The main goal of a family vacation is to have a nice, relaxing time, not see each other every split second.
 

I bet that having two-year-old twins on vacation isn't an easy task. But the hardest thing about this story seems to be having to put up with her cousin and her insane requests for the holiday. If you go on vacation, whether it's with family or on your own, it is important that your main goal remains the same. To relax and regain energy. Whether you want to get that relaxation from doing fun activities, hanging out with people, or sleeping the whole day, that's up to you. You should be focusing on having a nice time no matter how that happens. Not on the fact that your cousin is mad at you because you can't hang out with her full time.

When I went on family vacations, I usually did whatever I liked during the whole day, and only met up with them for dinner and breakfast –and sometimes not even breakfast. It's actually nicer this way, as we all could do the things we like the most and still hang out with each other more than we usually can. We also arranged a couple of activities all together, or at least most of us, so we could see each other more. But usually it would just be doing what you like or chipping it on somebody else's activity for the day if you felt like it.

This probably is something that varies according to the family that you have, but in my case it seems obvious to let all of us be free and just meet up a couple of times. We are all tired and stressed for the year, so making some strict schedules to see each other won't fit into our idea of vacation. It will just make us uncomfortable and irritated. Is better to leave the "hanging out" part of the job to the spontaneity of life. After all, it's just a vacation, and we all deserve to have a nice time!

What to do when your own manager takes the credit for you and speaking up could put a target on your back?

There are some things that I'll never understand about corporate life. Managers, for example. You can have the best experience with them and have a manager that is inspiring and very helpful… but other times you can be whatever this man is. A person who is not playing a part in an important project but feels entitled to take all the credit for it… for something we never do.

And the worst part of all is that managers tend to have a good relationship with the people who are above them, important people for the company, who don't really care about what's happening in the smaller teams below. As a result, those employees felt they couldn't speak the truth or claim the reward they deserved for the big project they'd done. 

Being a good manager means being more selfless and putting your own team before you… At least, that's what a manager is to me.

I feel I'm getting triggered by this story, but it sounds so unfair! I can't help but feel bad for these people who may have worked super hard for something they are not even being acknowledged for… But hey, that's how life can be sometimes! I think we can learn a valuable lesson out of this story, especially for those employees who were silent.

Remember: we work to live; we don't live to work. That's an important mantra to always have in mind for the next time you're spending a whole night finishing a project or writing a report that is due the next day. Your own life, your family, and your friends should be the things that you care the most about, and the ones you should be taking care of the most.

Why would he spend $100 a week on just dinners?

Eating dinner with friends is a great activity. Getting to live with your friends as roommates seems like a great idea to have fun while living on a budget. Getting to eat dinner every day with your roommates who are your friends sounds great in theory. But maybe it's not as good as it sounds! Living with your friends can bring several issues into the relationship. You could fight because of the cleaning of the shared space, due to the guests each brings to the apartment, and especially due to money issues. Not every friend has the same budget, and getting to live together is going to make that even more obvious.

Some friends never go through with the moving together thing because of the money differences. They can afford different kinds of apartments in diverse places, and getting to an agreement can be hard. But if you decide on that and go on with the move, that doesn't mean that problems end there. You will start to think that most of the qualities that made your friend a great one are actually quite annoying. It may be fun to befriend a funny guy that's never serious, but to live with them… that may not be the smartest decision.

Stories like this abound on the internet and in life. And they are a reminder of how careful we have to be before deciding to move with a friend, especially if we want to remain as such after the living-together period has passed. So be mindful, talk to each other, and compromise. Don't just say yes to anything because your roommate asked. Be especially mindful of how you want to manage your finances and take care of them. A roommate could be found anywhere. Friends are more rare. 

Is this 'singleness' trend meant to last?

I suppose we can confidently say that nowadays more and more people are choosing to be single. Plenty of new discourse is forming online about new types of relationships.

Right now, there are situationships, low-commitment long-distance relationships, open relationships, 'eyecontactships', and a long list of other types of ships navigating the sea of romantic attachments.

What doesn't seem to appear anymore in the conversation is long-term traditional partnerships. It's not that they don't exist anymore, but right now, it seems that more people are choosing not to engage in that type of commitment.

