For years they were the star employee and felt like they were truly making a difference in the world. Then one day they realized just how crooked their company, or boss, were and they were ready to just take the money and run.
His Cancer Was An Inconvenience For THEM
“When the owners and GM looked at my prostate cancer as a major inconvenience – for them. When they complained about my being out for cancer surgery – and I’d been out less than two weeks. When I was back after two weeks wearing a freaking diaper because I was afraid of losing my job because of cancer. Then they expected me to be concerned whether they made a profit. Yeah, that’s likely the moment I stopped caring.”
His Phone Was Officially Off The Hook After His Boss Pulled This Stunt
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“It was a three day weekend (Sat-Sun-Mon), and I was already scheduled to work Sun and Mon.
On Saturday, I got a call from work, they needed my (telephonic) help with something. That didn’t require me to go back in, I handled it from home and it took about 30 minutes.
I added 30 minutes to my timecard for the work on Saturday (you know, my only day off), and on Tuesday (after his three day weekend), my boss tells me the Saturday overtime (30 minutes) was disapproved because I didn’t actually ‘come in.’
So I just stopped answering my cell phone outside of work hours.”
Cheaters Never Win
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“When I was a cashier at Borders, we had to keep a certain percentage of Borders Rewards transactions. I was good at my job and was able to get in the high 80s, by being a good salesman and convincing them to get it.
There was another guy I worked with who kept his percentage up by cheating. He would just swipe a card and put it into people’s bags without saying anything about it. Eventually, he got caught and almost fired, but they settled on putting him on probation and having a manager watch his transactions closely.
Fast forward about a month and I find out he’s getting promoted to work on the floor with all the movies and music. I could not believe they promoted him after all that crap and looked me over, someone that was a hard worker that did a really good job and often would have people compliment me to my managers.
After that, I stopped caring as much, still kept my numbers up, but not as high as I used to. Ended up getting fired from there a couple months later because the guy that was covering my shift while I was on vacation was fired, so I had too many unexcused absences. I’m glad that company tanked.”
These Employees Were Treated Like Kings And Queens Until One Day…
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“My first year at Starbucks we all got a couple hundred bucks as a Christmas bonus and then later that year exceeded our sales goals and got enough money to take the whole store staff to dinner.
The next year, no bonus, no store party/dinner but they did give one person $20 for exceeding the goals.
The year after that they gave one person (out of about 15 stores) a $5 Starbucks gift card for selling some obscene amount of whole bean coffee.
The next year the company had it’s most profitable holiday in years, something like 8% growth (which is huge for companies) and we got an email from the CEO saying thanks. Then later that year they launched a new product which required a ton of extra work and was a giant pain in the butt to make, we still exceeded goals and they sent out a box of those awful orange jelly candies to the stores. The worst part was there were like 5 candies in the box and most stores employ 15+ staff, so there weren’t even enough to give everyone in the store a piece of junk candy. It was such a slap in the face when we’d been working our butts off to grow sales with fewer hours of labor and they sent that.”
He Wanted To Make A Difference, But His Job Cared More About The Money
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“I used to work as a recruiter for a for-profit school. There were thousands of us with the title of ‘assistant director of admissions.’ We were basically glorified telemarketers. I took the job because the pay was decent and I truly believe that everyone should get an education who wants one.
My first clue should have been the interview. The director asked why I wanted to work there and when I said stuff like ‘helping others get an education’ he looked at me and said, ‘I work here so I can drive that Benz in the parking lot.’ Over the period of several months, I had a lot more disillusioning moments, things like my director outright telling us that we weren’t looking to recruit the cream of the crop students, reading the fine print in our placement rates that we pushed (which said that if you got a job after graduating then we counted you, regardless of whether it was in your field, so, congrats to all those game design grads working at McDonald’s), finding out that we really only cared if you made it past the two week cutoff for classes because then you were on the hook for at least 25% tuition plus whatever books, software, etc that we sold you, etc.
