An All Time Low
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“The last company I worked for is called the Tile Shop. They are the largest retailer of natural stone tile in the US. There are about 100 stores, which do not carry a lot of product in stock. Instead, the product is stored in distribution centers and then trucked to the stores when customers order it.
Last winter, there was a big snow storm in Michigan. One of the regional managers sent out an email to the DC staff telling them that the snow would not be an excuse and that they needed to get to work on time, no excuses. A father and son who both worked at the DC left their home around 3 am because they knew the snow would slow them down.
They died in a car crash on the way there. The Tile Shop tried to avoid paying out on their life insurance. Fortunately, the widow sued them and won to the tune of multiple millions of dollars.
I also heard that at the funeral for the father and son, the Tile Shop sent a wreath and when the widow saw it she flipped out and destroyed it.
Later, at a manager’s meeting where the company flies out all the store managers once a year, the regional manager and the CEO were heard saying that it was the worker’s fault; I can’t remember the exact quote I heard but it was pretty much heartless.
The company is also built on Chinese slave labor, but that’s nothing new.”
Stealing From The Poor
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“The family restaurant (not my family) I used to work for had a free meal for the poor on Christmas Eve and they had Santa and gifts for kids, which sounds very nice of them, but it was mainly just a scam.
They would put little signs on all the tables and start taking donations in November. They would accept food and toys, but they always pushed people to donate cash. They claimed it was harder for them to get the things they needed otherwise.
The thing is, they didn’t need or use the cash for the charity dinner. All food and toys were donated and the workers were all unpaid. They scheduled their entire staff to work that day, but wouldn’t pay them (yes, that’s right, on the schedule, no pay). They never bought anything themselves. The owners pocketed all the money. I’m talking thousands of dollars. They also went shopping in the donated gifts for presents for their grandkids, and let their kids do the same. They pretty much always had gifts left over, but would get pissed if we told any customers that after the fact because they were worried people would donate less next time.
In the end, people still got fed and kids still got presents. But, when you see a family you can tell is not very well-off donate $20, $30, $50 because they think they are helping those less fortunate, and you know the cash is going straight to feeding the owners’ gambling problem, it eats at your soul a bit.”
Gotta Love A Good Markup
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“I worked for a ticket broker for a while. Ticket brokers basically buy tickets to events in hopes the event/section will sell out and people will be forced to buy their marked-up tickets.
We were also part of a broker network. If one broker had tickets they were selling at $80, we would list them on our site at $100. If someone bought it from us we would buy the tickets from the other broker and have them ship them to the customer.
There were also these dummy websites in the network. They would make themselves look like the box-office of a certain venue, and list tickets available within a certain range at a 30% markup to face value. When someone placed an order from one of these sites, we would go to Ticketmaster, buy the tickets at face value, then send them electronically to the customer. One time when I worked by myself on a weekend, I straight up told the customer (who hadn’t bought anything from us yet) that the tickets were still available from the box-office and sent her a link to the correct website.
It was one of the shadier things I’ve done as a liberal arts grad trying to get a job.”
I Don’t Know You Like That
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“I worked for an independent, husband and wife owned hair salon.
They were horrible people, they constantly bullied me and every other member of staff who didn’t conform to their way of thinking. If you didn’t conform, you were pulled into the office and browbeaten until you agreed with them. And god forbid if you wanted to try and leave! Again you would be pulled into the office when you tried to give notice and talked at until you changed your mind. The only way to get out was to just leave and not make contact it seems.
The most scummy thing they tried to do was talk people out of having babies – this happened to my best friend, she was asked ‘What on earth do you have to offer a child?’ Luckily my friend was self-confident enough to not let them get to her, now has two beautiful girls, and has left that place well behind her. Another co-worker wasn’t so lucky and was talked into getting an abortion.”
Don’t Become An Accessory To The Crime
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“I worked for a little mom-and-pop computer repair shop a few years ago.
A customer dropped off their computer, and it was full of viruses. I recommended a format and Windows reinstall.
He asked if we could save his data first. No problem. It was a $50 fee, and we had a server that I wrote a software package for that would retrieve, backup, and catalog customer data before a reload, then load all the data back on the machine once everything was back up and running.
Well, I hooked the computer up to the machine and started the backup process. Normally, I’d watch it for a minute or two to make sure everything was working, then wander off and do other things while it ran.
