People Share The Worst Thing Their Employer Did To Them

Only 50%

“This happened during my last job, as I now run my own business. I quit and gave my boss 30 days notice, which was more than was required. I timed this, politely, on the beginning of our pay cycle. Because I’m nice.

I figured it was easier on everyone with the paperwork and hiring someone new.

He calls me up at 8:00 am at the end of the first 2 weeks, which was our payday. He said, ‘I’m only paying you 50% for the next 2 weeks.’

Even though I had an email confirmation of my expectation to work and be paid for the last 30 days. It was a 100% remote job with no commute, either.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll only work 50%.’

He was shocked when I only worked 4 hours a day for the next two weeks.”

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Total Lack Of Support

“I have two terrible stories that occurred while I was working for the same employer.

I’m colorblind. My boss assigned me a work task once that was color-coded in a way that I couldn’t see. When I brought up my vision issues — not refusing to do the work, but asking for accommodation, I was written up for what they perceived as ‘insubordination.’

When I filed a complaint with HR asking for the write-up to be removed, the HR rep ‘graciously’ gave me what she perceived as a solution: that I should go use the company’s Tuition Reimbursement program to go take a remedial art class at my local community college. ‘So that you can finally learn your colors,’ she said.

For the next incident, I was working second-shift hours (four to midnight) in our network control center. At one point during the holiday season, I was working the last part of my shift alone — nobody else was in the building except the security guard, who was out of my line-of-sight.

At midnight when my shift ended, my coworker came in to start working the overnight shift alone. This coworker is seriously diabetic, of the type who wears an insulin pump to regulate her system. Literally, the moment she walked in the door, her pump started beeping that she was out of insulin.

To avoid going into a diabetic shock at a time when she had nobody else around to help save her, she had to drive home quickly, pick up an insulin refill, and then come back to work. That required me to stay overtime by about 45 minutes to keep the place staffed.

When I showed up at 4:00 the next afternoon for my next shift, I discovered I had been written up for the unauthorized overtime.

I left the company within a few weeks after the second incident.”

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A Freak Snowstorm

“One spring morning, my city was hit with a freak snowstorm right before morning rush hour. Several inches of wet snow fell quickly and snarled traffic all over town. At the major insurance company I worked for at the time, about 1/3 of the staff said ‘whatever,’ and just stayed home. The rest of us all arrived for work anywhere from one to three hours late.

In the days following the storm, all the people who stayed home were stressed about how the company would deal with the unexcused absences. They were all hoping they would catch a break and be allowed to use a vacation day instead of being docked a day’s pay and getting dinged on their next performance review.

When the next payday came around, we got a memo with our stubs explaining that all the employees who stayed home would be given an excused absence and paid in full, while the rest of us were docked for the time we were late for work.

This happened thirty years ago, and I still can’t talk about it without sputtering. I only remember that it was spring 1987, and my research of historical weather data shows it was probably April 1, 1987. To clarify, the employees who stayed home didn’t even have to burn a vacation or sick day, they were given a bonus paid day off. The company was Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kentucky, now known as Anthem.”

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No Special Treatment

“I put in a resume for a new job as an IT Director.

I met with the owner and we hit it off. I gave him my desired Salary (54K). He didn’t care for it. I left the interview and went about my business. I wasn’t in a hurry for a job.

Four months later he calls me back and says he’d like to sit down with me again. He mentions that he can’t meet my salary request, but we could work out other benefits in its place. I’m more than open to this idea.

So we sit down and decide to knock off about 5K in salary in favor of the company paying for my cell phone, and a better than standard vacation package.

Now, this company has been around forever, but they never updated their vacation package. It is terrible for new employees. Basically, you have no vacation for your first year at all. Once your second year starts, you start accumulating days off. So basically, by the end of your second year, you now have five days off. If you were there for 10 years, you got the second week.

So I said I wanted two weeks right out of the gate. He agreed but asked me to be very quiet about this arrangement as it could potentially anger other employees. No… I didn’t get it in writing.

Six months later, my wife and I have planned our very first out of country vacation. Beach. Cozumel. All-inclusive. A month before said vacation, I remind my boss (the owner) that I’ll be taking some vacation time, and that I’ll need to use those vacation days we discussed when I got hired on.

He ‘had no recollection’ of such an agreement. ‘We’ve always had the same vacation plan for every employee, so we wouldn’t have given you special treatment.’

I argued with him. It didn’t do much good. By the end of the conversation, he agreed to let me take five days of unpaid vacation, and thus would dock my first post-vacation paycheck.

I had resumes out by the end of the week.

Thankfully I’m skillful enough in my job set that finding another job of nearly equal value was pretty easy.”

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Failed Counter

“I got another job offer for a position that paid about 50% more than what I was currently making. My supervisor made a counteroffer that more than matched it – I just had to jump through some paperwork formalities.

