Are people crazy, or is it just normal customer service?

When you have worked in customer service, you know that people are crazy, entitled, mean, and disgusting. Some act so horribly that you seriously doubt if that is even normal. You start thinking that maybe some kind of crazy new disease has been spread around to customers and that's why they are all behaving so entitled. But soon you realize that it is not like that. People are just like that. Entitled, mean. They will act in the most awful ways, and you will just have to deal with it, because that is your job, unfortunately.

When you have been working for a while, you grow a thicker skin that is able to put up with almost anything. They could be spitting fire at you, and you wouldn't feel anything, and not a single scratch would be left on your skin. You become a witch that can tolerate everything, or almost anything. But one day, out of nowhere, some crazy people are going to get you out of your seat. They will start to behave so weirdly that you will have to stop for a second and check if the world has changed or people just got dumber over time. Whatever it is, it's actually so weird that you will feel uneasy. But there will not be much to do either. Just have to take it.

Like in this story, when this employee saw a bunch of people acting insane. It was just a normal day being a front desk employee. But it was so weird that she actually had to stop for a moment and think if anything else was happening. But that's just how working in customer service is. Sometimes a nightmare, sometimes a magic, insane world where everything seems to be upside down like Alice in Wonderland, and sometimes, rarely, a normal day where everyone acts nice and respects the people who are working to make their life easier. But that is not the common situation. That is the real fantasy world. 

What would you do if your job did this? 

You don't realize how much time you have until you no longer have it. I am grateful every day that my workday doesn't start until 10 AM, because it gives me so much more flexibility in the morning and in the evening. I can stay up late on work nights, and I can wake up early for doctor's appointments if I need to. I don't always use my extra time well, as shown by mornings I've spent lying in bed for 2 hours watching TikToks after waking up at 7 AM. I probably would get a lot more done around the house and read a lot more if I didn't waste my extra time with endless scrolling. At the end of the day, my free time is mine to waste. If I want to waste it by scrolling, that's my prerogative! If I had to work from 10 AM to 10 PM, I would feel a lot differently about how I used my time outside of work. I would have to use every waking hour for something essential, like cooking, washing, and cleaning. I wouldn't have any time for leisure during the week, and I'd have to adjust my schedule accordingly. 

Losing two hours of free time can drastically change your daily schedule. The employee in this story was miffed when he found out his boss was adding two extra hours to his workday and more work on top of that. He doesn't want to act like an entitled young person who doesn't want to work, but he's understandably alarmed by new expectations thrust on him without more pay or even a conversation about whether he could handle it. His boss just expected him to go along with it, and he's probably not going to do that. He has other options. 

A company withdrew a job offer after a lengthy interview process, leaving the candidate in a vulnerable position. First, lowballing the originally discussed compensation by $30,000. Then withdrawing it entirely when the candidate had the audacity to ask a common professional question.

Long interviews have a tendency to be an absolute drain on resources. On the company and the candidates both. While it's understandable to want to find the right candidate with the right experience and the right fit, you have to imagine that there is a point that is reached where things are just entirely overcooked. And this long process makes things exceptionally hard on candidates who are between jobs and desperate to escape the uncertainty. 

If your commute was double what it normally is, would you still do it?

Commuting is not a fun part of our day to day lives. It can feel like it takes the joy out our days, even when it goes fast. You're not being compensated for the time spent, so you feel like you want it to be as  quick as possible. When it takes any longer than it usually does, your stress levels start to rise. You don't want to spend any more time on it than you have to. And when your boss does something about it, this can be a huge issue. You like to work with reasonable people, and when people aren't reasonable you start to get a little anxious. You would much rather have to make some sacrifices than to do something that you don't want to. That's what was starting to happen in this story and things go a little out of hand.

Nothing says "team bonding" like giving up a whole Saturday for a mandatory unpaid fun…

For a manager, I understand that team bonding and having everyone working together + having good relationships is a dream goal. What better way to succeed in your position than having employees that like each other? It's okay sometimes to create activities that are going to force them to talk and get to know each other… but that doesn't mean you need to take away one of their weekend days to do this.

In this case, an employee found herself in a very complicated spot. Since she's tight on money, she has two jobs. During the week, she works full-time in customer support, and during the weekends she helps at a local café. Both managers are aware of the other roles, so they do their best not to schedule her if she has the other commitment going on. 

Well, it seems that the manager from the corporate job decided that, to improve "team cohesion", she organized a 'mandatory fun day' on a Saturday, and every employee is forced to attend. As you can tell, our employee cannot make it, but she tried to reschedule her shift at the café, because it was going to be easier to work double another day than to skip the work event. Her boss told her that it was impossible… so now she doesn't know what to do.