While I was watching it, I started seeing filenames that raised numerous alarms. I immediately killed the process, then opened the folder it was working on. It was hidden several layers deep inside the windows folder in something just system-y sounding to escape notice if you weren’t looking for it.
So. Much. Kiddie. Smut.
I didn’t open any of the files, because really, who wants to see that, but I did see the file names.
I tagged out the recovery server so nobody else would use it, then took what I had found to the owner.
Owner: ‘I don’t want to deal with that. Wipe the drive and give it back to him.’
Me: ‘Wiping the drive is destruction of evidence. We need to turn this over to the cops.’
Owner: ‘No, too much trouble. I don’t want to get mixed up in this. Just give it back to him.’
Me: ‘Then we’re distributing child smut. The only legal course of action is the call the cops and report it.’
Owner: ‘Out of the question. Just give the thing back to him and get it out of here. I’ll hear nothing more on it.’
I went back to the workbench and flagged down the other techs. I showed them what I had found and told them how the owner was handling it. The other guys had kids and were appalled.
Together we all walked back over to the owner’s desk and told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t call the cops and report this, we were all going to walk out on the spot and he wouldn’t have a tech staff anymore.
Facing the potential of losing his meal ticket, he relented and called our contact on the local sherriff’s department’s ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) task force and asked them to come pick it up.
For the next week or so, the guy called over and over again checking on his computer and asking when he would get it back, even coming in to try to pick it up early one time. We told him it was disassembled at the time and couldn’t give it back to him right that minute.
Eventually, the ICAC guys gave the hard drive back to us and said there wasn’t enough to charge him on. I’m not sure exactly what that meant, since there was clearly some very bad stuff on it.
The owner gave him back his unrepaired computer, told him what we had found and that we had given it to the sherriff’s department, and told him never to come back to our shop.”
And You Thought The Uncleanliness Was The Egregious Part
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“I worked at a juice bar. The Middle-Eastern owners refused to allocate adequate time to cleaning blenders. If you did anything past spraying them off with water you were scolded for wasting time. There was such a thick layer of mold under all the lids that I had no idea how they were passing health codes. Especially since on my second day at this place, I saw the owner’s wife straight up drop a piece of chicken on the floor right before serving it to a customer.
One day I was so grossed out that I ended up stopping everything I was doing to clean the place. My boss yelled at me for wasting time and fired me, so I grabbed three lids and handed them to each of the customers in line and said: ‘this is what your smoothies are being made in and I was just fired for trying to clean them.’ I came back for my final paycheck and I caught them trying to short me, so I asked them to pay me to rest. They said they would have the check in two weeks. When they didn’t have it, I went to the department of labor and filed a complaint.
I came back a week later and they FINALLY had my check. The owner said to me in broken English: ‘how do you expect to make anything of yourself?’ I laughed and said: ‘by not letting shady employers scam me out of my hard-earned money.’
A year later they were closed down because of an investigation my complaint ended up launching. Turned out they were violating a lot of tax codes as well as health codes.”
“Did I Say Four Weeks? I Meant Two Weeks”
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“I worked as a school photographer for a while. The pay was crap, but the work was rewarding, fun, and just enough of a challenge to keep it interesting.
The pay was really bad because the hours were ‘flexible’ in that if you ran out of children to photograph, you were done and you went home. They paid drive time, but it was minimum wage. We only worked about nine months out of the year. All told, it was a $10,000 a year job that still took most of your time and energy.
In the summer we had the option of going to work for the senior portrait division, but that was entirely too stressful. They didn’t schedule appointments for a reasonable duration, so they were always backed up.
We’d have quarterly meetings, and the mantra became ‘there’s no money for raises.’ We heard this so many times. Usually followed by some announcement that our company just bought another company. I wonder why there’s no money.
My friend was hounded by his wife because his job was so worthless. He compromised to at least try to make it better. He gave them a month’s notice that he was quitting, but that he’d stay if they gave him $1/hour more. This ended up equalling out to about $1,000 a year. Rather than pay him the $1,000, they flew an executive across the country, put that guy up in a hotel for a few days, and had a meeting with my friend about why they couldn’t give him $1 more. The trip almost certainly cost more than paying my friend would have.
His response was, ‘did I say four weeks? I meant two weeks.'”