What finally did it for me was the day my boss pressured me into getting this guy to sign up for our graphic design degree. This was a man with a wife and kids who just wanted to provide better for them. Despite this guy being so computer illiterate that he needed his son to help him fill out the online application, we told him that our Computer Fundamentals course would get him up to speed on not just using computers but also make him functionally literate in Photoshop AND Illustrator. I suppose if you were a genius, this might be true but, if you were talking to me, that was unlikely to be the case. I let my boss push the sale/recruitment because this guy seemed excited and I hoped he’d somehow pull it off. It was almost too easy. Sure as heck, two weeks later, his wife called me crying saying he was trying so hard but just kept falling behind and that he had to drop out (after he’d, of course, dropped hundreds on the Adobe Creative Suite, books, tuition, etc).
From that point on, I didn’t recruit another student. I stopped trying, became an insubordinate jerk, started dumb fights with management (like over wanting to know why women got to wear skirts to work but I couldn’t wear a kilt), and basically goofed off all day until I finally decided to quit.
To this day I feel bad about anyone I recruited and take great delight in the backlash we see now against for-profit colleges.
If there is an underworld and I go there, this will be a big reason why.”
This Greedy CEO Turned The System Upside Down, Ruining His Employee’s Lives
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“Worked at a company for three years that was a very successful small player in a large market segment. Most of their success in the area was due largely in part to the owner/CEOs vision of listening to his employees, and fast-tracking new ideas as quickly as possible. Whether it was a product idea, or a process improvement, he made sure to take to heart everyone’s input equally, whether you were a janitor, a secretary, worked on the phones, worked in R&D, or manufacturing.
He also believed in the importance of incentive. And as such he would regularly run contests for the various departments in the company, which were good, fun and friendly competition to boost sales, or trim expenses, things like that. Salespeople would get bonuses for record months. The lowly guys who sat on the phones would even get a monthly party if their call times were shorter, and if their volumes were higher than the projections. And the last Friday of every month was a big family style BBQ out in the warehouse, where we would cook up a bunch of meat, and people would bring sides and desserts, and work would provide the beverages and the place to eat. It was always a great way for everyone in the company to mingle, and feel equal.
And most importantly, if you were with the company for a whole quarter, you were considered to be an integral part of that quarter’s profits, and you got a profit sharing check. And during our product line expansion, pretty much everyone was getting $1000+ profit-sharing checks, it was great!
Then one Friday BBQ event, when it was planned that we would be getting our profit-sharing checks, it was announced that the owner was stepping down as the company CEO, and the CFO would take over in his place. On that bombshell alone, many people had a pit in their stomach, because the CFO was well known as a bit of a jerk, to begin with.
Upon that announcement, its announced we will all be getting our profit sharing checks! YAY! Followed immediately by the announcement that ‘this will be your last profit sharing check.’ What the heck?! But, don’t worry, it would be replaced by something MUCH better, just you wait. Ugh.
Following the hand out of our largest profit sharing yet, another announcement is made. ‘This will be the last monthly BBQ we will be holding, and effective immediately all incentive programs are going to be phased out through the different departments to focus more on individual performance.’ The mood in the room was quickly turning from gloomy to hostile. And mind you, these announcements were made back to back in less time than you just spent reading them.
At that point, I was pretty much done, as were plenty of other people. But the nail in the coffin didn’t come until the following week, on Tuesday, when the ‘BIG ANNOUNCEMENT’ was going to be coming out!
Tuesday comes, and there is a handful of representatives from investment firms. Oh, neat, this should be interesting. We start getting pamphlets, and memorandum passed around about…retirement investing. Neat, maybe they will be wrapping out profit sharing into our retirement plans, and with less overhead, we would be racking in the retirement money! That would be awesome! So I thought at first glance.
Then the presentation begins, and the investment guy begins to talk about all the finer points of why retirement is good, blah blah blah, and then comes to the part about how your money will be invested, and how the company will match your investments ‘up to 50%’ and left it at that.
