C.S Lewis once said, 'Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.' And well, this article proves that most people don't have any integrity whatsoever. But as a citizen of the world, you probably already knew this...sigh
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
‘He Wrote A Living Will’
“I’ll never forget this case of a 98-year-old patient who had a living will that he wrote when he was in his late 80s, stating that he would never want to be artificially kept alive with feeding tubes or a respirator.
Flash forward to present, his dementia has progressed to the point where he is non-verbal and barely moves. His daughter has put a feeding tube in him and has insisted he get intubated for his pneumonia and respiratory failure.
I found his living will and was outraged, trying to advocate for this man who can no longer speak, who once had wishes that he wrote down that are no longer being recognized. The daughter pushes for us to do ‘everything’ because she ‘knows him better’ and thinks his living will is ‘not what he wanted.’ And most doctors thus far had allowed her to drive the ship.
It’s a case that still bothers me every time I dwell on it.”
‘That’s Academic Fraud’
“I’m in college for biology and ran a research group for forensic entomology with the intention of publishing a paper. We noticed some of our numbers on maggot length were funny in our group Excel, and we double-checked who’d been assigned those maggots to measure.
I asked the guy who did them and he said, ‘Oh, I just measured one and guessed on the rest cause they looked about the same.’
Kevin, that’s academic fraud.
So, I had to redo two weeks worth of work.”
At The Foster Care Agency
“Right out of college, I got a job as a caseworker for a foster care agency. The regional director (my boss) was the last person you would ever want to be in charge of children in foster care. She licensed close to 100 of the awful foster parents (people who shouldn’t have been allowed to care for their own biological children, let alone foster children), which led to many unethical and illegal situations.
A big one that always sticks out in my mind is when one of our teens reported to her caseworker that some shady stuff was going down with her foster mother and the foster mother’s friend. This girl recorded the foster parents stealing goods from stores and then selling them elsewhere, caught them on camera berating one of the foster kids, and taped them doing some illegal substances.
My lovely boss was required by the state to ‘suspend’ the foster parents (that lasted about two months) but also refused to move the teen to another foster parent. She said she didn’t want to risk the girl ‘ruining’ any of her other foster parents.
I could go on and on about the unethical nightmare that place was.
No worries, I reported that place. I basically had a year’s worth of documentation and I went straight to the state once I felt I had enough evidence to take her down.
My boss got in trouble (but not fired).
I went on to work for a fantastic foster care agency until I decided to take a break. Now I’m a foster parent myself, and it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”
‘They Took Away My Home’
“I was given housing on company property as part of my compensation package. When I gave notice of my resignation, they decided that I needed to vacate my apartment immediately, as in, pack up as much of your stuff as possible at 9 p.m., get out, and come get the rest later. This was unexpected because I’d given a lot to this company and – the real kicker – it was a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness.
I got a hotel that night and was hoping to work something out with them until I could find a new place to live, but they wouldn’t budge. When I said I would be hiring an attorney, they said they’d start spreading rumors about both me and my significant other (who was affiliated with our organization), and they’d make sure that so much damage was done that neither of us would be able to show our faces in the community again.
At that point, I was scheduled to get both my regular paycheck and bi-annual performance bonus the next week. Once my unused paid time off was calculated in, I was due over $10,000, which I needed because I had just given up my job without the 30 days I thought I was going to have to find a new job and was made unexpectedly homeless.
They ended up taking four months to pay me, deliberately delaying it for no good reason and not returning my calls. I think they would have delayed it longer, but I started calling their grantmakers one by one and exposing their behavior. It was all I could do: at that point, my savings were all but gone and I could barely meet my basic needs, let alone hire an attorney.
This is just the icing on their unethical cake, too. There was a lot I saw in my time there, but I had my head in the sand.”
‘That Product Doesn’t Even Work’
“I found out that one employer I worked for had been selling a product which didn’t actually work.
A product that his customers (who were small businesses) relied on to back up their data in the event of data loss.
The employer had been selling this product which didn’t work for 10 years.
Over the last couple of years, he stopped selling it directly and started selling it as a service via computer stores throughout the state. To the point where a majority of such stores selling this service in the state were all selling the same back end, but branded with the store’s logo and name.
This meant that when a customer business lost all of their data (which they only found out about when they needed to restore something after a disaster), they often ‘fired’ their local computer store as a backup provider, and went down the street to the next computer store and their backup service, which used the same failure-prone back end.