Her corporate manager was not helpful either: she said this is a mandatory one-time thing, and if she doesn't show up, her absence will be written down in her file and that it absolutely shows a lack of commitment. And we all know that this can have major consequences in the future…

Her frustration is clearly noticeable, since companies sometimes force fun as a benefit, when in reality they're making life more complicated for some of their employees. For this one, is having her look bad in both jobs, but what about the people who have kids and need to sacrifice a whole day to do extra work stuff?

Can a stolen mattress fix this roommate's relationship?

Roommates can be a remarkable part of your life. They can become the best friends you never thought you needed, or the sibling you never had…in movies. In real life, they can be a challenge, to say the least. Especially when one of them owes you lots of money and seems less than eager to pay it back. In this story, college life meets Soprano-style revenge, but it revolves around a stolen mattress. 

Three roommates start having trouble when roommate 1 gets cut off by her parents. Because of this, the three roommates went from dividing rent three ways to roommate 2 trying to help roommate 1 with a little extra money (by covering a portion of her expenses). They even went as far as buying a pricey mattress for her. However, when roommate 1 got a boyfriend, things between the roommates changed once again. She barely spent any time at the apartment, and past debts seemed to get frozen for the time being, which, needless to say, roommate 2 did not appreciate. Also, roommate 2 decided to move in with their girlfriend and needed an extra mattress for their new apartment. The opportunity just started to spell itself out. 

Sometimes a business can come out of the most unimaginable place. 

Not every income has to be attached to an office job at a corporate office. Sometimes being original and doing something different can make you even more money than a normal office job would. Or at least it can give you a passive income that helps you out a bit, and it's also not hard to do, as you see it mostly as a hobby. Not every job has to be conventional. And having extra income, even if it's not a significant amount, can be not only extremely useful, but also can help you find new abilities that can come in handy someday.

If you break it, you buy it, or in this case, you pay for the damages.

A young man lent his car to his girlfriend so she could go pick up her brother from the airport, since her car seemed to be at the shop. The thing is, the girlfriend let her brother drive, and he tends to be a reckless driver. So much so that he crashed into the rear of another car. The boyfriend is furious about it, since now he has to pay to get it fixed. Even though the brother offered to pay for it, the guy is too young and irresponsible, and he has never been in debt to anyone. The boyfriend is mad at his girlfriend for giving him the car while knowing his terrible history with driving, and she is upset about him complaining and says he's exaggerating and being controlling. 

In my personal opinion, when someone lends you something as valuable as their car, you make sure to take care of it. Meaning that you won't let other people use it, drive it, or do anything to it. After all, it belongs to someone else, and they are just doing you a favour by letting you use it. A person is entitled to want to have their stuff well taken care of, and is also entitled to complain about the complete lack of responsibility others show regarding their belongings. In this case, the girlfriend was just as irresponsible as her brother, and the boyfriend has the right to feel offended and disappointed because she didn't respect him or his property enough to take good care of it. If he chooses not to lend it to her again, he's in his right to do so. She very well could have offered to take care of the payments for the repairs instead of complaining and calling him controlling. Since she didn't, he has the right to decide who drives the car and to be protective of his property. 

I was hooked on the first part, and I honestly never thought it would turn out this good for the objectively morally correct employee, but life seems to reward the good sometimes!

We should take his story as an example or a to-do list for when we find ourselves trapped in a situation like this- when somebody else takes credit for something we did, especially in the workplace or university, for example.

This never happened to me at work, but it happened to me repeatedly in school. People get really weird when they have to work as a team. In teams, we discover very valuable things about other people's characters and egos. Some people work without saying anything and add value to the team without getting their egos enmeshed in everything.

To me, the worst kind of partner to work with is someone who'll think every good idea is their own, even if they weren't even present when it came up, and those who won't accept criticism, even in the slightest. Sadly, the world is full of those people, and part of the work is learning how to elude conflict with them and, hopefully, integrate them in a way that doesn't trigger their wounded egos.

This employee already had a conflict with a personality like this, and managed to de-escalate it. So we should take a really close look at what he did. Part of the reason he succeeded was that he stopped defending himself emotionally, as commentators on his previous post told him, and limited himself to bringing concrete receipts of his work.

Luckily, this is a real blemish on the thief's employment history, and will likely evoke further management evaluation. At the same time, the other employee showed he can create and fix a project for a higher position. A win is a win!