Being the jerk I am, I raised my hand when they asked if anyone had questions, and said, ‘You said UP TO 50% – please explain when that UP TO portion happens, and where I can see when and how that happens.’ He very quickly pointed to some information in one of the pamphlets we were handed and said it was all laid out in there. Now, when someone refuses to give me a straight answer, I get some super red flags. When the data I am told to read has absolutely zero charts or hard numbers presented, I get even more suspicious. Thankfully, story problems were one of my best-scored tests back in school, so I start making note of the numbers, and the time frames discussed in the pamphlet blurb, and begin to jot down a rough graph plotting the time, to investment size, to percentage allowed. I raise my hand again, and ask to come up to the whiteboard in the front of the room, and begin to draw the graph on the whiteboard. At this point, the CFO (now the new CEO), gets up out of the room and leaves.
Turns out that when you signed up for retirement, you were limited to a few hundred dollars a year, for the first few years. You also got absolutely ZERO matching funds for the first 3 YEARS of the program. And once you DID meet the criteria for funds matching, it started out at a paltry 2.5% and didn’t get to 10% until the 10-year mark. From the ten year mark on, the percentage increased DRAMATICALLY each and every year until, at year 15, you had the maximum 50% matching contributions, and could put 30% of your income (which was on a similarly absurd sliding scale) into the retirement program. Well, you’re thinking, ‘That doesn’t sound too unreasonable, really…’ And normally, you wouldn’t be wrong. But would you like to know how many people in the company were there for more than 15 years? The CEO, his secretary, the CFO, and the guy that managed the payroll and bookkeeping. That’s it. And of course, this ‘plan’ was retroactive to the total years worked in the company, meaning that this horrible hockey stick shaped investment graph only benefitted those at the top of the company.
And then it hit me, the memory of an impromptu conversation I had in passing with the CFO out in the warehouse right after I had joined the company where he asked how I was doing, and I said I was really excited because I just got my first profit-sharing check. And he asked how much I got, and I told him it was just shy of $850. And he looked at me and asked how long I had been here, and I said just over 4 months. There was a profit sharing just a few days after I first started, so I didn’t have to wait long to get mine. And, even though he didn’t say it in a dismissive tone, or at least I didn’t think so at the time, he said ‘You know the CEO only gets about $1000 on his profit sharing check? Seems a bit unfair that he’s been here since day one, and only gets a $150 more than you do, when he has done the most work to give you this opportunity.’ And still being relatively new my response was along the lines of ‘I’m very grateful he has given us the opportunity and is generous enough to share the companies success with his employees’ or something to that effect that was equally as kissing his behind and sophomoric. He just smiled at my answer and went on his way.
After the meeting closed, I went to my supervisor and told him I would work through the quarter, as it was our busiest, and then I would be quitting the company. He pleaded with me to stay and assured me it would be for the better. 2 months later I was asked to resign from the company, which I did without hesitation because the place was turning into a petty crap hole, again, still to the dismay of my immediate supervisor. The humorous side note here being that my old supervisor left the company 3 months later, citing differences with management, and an inability to properly motivate and inspire his workers because of it. We had a laugh about it over drinks a couple months later when he apologized.
All said and done, 6 years after I left the company, aside from the CEO (former CFO), his secretary, the purchasing manager, the dropship manager, and the head of R&D, no one else I knew, still works there. The place has become a complete revolving door employer. And I am certain that the CEO is still taking his cut of the profits and pumping every dime possible into his retirement fund. That said, they brought in new investors to the company, and have greatly expanded their distribution, and product lines, and are making more money than ever, so I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is a freaking genius. To the rest of us that worked there before his reign of terror, he’s the idiot that drove the joy of working for a great company, right into the ground.”
There Was No Way This Employee Was Letting His Ethics Go Out The Window
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“Boss at department store wanted me to pressure people into buying crap they didn’t need. Old fella came through, needed help with his disconnecting Internet. I know my networks, identified from his information that the fault was the Ethernet cable between his gateway and wireless AP, sold him a cheap cable. Boss tells me I should have tried to sell him a new router too. Guy was a freaking pensioner, you slimy cheapskate. I quit a few days later, screw that mess, I refuse to lie to sell crap.”