By the time I left, they had a few thousand customers, the vast majority of whom never knew they were using this particular service, and had a corresponding trail of failures and disasters – of other people’s businesses, of course.
They’re still operating today.”
‘Racism Is Still Alive, They Just be Concealing It’
“I have worked for eight years at my previous job. I can safely say that they trusted me to listen and participate in their meetings, even though I am not in any top position. My employer asked me once to look for new employees, and I recommended my friend.
I didn’t tell them that he’s a good friend of mine. After passing with flying colors in the interview, my employer pulled me to the side and said, ‘He’s more than qualified and I like him to be part of the team, but he’s black.’ My friend didn’t end up getting the job, and I handed in my resignation letter the day after.
We live in Canada, by the way.”
The Whistle Blower
“The worst is when I was told to fudge some numbers for a report that was going to be public. I refused and resigned. I told human resources about it in the exit interview. I was in a hard place at work, if I reported it then I was going to catch the backlash, if I did it then my personal integrity would go out the window. I don’t want to work for any company that does anything that requires me to jeopardize my integrity or reputation.
In my years of experience, it’s better to find another job. If you blow the whistle and stay at the company there are repercussions no matter how much they assure you that you will be protected.”
‘As Long As Their Son Starts’
“My husband is a high school football coach. The school he coaches has a good football program, and they normally have a few kids earn college scholarships each year.
My husband discovered early on that parents would do almost anything to make sure their son is a starter. This includes physical favors, doing yard work, cash bribes, etc. My husband was offered money, and when he reported it to the athletic director, he was told, ‘I hear nothing, I see nothing.’ My husband discovered a few coaches take people up on their offers.
It just seemed wrong to me. The parents are wrong for offering, but the coaches shouldn’t accept. Another coach told my husband that a lot of the dads are cool with their wives offering physical favors as long as their son starts. It’s gross.”
‘I Work Freelance’
“I’m a video game journalist. Most of us are freelance, so we regularly file invoices with the hope that a publication will follow through on our contracts and pay on time.
This does not always happen. One of my favorite publications let go of their freelancers recently, and I’m still owed over $300 dating back several months. My contract states payment must arrive 30 days after filing an invoice, it’s been 120 and 90 days between my two invoices.
It’s not just wrong to writers, it’s breaking our contracts. There are messed up priorities there.”
‘She Is Not Cooperative With Our Company’
“I used to work for a retail position in Denver, Colorado. One of my co-workers had been in the movie theater when James Holmes attacked and she’d been shot in the leg, but survived. She was gone for a few months but eventually came back to work. The poor girl had to cut back on her hours due to physical therapy, psychological therapy, and the fact that having had a bullet removed from her leg, so she couldn’t stand for long. She eventually worked up to being able to stand for a full shift, and the manager was fine with that and provided her a stool so she could just work registers instead of walking around the store like the rest of us. We were all fine with it too. If anything, having someone guaranteed to be at the registers was helpful.
A month or so after this girl returned to work, we got a new manager. The new manager started cutting the girl’s hours back without her asking for it, to the point where this girl was working no more than eight hours a week instead of the 20 or so she needed. The new manager also changed her schedule, so the few hours she was getting ended up being on days that she needed off. She BEGGED us to allow her to cover half of our shifts or swap shifts with her because she couldn’t afford her basic expenses anymore, let alone her copays. It broke my heart to tell her that I needed my full shifts to cover my expenses, and we all tried so hard to get her hours back.
Eventually, the girl had to quit after moving back home with her family after doing everything she could to get her hours. She was in tears turning in her resignation letter. For a couple weeks, our regular customers were asking where she was, and when we said she’d quit, they all said, ‘Oh, what a shame. She was so sweet. Good luck to her.’ Everyone loved her.
By this time, everyone hated the new manager. Not just for this incident, but for a whole host of reasons. One of the previous shift managers straight up asked the manager why the girl’s hours had been cut so drastically, and this was the manager’s response:
‘Our customers rely on our employees to be available throughout the entire store. We need an employee who is cooperative with that policy.’
Once word got out about that, over half the store quit in the same week. I hope that manager got fired for not meeting sales quotas, and I hope that girl that was forced out threatened to sue.”
The School’s Principal
“I teach third grade, and the principal’s son is in my class.