Some argue this happens because we have a choice now, and people who otherwise would've jumped into relationships can now contemplate other options. In prior generations, being in a committed relationship after a certain age was pretty much  mandatory.

Anyone you'd date in your twenties would be, more or less, someone you'd later have to marry.  Both parties entered relationships with that mandate in mind, regardless of whether they knew it was their own desire or a societal imposition, and things kinda went on from there.

I'm not saying that was necessarily a good thing; in fact, I think it wasn't, but somehow I still think the place we have arrived at now isn't quite the best yet. We tend to be more lonely, and relationships have become more fragile.

Having some form of commitment towards another person or a relationship teaches you a lot about yourself, humanity, solidarity, and love; and I think those lessons are very valuable in life.

To me, it would be great if we landed somewhere in the middle on relationships, and I think we'll eventually get there after so much flexibilization. Hopefully, soon we'll all have a variety of relationship styles to choose from, and commitment will definitely be one of them, possibly chosen by many.

Why would the company with millions in revenue be the one paying for one employee's PTO?

When an employee finds themselves having to take time off work while they don't have enough PTO to cover it all, they are basically at the mercy of their company. Whatever the higher-ups decide is what will happen, which can make or break an employee's future with them.

A decent company with empathetic management might offer to help an employee themselves. If a worker has to go on medical leave, the best-case scenario for them would be if their company offers to cover that PTO so that the worker could focus on their health and nothing else. 

A less decent company, like most out there, will pull all kinds of stunts to avoid the responsibility of an employee in need. They would do everything to avoid carrying the weight of someone else, even if they value the employee and want them to stick around. That is the kind of company described below.

One of its employees is going to be out for a while for a medical reason, but unfortunately, she doesn't have enough PTO to cover her leave. Instead of the company covering that time off, HR decided to ask her coworkers to donate some of their own PTO hours to this employee. It's not a great solution, but not horrible either. Employees can decide whether or not they want to donate, and hopefully enough volunteers will get the job done.

However, this is not where the company's stunt ended. In order to pressure employees to donate their time off, HR decided to publish a leaderboard with everyone's names and how much they decided to donate. Those who didn't offer anything were up there too, names highlighted in red. What a nice gesture, right?

The only question left to ask is: where are the company itself and the lovely HR manager on that leaderboard?

As if looking for a job isn't embarrassing enough, they are now putting robots in charge of it.

It turns out that no hiring manager really enjoys the grunt work of sifting through countless samey candidates to find the handful that seem to be worth interviewing, and they aren't even that interested in the initial interview, either. Luckily, they live in a time when artificial intelligence gets used for everything, and they can outsource this annoying part of their job to a computer that is not going to get bored of it.

Needless to say, a lot of people looking for work probably do not find it that encouraging that their experience and skills are regarded as something that a bot can screen. The job search can be a demoralizing slog, so not even getting direct human contact in return for your efforts can be pretty insulting. Still, most applicants have no choice but to play the game if they want a chance to get that (probably insufficient) salary. It isn't fun, but then none of the job-hunting process is, even when it isn't influenced by artificial intelligence. Everybody has to play the game on some level, even if they have an aversion to interacting with robots.

During the interview process, employers put on a brave face as much as the applicants do. Whatever problems the organization has, whatever chaos is going on behind the scenes, won't show. It all lies carefully hidden behind a perfect facade.  

This new hire began a new office job and thought that they'd be receiving some on-the-job training. Instead, they found themselves only with two short onboarding sessions. The two days' worth of company-values videos and tests.

This continued, with no real work assigned to them and no practical instructions being given. They started trying to train themselves, searching around company files for procedure manuals. Their boss still told them to "work more" and to learn by doing. But do what? No one was able to give a certain answer.

What started off as an exciting and hopeful new start quickly dissolved into disillusionment.

How do you train someone who thinks 20 years of experience means they have nothing left to learn?

Multiple things are going wrong in this workplace story shared by u/One_Sell_250. From the start, there's no office manager… and that just sounds completely off. Because of that, when a new employee comes in and someone has to teach them how to do things, another employee is given the task, although it's not their responsibility. And things start to go wrong, and mistakes are made.

The mistakes are not the bad part: we all make mistakes, especially if we're starting at a new job. The problem is the attitude and the way we face the people who are there to teach us what not to do, so that next time we can avoid doing them. This woman, who just joined the company, apparently has 20 years of experience in the field and was not willing to let anyone teach her how to do things. She did what they told her at her past job, thinking it was enough. And, of course, it was not.