Not Even His Hard Work Was Recognized By This Jerk Manager
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“I started working for Radio Shack as a Christmas employee in 1989. When the holiday months were over they offered me a full-time job and I took it. For the first 4-5 months, it was great and I enjoyed coming to work. Then the manager got fired and a new manager took over. At first, he was okay and we got along decently especially since they had announced that they were going to move the store to a newly built strip mall where we should see a nice uptick in business. Great!
The week of the move I put in a lot of overtime helping get the new store set up. The weekend we moved the district manager screwed us. He said he was going to rent a big U-haul truck and get 15-20 people to help us. He did nothing and got nobody so we were on our own. I worked 36 hours straight, went home for 6 hours to sleep then came back and worked another 12 getting everything moved and set up.
The district manager didn’t thank me for putting in all those hours and helping, he complained that it took so long to do and said we were weak. When I went to turn in my time card my manager didn’t want to pay me for all the overtime. He and the district manager tried to convince me to ‘volunteer’ those hours. When I demanded to be paid they told me they might have to let me go because my hours are throwing the store payroll out of whack. I told them if they wanted to fire me for asking to be paid for the hours I worked it was fine with me so long as they paid me.
After a couple of days of arguing they agreed to pay me.
From that moment on I didn’t give a crap. I started to realize that they didn’t care about me and I was just here to collect a check.”
It Was No More Fun And Games For This Fast Food Restaurant
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“I worked at Wendy’s, a minimum wage crappy food service job just like any other. However, I loved it. Our managers were awesome – as long as the job got done, they were cool with us taking home food at the end of the night, having an extra 5-10 minute break every once in a while, even having food fights after close (as long as we cleaned it up and still got out early). They had been with the company forever and knew something very important about crappy minimum wage food service jobs: morale is everything. Without morale, you have a 3-month turnover rate, employees coming in wasted and out of it, fights, etc. Everyone on the closing shift actually liked being at work. After close, employees that weren’t on schedule would even come in to help get out early, after which we’d go to the local 24-hour diner and eat pie at 2 am. It was bliss.
Then we got a new GM. Fresh out of grad school with an MBA and no food service experience. Suddenly, even though the closing crew had record times for every time point, the highest efficiency of any store in the region, and a great work environment, things had to change. ‘Problems’ suddenly appeared out of thin air that needed addressing. Every employee had to be clocked in 10 minutes prior to the start of their shift, or they were late. Every employee got an exact 30-minute break and nothing more, not even 5 minutes outside at 10:30 pm when it was dead. No employee who was off the clock was allowed to be in the restaurant unless they were a paying customer. We threw out all food left over at the end of the night – no giving extra to the last customers in the drive-thru at 11:55 pm, no taking home, just throw it all away. No horseplay or non-work-related activity during work hours. Conversations were to be kept to work-related matters.
It was horrible. Within months, they had a third of the closing crew left. Shift supervisors had to start coming in to close because everyone quit. I stayed on because I thought maybe it would get better, it didn’t. By the time I quit, I was the longest-working employee in the store, I had trained in every single other employee, including the GM. On my last day, after working there for years, I asked the GM if I could make myself a sandwich before I left, she said yes. I made it and clocked out, got ready to leave. As I was leaving, she says, ‘Oh, that’ll be $3.39.’ What? ‘Well, you already clocked out, so I can’t technically give you your discount. You’ll need to pay the full amount.’
I pulled out 4 $1 bills and told her to keep the change. After that, as I heard from some coworkers, the turnover rate became about 2 months. The GM couldn’t figure out what the problem was since she was doing everything ‘exactly right.'”