Scams All Around
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“I worked as a leasing consultant for student housing in college. We pre-leased apartments for about 11 months before our big wave of move-ins before the new year started. We had a lot of low income/first generation college students come in and lease with us and they brought their parents and family members with them for support and to celebrate such a milestone in the family. Anyways, we had a program where if the kid was getting financial aid through the school to assist with housing we would postpone their first rent payment until the university issued them their financial aid checks. These usually came within the first two weeks of the semester. When the resident got their check they had to give us three months rent in one go. Super common in college environments and is sometimes the only way a low-income student can live on campus.
Anyways, corporate comes down about two weeks before move-in to make sure that everything goes smoothly and ‘finds out’ that we have been having these kids and their families sign these documents agreeing to postpone their first rent payments until they got their financial aid. We had hundreds of these kids who agreed to sign with us because we had that program. Corporate told us to get on the phones and call every single person and tell them that that document they signed with us (in some cases almost a year ago) would not be honored and that they would not be allowed to get their keys and move in without money up front. Move-in was in less than two weeks!
I told my boss to have me do anything else. Work with the maintenance team. Go out and market. Anything. I just couldn’t call these people and do that to them. He threatened to take away my commissions if I didn’t. We got into a shouting match while all my little sheep coworkers made those phone calls. I quit and so did another coworker.
He was telling us all that since he had no idea we were doing it that it was our faults and not legally binding. I reminded him that his subordinates at corporate had come down a year earlier to train us and SHOWED us the forms and how to use them. My buddy and I gave up about $3,000 each in commissions because we quit two weeks before our one-year mark.”
Great Corporate Policy
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“The owner of a business fired me two weeks after I complained about being violated by a member of the corporate staff. She had been informed by one of the lower-level employees that I was planning on causing trouble with her business. The reason that employee said that? She was a felon on parole and had broken into my office while I was gone for the day and found a notepad with a list of all the dates I had collected of her stealing money from the register. The reason the owner believed her over me, an employee with three years of dedicated service? I had recently broken up with her son.
So I got fired for reporting an assault because a felon with a history of credit card fraud and identity theft told the owner I was going to cause trouble.”
“I Will Never Forgive Her Or Respect Her”
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“The manager at my old workplace (a convenience store) was in a bad relationship and started messing around with illegal substances again (she had been clean for a while). When she did, she started just acting completely insane. She refused to do her job, started just leaving in the middle of the workday when it was only her and one other person there, and started throwing everyone under the bus for things that were clearly her fault.
One of the worst things though was she started hiring more guys at the store. Not a big deal except some of them were questionable from the get-go. One guy had never had a job before, told everyone he took multiple ‘smoke breaks’ to get high, and just walked out of the shift multiple times for no reason. She refused to write him up or fire him though.
It all came to a head when she hired my husband because he needed a job after recently losing his. I thought she was doing it because she knew our situation. She refused to let us work the same shift though and he was always working it with her. She said it was because she didn’t want us flirting and kissing while on the clock in front of the cameras. My husband came home early one day and when I asked what happened, he said he couldn’t work with her anymore and had quit.
She apparently had been flirting with my husband from the beginning, and the day he quit, she had cornered him in the soda vault and tried to convince him to sleep with her. He had been uncomfortable and polite with her beforehand, but that was the final straw for him.
I was furious and called up our district manager and ended up telling her all about the crazy stuff that had happened. Our manager was demoted and ultimately quit within the next week. She’s sobered up again and married a guy she met, but I will never forgive her or respect her for using our financial crisis to try and sleep with my husband.”
Don’t Forget To Pay Your Taxes
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“My boss told me he filed my T4 tax form but never did because he was avoiding paying his own taxes. This resulted in me filing for my tax return and getting $2,000 ‘back’ from the government. Only he never sent all the money he was skimming off my paychecks for ‘taxes.’
Fast forward two years and the government came after ME for stealing money from them, demanding I pay them the $2,000 back. It took nearly a year to resolve, and the whole time the government was holding my current tax return ransom. In the end, my old boss went underground. I don’t think they ever found him.”
What’s Worse, The Act Or The Coverup?
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“I was working at a community mental health center with kids, so my job was already rough enough. I staffed a case with my supervisor because I was unsure of whether I had to report something to CPS. She said, and I quote, ‘I wouldn’t. She’s not in any danger and it won’t even be investigated.’
A couple days later, I was still thinking about it because I just didn’t feel right not reporting my client’s accusation. So I reported it.