How many students are too many for a first-year teacher?

Teachers are heavily underpaid and underappreciated. We send all of our children to be with them for most of the day; they are responsible for keeping them alive and untraumatized, educating them, and keeping them healthy and happy. They have to plan how to teach each individual class and student, because everyone is different. They even sometimes have to get their own school supplies for the class with their own paycheck. When are they expected to have time for their own life, mental health, or happiness? 

A first-year teacher is struggling with this exact dilemma, and the school year has only just begun!

Sometimes being honest works against us

I can't believe this employee wrote an entire post without realizing he is the one who's in the wrong. I can't believe that being morally correct isn't always the best. Being honest is absolutely a virtue, but one has to have enough malice to understand whether it works in our favour in a specific scenario.

Through experience, one understands that managers and bosses won't always reward us for finishing our job in less time; even more so, if they find out we do, they'll likely cut our wage as well because it is proven that it's not worth as much.

Maybe this employee still has to find out about this. Bosses are not that bound to their employees. They are most likely looking to earn more and spend less on them, and if they voluntarily say their work can be done in much less time than they thought, they will pay them less as well.

I guess if he doesn't care to earn less, he will have 2 free days more per week to find another job. Can you imagine getting paid the same as if you worked the entire week for only working three days? If that happens, this employee would be living my dream.

Could it be that he didn't understand that work doesn't work like that in a capitalist society? How did he manage to get through school without knowing this?

I think he is going to be really surprised by what his 'very thorough documentation' actually produces, unless he is looking forward to getting more tasks a day or less pay.

Amazed at how some minds work.

Some recipes are better left to the professionals…

You know that I love talking about cooking fails and bad food because I think it could be used as a good metaphor for life. Yes, maybe I'm getting a bit far from the topic, but hear me out: when it comes to cooking and making food in general, there are certain people who have the skills, and others who just… do not. That being said, you don't have to feel discouraged if preparing a delicate recipe is not your game. Why would there be something wrong with that? 

We all have different talents; we just have to find them. I think cooking is a bit different than others, though, because we need to eat to live, basically. And maybe, if we're not the best at cooking, we'd feel like we're going to spend our life eating the same thing. But let me tell you that I'm the worst cook ever, and I don't eat the same thing every day. It's really up to you and how much you can learn. You don't have to go to culinary school or learn to cook the most complicated dish ever… just learn to prepare some simple dishes you can vary throughout the week, and you'll be fine!

That being said… I find cooking fails and bad foods to be hilarious! I think it's because I feel so related to them. After all, all of that mess could have been mine! Actually, in many of the pictures you'll find below, there are some that look exactly how my kitchen ended up the day that I was trying to cook some spinach crepes… somehow every part of it looked like taken out of the Grinch! That was the last day I attempted to cook something new… and since it was a massive fail, I now rely on my basic and easy recipes that go through every week.

'Don't you get tired?', you may ask… No, I do not! And if I were, then I'd DoorDash or have my boyfriend cook that night. See how simple I fix that?

Do you check your paychecks for random deductions? 

You might think you're financially responsible, but are you really crossing all your Ts and dotting all your Is? Do you pay off your whole credit card at the end of the month every single time you use it? Do you refrain from buying a Gatorade on your way home from work because you know that it's not in your budget? Do you max out your Roth IRA every year, even though you'd much rather use that money to go on vacation? If you do all these things, you still might not be as financially responsible as you think. 

One essential step is to double-check that your paycheck is correct and that you're not having anything deducted that you don't want. It's normal to trust your employer to pay you properly, and if you're getting paid the same amount every month, you might not think there's any reason to double-check your paycheck. Still, you want to make sure that your company isn't ripping you off. I'm not saying you should sign up for the cheapest health insurance, because that might end up costing you more. But if your company is charging you for food you don't eat and parking you don't use, you need to get that sorted out with the payroll person. 

Why must the performance of productivity be more important than the actual results?

At whatever point in capitalism we exist in currently, most people have figured out that much of workplace culture is a sham. Who you know is more important than what you know; if you're too good at a job, you can count yourself out of being promoted out of it, and few people are as busy or productive as they like to make out. There are some who believe in the charade, of course, but plenty of employees are just going along with it to ensure that they get paid.

As the quiet quitting phenomenon has proved, companies that push too hard for their workers to put up this facade may not get the level of personal investment that they are hoping for. It is also a recipe for high turnover and being forced to invest much of those hard-earned profits into the difficulties of the hiring process. 