Even When He Followed All The Rules, He Still Got The Short End Of The Stick
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“Used to work at a builder’s merchant, running the outdoor yard of the place entirely by myself (should be at least 2 people, 3 people is ideal). Put up with a lot of crap such as not one single staff bothering to help when it got busy (it got busy a lot) and being a doormat by working 9 hours straight with no lunch breaks for weeks on end because lack of staff (pretty exhausting considering it’s manual labour and all outdoors).
The bit that was too far was when a health and safety officer showed up one day decided to write me up for ‘gross negligence’ of rules even though I was doing exactly what the company told me to do, which then led to almost losing my job, and being on a final warning for 6 months (bear in mind I’d never had a single warning before this so that was bollocks).
Crap like that makes you realise that you’re nothing but a freaking number to these companies and actually going way above what you should be doing for a crap job is a complete waste of time.”
The Recession Showed Its True Colors At Their Company
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“I realized I was only at my job for a paycheck when they did layoffs (during the recession, I understand) but laid off the people who cared about their job and worked their butts off and kept the people for whom it was like pulling teeth to get them to do anything. Well, that, and also when I was interviewing for a promotion and the interview was 15 minutes of them telling me how much they loved my work and how perfect I would be for that position, and then ended with ‘and we’re giving it to the VP’s daughter.'”
Why Work When You Can Donate And Volunteer At This Gym?
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“I worked as a personal trainer a gym which is technically classified as a charity in Canada. I took immense pride in being a part of the organization due to its reputation within the community and attending the facilities since I was a child. The pride train ended when they demanded that employees ‘donate’ part of their salary back to the organization under the guise of sending children to camp.
Now, what’s wrong with sending kids to camp? Absolutely nothing. Problem was that there was immense pressure from upper management for staff to donate. They didn’t offer the donation as a choice, rather it was expected that staff donate at least $1 or 2 of their hourly wage. I was written up for refusing to donate as I only had a few shifts a week and am still in university. Additionally, most staff employed were making slightly above minimum wage, and they were struggling to make ends meet. This is while 4 members of upper management were reportedly making $100k a year, including the CEO who was allegedly making $250k annually.
The problem with the charity front was that the account for both the facilities operation budget and the camp campaign were drawn from the same account. The implication of this was that staff was essentially taking a pay cut to upkeep the existing budget, which included said inflated salaries.
This was the icing on the cake after being subjected to an array of messes including; tampering with payroll to avoid paying overtime, expected to spend personal time researching information for clients and not having any say in trainer-client placement.”
Their “Bonus” Turned Into An Absolute Nightmare With These Strict Rules
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“Recently the company I work for took away commission and replaced it with a ‘bonus’ of a free pair of jeans from the store (the item gets taxed as well which is fine).
Today we found out we get an item of up to 200 dollars. The company is American, and my store is in Canada. Our dollar is crap, so the prices of the clothes in my store are a lot higher now than before. In the states, that 200 dollars gets you pretty much everything, you can save with 2 or 3 styles of jeans and outerwear.
In my store, not a single pair of jeans fall into that category. So I contacted the DM and asked if we could go off the American price (which would mean we could actually get our free pair of jeans). Nope. It’s 200 dollars company-wide ‘for fairness.’
So I asked if I didn’t take my pair of jeans if I would still get taxed. Regardless of if I take the jeans or not, I get taxed on the 200 dollars.
So they took away my commission, replaced it with a bonus structure I can’t use and get taxed on it anyways.”
This Manager Told Them To “Deal With” This Chaos
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“I was a relatively new manager of a college bookstore. When my assistant manager left to take a job in her field, there were two months to go until the start of the textbook rush.
My regional asked what he could do to help me make it through, seeing how I was going to be short-handed. ‘Get me someone experienced from another store, just for a week when things get busy.’
The next day he called me back and said, ‘I can’t get you anybody, you’re not going to be allowed to hire a replacement, you’ll have to terminate your three temps the day rush ends, and you can’t convert any of them to part-time.’
But that means I’ll literally be the only person on staff.
‘It’s a small store, deal with it.'”