The writer said he was with her most of the time, and whenever she did something wrong, she wouldn't listen to him and would defend herself. This leaves no room for improvement, and the employee who's teaching her is very exhausted and not cooperative. And since there's no office manager, he has to complain directly to the owner of the company… 

The worst part of all was when this woman revealed confidential information to a client, something that is never supposed to happen since this is private to the company and their own procedures. If you ask me, after the multiple mistakes and the poor cooperation. I'd have done something to get fired. But that wasn't the case, and she's still working there and doing her own things. If nobody steps in and can stop her, worse things can happen, and more confidential information can be revealed…

What do you do when your children never learn to be responsible? 

Parents feel the need to protect their children even when they are well into adulthood. After all, they will think of them as their kids forever. However, no matter how much they love them, children need to learn to fend for themselves at some point, especially when they are over 30.

Parents may not want to leave them or be too hard on them to spare them suffering, but sometimes they need that tough love as a wake-up call to realize that they need to step up and take control of their own lives. They cannot depend on Mom and Dad forever. Learning to be an adult takes time, but that time cannot be spent being irresponsible and still behaving like a reckless teenager.  

Something like that happened to a mother who has an irresponsible son. He's over thirty and asked to move back home after breaking up with his girlfriend and losing his place to live. The mother lives with her daughter and her family, and loves to have them around, but couldn't bear the thought of having the son back home, with his bad habits, demands, and bad attitude. She ended up telling him no, that he was old enough and had spent too much time being reckless. It was time for him to put on his big-boy pants and figure it out. Of course, he was not happy about his mother setting a boundary for the first time, and he chose to cut contact with her. However, because his mother chose to teach him a lesson, he figured it out: he got a job and a place to live. He may not agree with her methods, but he can't argue with her results. The mother completely understands why her son chose to go no contact and accepts his decision. Still, she still wonders whether that was the right move ot make. We can all agree that it was. Sometimes children need to learn things the hard way. 

It's your house, your rules. Or wasn't that the saying?

Having your own house is a moment to live however you want to. You have the right and the freedom to decorate as you want, have as many pets as you desire, and enforce all the crazy and bizarre rules you can think of. After all, it's your house. It's your time to decide how you want to live and how you want others to behave at your place. It's important that you are fully happy with your way of living, and, unfortunately for others, that can only be achieved by enforcing your house rules onto every visitor that dares to enter your house.

I think that the thread below and I can agree on one thing. This house rule has a meaning for its existence. They were created because they were needed to prevent something. Don't enter the house with shoes started because the floors were always dirty after a few minutes of having them cleaned. The rule of closing the door as soon as you entered the house was created because the dog was always escaping. So I would just encourage you all to create your rules and, more importantly, follow other people's house rules. 

What a nightmare.

It can be really inconvenient to date when you have roommates. Your roommates might get annoyed that your partner is sleeping over most nights of the week, using up all of the water, and sitting on the communal couch all the time. On the flip side, you might get annoyed that your roommate's partner is taking over your life. You overhear them up to no good every night, and while you're happy they're having a good time, you also want some shuteye! Some people will specifically request single roommates because they hate it when people's partners come over. Others will specifically refrain from dating people with roommates because they don't want to deal with the drama, which is a totally understandable stance, especially when you're in your 30s and tired of roommate debates. 

As far as I'm concerned, I'm all good with my roommates dating and bringing dates over, as long as their boyfriend or girlfriend eventually goes home. I am not cool with adding an extra roommate to the house full-time, unless they're going to pay their share of the rent. If another roommate means that I have to pay $400 less in rent, then I'll definitely consider it, but I cannot deal with my roommate's partner mooching off the rest of the household for months and months on end. That is what happened to the girl in this story, and I do not want her life. 

Don't give out advice nobody asked for. No one cares!

I don't understand why someone would get involved in something that has nothing to do with him and then pretend to get thanked for some useless advice nobody asked for in the first place. In this story, we get some brother that should have just kept his mouth shut over something that didn't involve him, and that is not his problem at all. I think that getting involved with anyone's parenting is something really personal, and unless you are some kind of specialist in the matter, your opinion is biased. You are talking from your experience, which is actually not a valid qualification.