Before the year started, the principal finagled all of the class lists so her son’s friends would be with him in my class. These kids were not supposed to be together at all.
Then she would show her son the class lists to make sure that he was okay with the list. There was one kid he wanted in my class with him that he was friends with. The principal contacted his mother and told her to request me so they could be together. It ended up not working out after the second-grade teachers said absolutely not.”
‘Pay Me What You Owe Me, Don’t Act Like You Forgot’
“The last two tours I ever did as a musician, our guitarist was a money grubbing prick. We did six weeks in Europe, and when I was told about the gig, he expected us each to earn $300 a week, which, in all honesty, was quite good for this band. It turned into $500 for the entire tour, plus our 10-euro per diems every day. Oh, and then it turned out that I was the only member of the band he couldn’t afford to pay. Then he duped me into paying out of pocket to fly out to NYC to practice for the next tour, which was 10 days in the U.S. and Canada, and a week in Japan; saying he’d pay me back everything he owed me on the road. Also, he had some unspoken problem with me the last three weeks in Europe and avoided communicating with me between the end of it and the beginning of the next tour.
It turns out, he never intended on paying me back. As we got closer to the seventh day, it started getting heated. I finally approached him in person to square it away, and he told me he was not interested in talking to me in person, and he would just email me instead. I told him to either pay me what he owed me in full after the show that night, or I would fly home the next day. He made the excuse that the band didn’t have any money. So, I went home the next day, and I haven’t performed music ever since.”
‘We Are Going To Pay Them Eventually’
“I had a boss that hired a company to do some development work. The project lasted for the duration of about 10 months. Our company was struggling financially and refused to pay them for their work on time. Payment terms were 30 days. We had some bills that were over six months late.
His response when I told him we were violating our contract was, ‘we are not, we’re going to pay them eventually, just whenever I feel like it.’ This was a normal occurrence and the sole reason why I couldn’t keep a development firm around.”
‘I’d Report Him For Fraud’
“I can’t say it was a career, but I worked for a man who wouldn’t hire a young woman because ‘she’s 23, she might have a baby in the next five years, and I don’t want to deal with maternity leave.’
He also wrote his children into the books as cleaners so they would meet work requirements to qualify for government payments. I cleaned that building every day and never qualified for benefits. By the way, he drove a BMW.
Also, he once asked me why I had walked down a different street to work (apparently watching me through the window). I told him I’d visited my boyfriend the night before. He was silent for a moment or two then said, ‘You know you’re going to that firey place down below, right?’
I was too young and naive to realize just how unethical it was working under him. If I had my time again, I’d report him for fraud. And I never got my government benefits.”
Some Club Bouncers In The UK
“I worked in a nightclub that had a ‘cloakroom’ where the bouncers would take the occasional misbehaving person. A group of them would beat some poor guy senseless then hand him over to the police outside after he ‘fell down the stairs.’
In the U.K, Door Supervisors (bouncers) need to be SIA licensed and complete a criminal background check; basically, any violence, theft or offenses meant you wouldn’t pass the screening. It’s been this way since about 2001.
Some companies will hire several people with criminal records and put them all down as the same person with a legit ‘license.’ The police know good and well what’s going on in these situations, but they’re just as unethical.”
‘I Was Let Go For No Reason’
“The company I used to work for changed the hours for most management. We used to work 45 hours, and get guaranteed five hours of overtime every week. Well, for whatever reason, they cut us down to 40 hours a week but said our pay would be raised to account for the lost hours. In other words, we’d be paid the same, but work five hours less.
Well, they certainly raised my pay rate, but the new higher rate was still short of what it was supposed to be. I told my manager this, and he showed me the online form the company gave them, that automatically calculated the pay rate, and it was wrong. He said he’d pass my concern up to the general managers.
A couple weeks go by and I ask my manager about it. He said that he had to go by the form and there was nothing he could do, but if I ‘work hard’ then by my next evaluation, my pay rate might increase to match it.
I was mad, but naive younger me thought he would come through on his word. I was one of the hardest working people there but the company went through some major restructuring and got bought out. Eventually, I was fired for ‘not performing my duties’ (I was furious but I was getting ready to leave anyway). Then, I came to find out, a few months later that a former co-worker sent me some pictures of the area I was in charge with (and part of the firing was because this area was not clean and organized), and that area was easily 10 times worse and dirty under the new management.”