That paperwork gets dragged out for about 2 months when I’m told that the supervisor didn’t have the authority to make that kind of counteroffer. There were other things he could have done, though. It was a government job that apparently had a defined pay range for a position. He offered outside of that range, then just claimed that it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t legally give me that amount. What he could have done was give me a different position or job title which he refused to do, or he claimed that people above him wouldn’t let him open a ‘new’ position even though it was just changing an existing position.

Instead, I was told I could get a 10% raise, take it or leave it.

I had the offer in writing but it wasn’t an official document, and I knew fighting it would have been a long uphill battle. I took the 10%, found another job, and left without helping train a replacement. I no longer cared after how he cheated me out of a good raise. The new job offer was even higher than the original offer, so it all worked out for me in the end.”

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Couldn’t Hold It In Anymore

“I was working control, which basically means I spend about six hours in a small room, hitting buttons, watching cameras, and filling out paperwork. Nothing too bad, but you can’t leave the room until you have someone come and relieve you. Around four hours in, I realized that I needed to pee. I called my supervisor and asked for someone to relieve me. She said she’d send our other coworker up when he got rounds done. And then she left.

So no one could have relieved me, because you have to have someone on the floor at all times. I called her three more times — every time she came back to our floor — but she kept blowing me off. I ended up peeing myself coming down the stairs when she finally came to relieve me, after she’d spent the last twenty minutes standing in the doorway down the hall, chatting it up with her higher-ups after she went for a bathroom break. I could see her from my chair. Heck, I could see the bathroom from my chair. And she still let me pee on myself.

Jokes on her though. I talked to my lieutenant and he moved me to work with people who actually knew what they were doing, and, after two months, I finally got moved to days, which she’d been putting in for forever and not getting.”

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Just Desserts

“I got pregnant while working for a small subcontracting company as an assistant. I told my boss, the vice president, and let them know I’d need to take a few weeks off after I gave birth. So the VP hired an ‘assistant’ to cover my duties while I was gone.

I gave birth and took the week off and then an additional week with the baby for a total of two weeks of leave. I returned to work for a bit until my newborn son got sick. Very, very sick. He was hospitalized for almost a week.

I missed three days of work because of this and the day I returned, I was fired, and guess who replaced me? The person who I basically trained to do my job, ‘my assistant.’ Taught me a life lesson there, never train someone to do your job.

Bonus: The company was running out of money, and fired others as well without warnings or cause.

I filed for unemployment, along with others, and was subsequently denied. The VP and managers submitted forged timesheets, our signatures on the cards, and said the employees who were fired were termed due to being late three or more days in a row and were warned.”

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Disloyal Employer

“I got activated and sent to war. When I came home, my employer said I no longer had a job. I called the head of the department of the Soldiers and Sailors Act. I was informed that activated reservists get fired all the time and there is nothing they could do about it. The biggest offenders were the large contractors that build all of the military assets, jets, ships, rockets, etc. My employer was a small electronics company with a lot of government contracts. The Colonel at the SSA asked me the name of my company that had fired me. I told the Colonel. The response was, ‘hmm, they have a lot of government contracts. I’ll give the CEO a call and let them know that they have fired one of our reservists for answering the call, and we are going to review their government contracts.’

I was back to work the next day and the Human Relations manager and my supervisor were in a lot of trouble. The CEO was annoyed that those two knuckleheads had jeopardized the main source of income for the entire company over a mid-level employee.

It was all a bluff, but fun to watch. I quit for a better job a year later. That company folded a few years later. Not because of me but because they kept too many knuckleheads on the payroll.”

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Liar, Liar

“I worked 18 months without any vacation or even requesting a day off for personal. One of the guys I supervise died, and he happened to be my stepfather. Instead of taking time off for my mother and brothers, I covered all my hours plus his for the next several weeks, running into 100+ hours per pay period multiple times, because the department couldn’t handle losing BOTH of us and we were already limping by with temps. I finally asked for a night off to spend with family and help with their things, and my boss told me no and called me a liar.

She accused me of having a date or party or some such, instead of actually going to see my family.

I’m not a college kid. I’m not a party type. I never go out. And my family needed me badly. I hadn’t even seen my mother and little brothers beyond a couple minutes in the parking lot a couple times. My mother lost her husband of 25 years and my 14 and 22 year old brothers just lost their father. And I’m a liar the first time I ask for a little break to be with them.

The more I think about it, the more livid I am. I’m going to have a nice little conversation with the big bosses the day before I go back to work. I want her gone and I have more than enough proof of a multitude of serious misdeeds. Her behavior impairs the operation of the department and is an actual danger to the university.

I’m currently on a 3 week paid vacation after the bigger bosses heard about that one.”

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Fake Promotion

“I work at Sears, as a Backroom Associate. The PMT (Preventative Maintenance Technician) position opened up. The day the old PMT worker put his two-week notice in, my boss approached me asking if I would like the job. Knowing that the pay was better than my current position’s, I was excited and instantly told him yes. The following day they started training me for the position.