I think the best thing to do when you are seeing a situation where the kid is going over the parent is to shut up. Is not dangerous and not your problem. So maybe don't get involved in it. What's even worse is to get involved in something that nobody asked you to and then want some kind of thanks for it. You shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place. The best way to live in a society is to mind your business unless something really bad is happening. Other than that, mind your business! Your issues are yours. The other people's issues are theirs. Only give out your opinion if they ask. That's it. 

When does a company asset become the employee's property? Is it when the asset is legally in their name? How about when they are paying for all the expenses?

This mobile mechanic is trying to determine who owns the company vehicle that his boss paid for after the boss deliberately placed the vehicle in the mechanic's name and pushed the costs of insurance and registration onto him as well.

Jobs can come with many perks, like a company vehicle and a phone. But you usually wouldn't expect that you might get to keep those things after you leave the job.

I mean, if the title has your name on it, and you're paying for all of the expenses. Isn't that literally just your vehicle?

Have you ever fallen asleep during something you weren't supposed to?

Sometimes life just hits you, and you fall asleep when you weren't planning on it. Maybe you got a rough night's sleep, or maybe you've been lulled into sleepiness by a big meal. Either way, it happens. It happens to the best of us, and all you can do is apologize and move on. But what if this happens at work? Should your supervisors hold this against you? If it happens on a regular basis, then maybe. The person in this story was in a difficult place in life, where they had some slip-ups at work. Nobody likes to be told they're doing a bad job, and it can feel like it gets personal when you get negative feedback at work. But it's best not to take it personally, lest you end up in a situation where you're resentful of the people you work with. 

Messing up at work can be a real head trip. It happens a lot, but the way that we react to it says a lot about who we are. It's easy to get down in the dumps about this kind of stuff, and it can be difficult to get out of the muck. The employee in this story was definitely feeling it and wondered if anyone else had ever felt the same way. When you're in a bad spiral at work, it can take so much to get out of it. No matter what you try, you keep ending up in a bad spot. Keep reading to see what this employee was going through and let us know in the comments if you relate to any of it.

These scammers just think that we are all dumb.

In customer service, you always get to see the craziest things, the most entitled guests, and the most annoying requests. So if you worked in the environment for a while, you start to get the gist of it. You learn and become incredibly aware of your surroundings. That is extremely useful. You get to know when a customer is going to be a handful even before they open their mouths. You get to anticipate their movements and act in favor of it to avoid escalations and headaches. But as you get to see these things before they happen, you also get to discover scammers in a split second. Don't tell me that isn't a superpower.

In this story in r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk, we see some things that, if you work in customer service, may be really useful to learn how to spot scammers from a mile away. Here we have a young couple who seem to be traveling the world and have a reservation in a hotel. When the front desk employee is doing the check-in, she realizes that the card name and their ID names aren't the same. She points out that she won't be able to check them in if the card isn't theirs, to which the couple replies that they have a letter of authorization. The first thing this employee does great is not playing into their game. She refuses to open the letter several times as she knows it won't work either. After a while, she opens it just to say the same thing. The letter wasn't even signed! These scammers thought that front desk employees were dumb enough to accept that awfully written piece of paper!

What is amazing is how she handled the situation. She explained why that didn't work at all. She responded to the "I want to talk to the manager" with clarity, explaining that they were just going to say the same exact thing. And lastly, when they threatened to call the police, she encouraged them and even offered to do it herself. That is how you handle this situation. Props to her, and what a crazy story. But, well, it's just another day at customer service. 

Managers who treat meeting rooms like church, where showing up late is a sin but doing actual work is also a sin, are unfortunately the sort of people this story takes us to meet today

A customer service rep resolves an upset customer's problem, gets thanked for the help, and walks into a room to get scolded in front of everyone for being ten minutes late. The meeting obviously could have started. And for no apparent reason It did not. Maybe bossman just felt he needed to make an example of something using someone, anyone.

So a meeting that gets delayed, moved, and cancelled regularly is suddenly the holiest of sites inside the sacred place that is some office. Nobody gets called out for thatother times but today was that day. And although we know a lot of managers love a meeting about a job a lot more than working actual job. But that doesn't make it any less annoying.

Who could resist this great conversationalist? 

