled off ALL of the people to do other things not related to the job.
Being a fairly vindictive person, I left and told nobody so that they would be lost when the entire store looked like crap. I heard later my managers actually got into some serious trouble over that because they tried to explain that the guy who was supposed to clean the store left mid-shift. And their bosses were like, what about the three other people supposed to be doing maintenance cleaning?”
He Had A General Concern For His Safety
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“When I was in between jobs, I applied to work a construction job that needed harness trained people. I was just coming off working as a solar installer, so I figured I’d give it a shot. The first day on the job, they took me up to the top of their scaffolding section to clamp down beams. No biggie. I asked where their walk boards or scaffolding walks were for this floor because all the other floors had walkways but this one was just a 1-inch beam, 3-foot gap, 1-inch beam all the way across, 100+ feet in the air. They told me they don’t have any.
Ok… I’ll deal.
After a few hours of grueling work, I depleted my gallon jug of water and was getting dizzy. I called down to the elevator operator to bring me down. Without missing a beat, he shouted, ‘Climb,’ and walked off to smoke. I climbed down all 14 or so stories on angled beams with no harness while bordering on heat exhaustion. I walked up to the foreman, told him he was going to kill someone and it wasn’t going to be me, and left.”
His Coworkers Were A Bunch Of Idiots
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“I worked as a foundation repair guy for houses. We did hand excavation with shovels. When people’s basement walls would leak or lose some structural integrity, they would call us. We would dig out the wall, about 12 feet deep and 2 feet wide. Sometimes the trench would go around half the house.
Once you start getting about 4 feet deep, you have to start bracing the wall so it won’t collapse on you. Now, keep in mind, there was a lot of loose dirt since we were digging by hand. You can’t just pile it up on the customer’s grass, so you lay down plywood in the center of the yard and pile there. You dig a wheelbarrow worth of dirt, then go dump it on the plywood.
Soon, you have the throw dirt above your head to get it out of the hole. While doing this, there are blocks everywhere so you have to carefully maneuver your shovel so you don’t hit one and spill the dirt. We were doing this in a two-foot wide trench, too. I’m not a small guy, so it was very tight. About 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 feet, you’re throwing dirt as high as you can, climbing out the trench, empty the wheelbarrow, climb back down, and repeat for 12 hours.
I worked there for about a month, just hating my life. Everyone I worked with seemed to have a problem with something. As the ‘new guy,’ they always chirped at me, as it goes anywhere, so that’s fine. One day, however, they kept greasing up my wheelbarrow handles with mud and whatever else, so my grip when digging and moving dirt was horrible. I kept spilling and making messes that I had to clean up.
I quit that day and told my boss he hired a bunch of idiots. I really needed this job so it was stupid to rage quit. Luckily, I landed another job quickly. There is a fine line between fun games and being tools. They didn’t know me well enough to be pulling that kind of trash.”
He Figured Out How To Use Their Bad Policies Against Them
“I worked for a ‘landscaping company’ that operated more like a pyramid scheme. I only worked for them for like a week. They mostly targeted students and immigrants who needed work in the summertime and would take anything, with promises like, ‘Make your own schedule,’ ‘Make $X-Y an hour!’ and ‘Work outside!’ They target desperate people, those without proper documentation even, and they paid cash so everything was under the table and I’m 100% certain they were not paying taxes.
I was stupid enough to go for it when I was 18. I went to the info seminar and instantly got terrible vibes, but I figured, eh, I don’t have anything else going on, so why not.
They picked us up in a cube van – like 15 people crammed in without seatbelts – and drove us to a location. Then they gave us aeration machines and we went around trying to sell plans and aerating lawns. Basically, whatever you sold, you would get to keep 10% of the money and the company kept the other 90%. You also had to work like a 15 hour day in the hot summer sun, no supervision all day, no bathroom breaks or anything unless you happened to find a bathroom to use.
Anyway, I did this for a few days and the pay was miserable. Let’s say you collect $1,200 – well, you get to keep $120. $120 / 15 hours is $8/hr and at the time, the minimum wage was higher than that. Well, sometimes I got a little higher than that, but much of the time it was around minimum wage or lower.
The second day, they drove us to another city an hour away. It was pouring rain all day, nobody wanted to buy anything (I don’t blame them) and nobody wanted their lawn aerated in the pouring rain, so I ended up with like nothing at the end of the day and it was miserable.
The next time I came back, we drove out to some suburb, and the guy gave me this talk about how last time I didn’t make enough money and I needed to pick up the slack this time because these machines are expensive, I’m clearly not trying hard enough, etc. Well, that set me right off.
So that day, I took the aeration machine out and busted my whole butt. Did my best to sell, did the aerations where I could, worked up a sweat. I’d collected $1,800 by the end of the day. At the end of the day, you would wait at a certain spot and they’d pick you up with the machine and bring you back to the station so you could deliver the money and get your cut.
So, instead of going to the pickup spot, I went to the grocery store and bought a bag of sugar and poured it in the gas tank of the aeration machine and left it by the side of the road. Then I took the bus home and pocketed all the money. I ignored all their phone calls, and eventually, they stopped calling. They never took identification or social insurance numbers or anything, so they had no real proof I even worked for them in the first place.
This was about 10 years ago now and my only regret is that I didn’t do that the first day.”
He Was Sick Of Dealing With His Boss’s Attitude And Addiction
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“I worked on a farm throughout high school for a very wealthy couple. The husband was a successful commercial real estate agent and the wife trained dogs to do hunt and field tests. I primarily worked for the wife, assisting in training the dogs, but as it was a farm, I did various things for the husband as well.
The husband was a raging drinker who would get really upset if you wouldn’t share a drink with him when offered. When his wife was out of town participating in competitions with the dogs, I would have to drive over to the farm multiple times a day to feed the horses, clean out their stalls, etc., and I would often run into him, but I tried to avoid it when possible because he made me uncomfortable.
I was like 17 and it was summer, so I accidentally slept through my 6 am alarms one morning and didn’t get to the farm until around 8 to feed the horses and clean out their stalls. Not like it mattered, horses can’t tell time. The husband was there and had already been drinking as I could smell it on him, and he started laying into me about being so late.
He told me I was a poor, white trash, piece of crap and if my parents let me oversleep for my job, then they’re even worse white trash pieces of crap and I won’t ever amount to anything just like them, yada yada. I told him he could take care of the horse crap himself and that I quit. As I was leaving, he was yelling at the top of his lungs that he would find me and kill me. I never went back.”
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