Four months later after the school called in extra help for my client. My supervisor and her supervisor went to a meeting with the school. Basically, my supervisor connected the dots that maybe this horrible thing my client disclosed to me that she told me not to report to CPS was a bigger deal than she thought. My supervisor apparently still thinks that I never reported and told her supervisor that I hadn’t reported it.
I got called in the next day and they told me that I was being put on leave for not reporting. I first told them that I did file a report and that I made a note of it in my client’s chart. They still put me on leave so they could ‘investigate.’
I thought I was safe because I put in a note after I spoke to my supervisor and after I made the report. They called me a few days later with the decision to fire me. But their reason this time was because I didn’t report within the 48 hours that mandated reporters are required to report in. I was dumbfounded because I know it’s happened before where someone didn’t report within 48 hours and it’s not even a slap on the wrist.
I told them that I was advised by my superior not to report and I heard her in the background say, ‘I don’t recall that.’ So then they told me that I’ve put in fake documentation in my client’s chart.”
Wearer Of Many Hats, Paid For One
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“I worked at a pharmaceutical company for a year, and the owner was an absolute psycho. Throughout the year there had been a few walkouts from other employees and then came my turn.
My anxiety and stress hit the roof working for this man and general unhappiness seeped into my life because of it. I was hired as customer service for their skincare line. After a walkout, I was put in charge of the customer service and marketing department (which I don’t have a background in whatsoever). Then after another person quit, I also became the receptionist. Then after another person left, I was in charge of logistics. My hands were full and then some, all within just the first year of working there with not one pay raise.
The last straw came when I was ‘asked’ to go to a local spa to train the employees on the application procedure of a peel and other facials. First, this was a red flag because this is something that requires proper schooling otherwise it can leave the clients skin painfully damaged. Second, I was one dropped pen from having a burn out at 26 from the demands of the job. I was now single-handedly running an entire department of skincare but I was the only team member.
Initially, I kindly told him I wasn’t comfortable with that and if I had proper schooling and became certified but I was also drowning and needed support. He flipped his lid telling me how disappointed he was in me and that he could ‘literally pull someone from IGA (grocery store chain) and have them do your work’ then he finished the conversation with ‘think about your choices.’
The next day, he called me into his lair and asked me to get on the call with the client. I said no. He said no. I said no. Just no. I was done. He started to say something that sounded like a threat and in response I said ‘that’s fine, should I go finish the shipment?’ I did not finish the shipment. I grabbed my stuff and left.
Not one person knew how to prepare the transport documents in the company for the skincare line. Not one person knew anything about the skincare line because of all the walkouts leaving no trained replacements. Not one person was able to replace me. Because of my walkout, I single-handedly closed the skincare department.”
Read The Fine Print
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“I work for a credit card call center and they once came out with a new e-mail and electronics policy, which everyone was required to sign.
What they meant it to say was, ‘You don’t have any expectation of privacy when using: Our network, our hardware, or our software, including our e-mail system.’ What they actually said was, ‘You authorize us to read your e-mail if you’re using our network, our hardware, our software including our e-mail system, or your hardware, your network, or your e-mail system.’
They tried to write it so that it covered when someone was, say, off at a sales conference using a company-issued computer to access their personal e-mail account or you brought your personal laptop into the office, plugged into the network, and read your e-mails. They failed. And they refused to see how they failed and refused to accept my alteration to fix their failure.
While I know that in practical terms they wouldn’t have the desire or even capability to monitor my personal e-mail accounts if I never logged into them through company assets, but man, I’m not going to sign away my right to privacy for nothing.
That same company also violated their own attendance policy and refused to even look at the employee manual, much less correct their violation, when I cited chapter and verse of manual and brought a printout with the relevant portions highlighted.
The policy was: If you miss 1-15 minutes of your shift, it’s .25 occurrences. If you miss 16 minutes to 50% of your shift, it’s .5 occurrences. If you miss 51%-100% of your shift it’s 1 occurrence. Enough occurrences and you’re fired. They dropped off on a rolling time period.
Thanks to traffic I was 2 minutes late. I was already feeling like crap, so I took a half day but waited long enough that I had worked 50% of my shift plus more than 2 minutes. By the rules they gave us, I should have gotten .5 occurrences. They gave me .75 (.25 for 2 minutes late, .5 for 50% of shift), despite the fact that every single line describing how you get occurrence all said ‘per shift’ and not ‘per incident’ or similar language.
They ended up deciding that the older version of the electronics policy that I had signed was good enough for me to keep my job. I never signed the new one.”