I do not miss being on dating apps. One of the most underrated parts of being in a relationship is that I am no longer socially pressured to go on Hinge because, apparently, that's the only way to avoid being alone. I was lucky enough to meet my partner in real life, so I don't have to deal with the awkward experience of telling people "we met on Bumble." I deleted all my dating app accounts before we even became official, both because I was so into my partner and because I hated using them.

By far the worst part of dating apps is texting some random stranger for weeks, only to meet them and realize that they're a total dud. You can't always tell if somebody's cool over text, but you can often tell if they're uncool. The guy in this story was talking with a woman on Tinder. Well, he was talking to her, but she wasn't doing any talking back. 

Teenagers can be extremely sensitive, especially when their parents get remarried…

A Reddit user shared on r/AITH an issue that has been affecting her family. She recently got married to a man with two daughters, Tara and Ava, and she also has a daughter of her own. Before getting married, she liked to travel everywhere with her daughter, and now she keeps the tradition, but includes her new family in her plans. She invites her husband and stepdaughter everywhere she goes. One of the girls, Tara, goes with them all the time, but her husband doesn't like traveling, and the other girl, Ava, is afraid of flying. The stepmom keeps inviting them everywhere they go, but the two of them always stay home. Lately, Ava started mentioning that she doesn't want them going on trips without her, because she feels left out and that her sister is closer to their stepsister than to her. She asked that they take more road trips and camping trips so she could go. The thing is, no one else in the family enjoys those kinds of trips. Ava has tried going to therapy to get over her fear of flying, but it hasn't seemed to have worked. 

The matter here is delicate. On the one hand, we understand that Ava feels left out and not close to her family, and she doesn't seem to be coming from a place of malice, just some teenage jealousy. On the other hand, it doesn't seem fair to make the entire family go through something they don't enjoy, or to renounce an activity they love just to accommodate her. 

Teenagers need to learn that they are not the center of the universe. People have the right to do things for themselves, and that doesn't mean they love us any less. It is understandable that maybe she feels unloved, but everybody else's decisions can't revolve around her. They said she "tried" therapy, and maybe that's part of the issue. Fear of flying is perfectly treatable, but you have to put in the work and acknowledge that those things take time and effort. Her stepmom would love to take her on trips with her sisters, and that can totally happen if they all agree on working alongside the correct therapist to help her get over her fear. The solution is not for them to stop traveling altoghether; it's to work as a family to find a middle ground that makes everyone happy. 

Why should he stay later than that?

I've never understood offices where employees stay late on purpose to prove to their bosses they're dedicated. If anything, I think staying late at work shows your boss you're bad at time management, but not everyone agrees with me. A lot of bosses want their employees to stay past the time when their workday ends, and the boss in this story is one of them. She thinks her employee's clock is off, but doesn't get why he doesn't think leaving a couple of minutes early is worth commenting on. 

If the meeting was truly voluntary, why does skipping it suddenly put your job at risk?

I'm sure that's the same question the OP is asking themselves. Before talking about the manager, I think it's interesting the time that the meeting lasts. Because it's only 10/15 minutes, people would think that they don't mind arriving early so they can discuss before the shifts start, and things like that. Sounds normal, and it shouldn't be that big of a problem.

The problem arises when the meeting happens to be every day, and the fact that the employees cannot clock in after it's over… meaning those extra minutes they are there are unpaid.

And now, the manager… what is it with some bosses that they don't know how to boss? According to the way the story is described, this person is not only very disrespectful, but also has a bad way of encouraging participation in this meeting. On one side, he's saying it's voluntary, and that the people who don't feel like coming could avoid it. But that's not before clarifying that working is also a "voluntary thing" (sort of?), and that the ones who are not in the meeting aren't working that day.

I really don't know how someone can be so mean and so disrespectful. At the end of the day, they are employees working there, and there's really no reason not to treat the employees fairly and with respect. If this meeting is important to them, then he should find a way to make this a fun thing, especially if you're not letting them clock in beforehand, so they can feel encouraged to assist. At least, that's the way I'm thinking.

I do think that some people shouldn't be allowed to become bosses or managers, since they clearly lack the skills needed to be a team leader. Talking badly to people and forcing them to attend meetings is not okay, especially if you're the one also threatening to fire them for a single 10-minute morning meeting.