This went on for about a week or so and then management announced that there would be a meeting at the end of the month. Well, I attended the meeting only to be introduced to the new PMT worker! I couldn’t believe it, they gave me the job and then took it away just like that. It would be somewhat understandable if they would’ve promoted someone who either had more experience or someone who’d been there longer. But they hired someone completely new and this guy can’t do his job correctly, he’s always asking how to do this and that. He’s old and can’t even use a computer.

Ever since then, there has been no mention of the incident. They handled the entire situation in such a horrible manner, I guess that’s why Sears is one of the top ten worst places to work at. I hate you, Sears!”

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Horrible Boss

“Last week, my boss gave me a difficult task with an impossible time frame in which to finish.

When the time was up and I said I needed another day to finish, he got way too confident and said, ‘I know. I don’t need it until tomorrow. But I told you I need it today because if I told you I needed it tomorrow you’d say you couldn’t get it done until Monday.’

And when I told him that’s not true, he pointed to the fact that I was unable to do the task in his just recently admitted impossible time frame as evidence that I wouldn’t have finished it on time if he’d told me when he actually needed it.

So, setting me up for failure, and then using the fact that I failed as evidence to say I’m an awful employee. Ain’t management grand?”

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Blackballed For Life

“I interned in my state government while I studied for the bar exam. I took the bar examination and kept interning while I awaited the results with baited breath.

In the meantime, my wife got a job in the city we’d both grown up in and wanted to return to, so we planned to move there as soon as possible.

I gave my two-week notice and offered to train a replacement before I left. The intern coordinator fired me instead and called me unprofessional for leaving.

Several months passed by. I passed the bar exam and interviewed for a state government job that I thought would be perfect for me. The interview process went really well, or so I thought. I was called back a week later and told they passed my name up the chain (this job requires approval from the Governor’s office), but it was rejected because I was on a government employment blacklist for my state.

I am permanently barred from state government employment because I gave two weeks notice and offered to train a replacement for a low-skill internship that could’ve replaced me by the end of the day.”

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Holding Me Back

“My friend’s dad was a regional manager for a very popular bank. At 19, he got me a job as a bank teller. My first year I did well and led the branch in sales. The branch was to be closed so I asked him to transfer me closer to home.

I was transferred to this new branch with the bank manager who has already been there for 35 years. He happened to be good friends with my friend’s father. It was strange that we had the same personality types and same interests. It started off great, but he began to seemingly resent me. I don’t know why for certain, but I think he saw a lot of himself in me and was jealous that I was better than him.

Anyway, I was still a bank teller and killed it in sales for two years, leading my branch and I was always top three in the region. I was 22-23 at this time and figured it was time to move up and be a banker. I went up to my resentful boss and he said that a promotion was not in the cards right now because I have not been consistent with my sales and that I am too free-spirited (as he describes himself, too). He said, if I become more consistent with my sales, he will consider it.

I know, it’s stupid. I’ve been the most consistent bank teller in sales for two years in my region, but whatever. I went balls to the walls for four months. I ranked in the top 20, not in my region, state, or even country, but all of North America for those 4 months. That is an incredible achievement which put me in like the .006 percentile for my position.

I went back up to him. I was prepared. He knew how well I have been doing and how well his branch has been doing because of me. However, he said he thinks I am just not cut out to be a banker, that our branch was too busy, and I needed more experience.

I thought, ‘no way.’ I was prepared for a denial, so I told him I was going to switch to part-time. I did that and finished university and quit shortly after in order to travel.

After traveling, I was immediately offered a job as a banker at a different bank. What did I do during my first quarter there? I led the region in sales.

I still hate that manager. I feel like he personally stole years off my life, fighting for something that he knew he was never going to grant me, all while reaping the rewards of my labor.

Though I must say I like the direction my life has turned and if it wasn’t for him, I might still be grinding away.”

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Sounds Like Something Out Of Office Space

“Suffice to say that I was working in a technical capacity at a fairly large company. I was good at what I did, but my real passion was for the creative side of things. So when I started to hear rumblings about the need for an in-house writer, I jumped at the chance to apply. Meetings were scheduled, interviews were conducted, and I was told that the job was essentially mine. The one caveat was that the opening had to be publicly posted for a minimum of one week before they could give it to me.

I spent that week in rapt anticipation of starting in my new position, even devoting my free time to preparing for the shift in focus. When the waiting period was finally up, I approached the individual whom I thought would be my new supervisor, intent on making the transition as smooth as possible. Imagine my surprise when I was told that someone else had been hired in the interim and that the new employee had actually begun working several days prior.

That was already bad enough, but it became downright infuriating when I discovered – some weeks later – that one of my superiors had apparently made me sound like a less-than-desirable candidate, simply because they wanted to keep me in their department.”

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