Unfortunately, giving employees that work-life balance that so many covet can feel like a step too far for some employers. They worry about it not bringing them the results that they hope for, even if they get proved wrong. As a result, the performance of busyness can sometimes be prized over the actual results. They think that this is the important part, even though that could not be further from the truth.

This young woman has worked for the same family since she was 17, developing a close relationship with the children and continuing to nanny during college breaks and summer vacations after becoming a teacher. But now she considers whether or not she should tell the family why she is leaving or, simply, quietly disappear.

Why did he feel the need to always be watching?

While few jobs are ever going to be totally supervision-free, one of the supposed benefits of working remotely is that an employee has a little more freedom with how they approach their workday. So long as they get done what they need to get done and look suitably productive to management, they can enjoy the peace and quiet of not having a nosy colleague breathing down their neck (and maybe put on a load of laundry between meetings, too).

This is also a big reason that many companies don't like to let their employees work from home. They want as much control as possible over what they are doing, and that is a lot more difficult when they aren't all coming into the office. 

Still, in this modern world we're living in, more flexible working arrangements are the future. Even the more traditional parts of the corporate world have to make some concessions. However, these usually happen with specific terms and conditions attached. They don't want their workers to get too relaxed or forget that they should be switched on and contributing to their job at all possible times.

 

Yeah, and the butterfly that flew in front of my nose this morning is why I failed math 15 minutes ago

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This story's depiction of management reasoning is way beyond my comprehension. I get that you're mad because you got a 1-star review and you want to blame somebody, but why not blame the person who's directly responsible for showing up late instead of the person who worked their entire shift before them? The way some minds work amazes me.

Yeah, ideally, the worker who came before the woman who showed up 30 minutes late should have stayed until her coworker was up and about; but this is real life, and people have real-life commitments to arrive at after work that can't be delayed. Plus, leaving before the other worker came in isn't enough reason to blame her for her coworker's tardiness; she worked her entire shift! Sorry, it's that I still can't wrap my head around it.

This is definitely one of those workplace absurdities that sometimes happen, but I trust it can't last for long as a valuable form of reasoning.

What would you do in this employee's situation? Would you argue or make your boss pay you more for the extra hours?

Picture a course so important that failing it feels like tripping a wire that sets off alarms across your entire academic year. A curriculum heavyweight. 

Now hand that course to someone who treats grading like an abstract art project, and you get, well, somewhat of an abstract art project.

I had a few of these during the years I've spent in academic institutions: a course that carries too much grading weight. Feels like a way-too-big kettlebell for me to carry that far, and stressfully intense because I'm in the hands of a professor who feels like one Prof. Snape, only Philosopher, not Wizard. 

There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class, you hear me?

When being too good at your job becomes a career liability…

We were always told that we have to give 100% in everything we do if we want to "succeed". What is success, anyways? I don't want to get into the philosophical road just yet, but I think it is a question worth asking. Anyways… we grow up thinking that we have to be the best at everything we do and life will pay us back with the things we want and deserve, of course.

Well, this employee can totally disagree with us, because their experience at their job proves the exact opposite.

For starters, they were always the top-performing employee. They not only were the best at reaching their goals and targets, but also were the ones who would go beyond their job descriptions and really wanted to be good at what they did. They fixed broken workflows and also had the best relationship with everyone on the team. Obviously, they want to grow with the company and thought they really had a chance at doing this when a management position was opened a month ago.

Naturally, he was the first one who applied for the role and was really hoping to land it. But life has its tricks because the person who ends up getting the role was someone who barely knows their numbers and doesn't bring anything to the table. He went to his boss and asked about this… and the response was that he was 'too valuable' in his current role, and that they couldn't afford to lose him…

I'm sure the boss is aware, but they just lost the best employee he ever had. 

For everyone who's currently working for a company, this story can be a good lesson. If we look at this person, they did it all, and they got nothing. Success was not in pursuing a higher role… maybe he needs to find another company that's willing to let him grow and to give him the space he deserves to be the best employee. For now, I'll leave you with the story…

This story seems to have come out of a soap opera. 

I hate people that get involve in things that are, actually, none of their business. Why are you getting involve in your friend's relationship drama? I get trying to be supportive to her and trying to guide her in the right direction when you think she's committing a mistake. But to purposely get involve and talk to her boyfriend behind her back instead of letting her do all the talking is weird You may be right by pointing out that what your friend's doing is wrong. And calling her out IS the correct thing. But to call her boyfriend and tell him everything is just going too far. Girl, you have your won life. Stop getting involve in other people's personal lives, I mean it. And this tip goes out to whoever needs to hear it. Stay in your own path!