I see this guy's true colors shining through a home insurance policy now that the bushes are gone. I see his true colors and that's why I don't like him. Sing it!

Watching a grown man discover deep feelings for bushes he never once watered, right after his insurance company tells him his dirt bikes aren't covered anymore, is impressive. It's also a beautiful, deeply stupid transformation, and his sorrow arriving fashionably late and suspiciously well timed, landing right on someone else's doorstep with an invoice attached, is a fine hint that he doesn't really want a fence. He wants a scapegoat with a mailing address.

I think a lot of us have probably had a real good, long, and hard think about moving out into the country and away from other people. Especially as we have gotten older and grown increasingly tired of the hustle and bustle. It's sort of that "inside you there are two wolves," but one of those wolves wants to pay a fortune to live in the center of the city and to chase fortune and fame, in some misguided thought that living in a studio apartment for $4,000 might give you a chance to bump into the right person who can actually afford to live in the area and who might give you an opprotunity. 

Once you've lived out that Hallmark fantasy and after spending your 20s insisting on living in the center of the city close to the "pulse," you inevitably reach a point in your late 20s, and certainly by your 30s, where you start pulling up real estate and browsing rentals out of the city. 

And, upon seeing just how much space you can get outside of the city, or in another state entirely, that other wolf starts to win out. Before you know it, you're weighing just how bad a longer commute would really be or considering quitting your job altogether, as that second inner wolf pulls at you to go and isolate yourself in a cabin in the woods like Henry David Thoreau and never talk to another human soul again.

I don't know about you, with the way things are going with social media and AI, that cabin in the woods is sounding more and more appealing.

Have you agreed to a favor, only to find yourself stuck in a loop of doing it over and over again for the same person?

My sister, for example, asked me once to go pick up a package from a clothing store, because I live near by it and it's easier for me to drop by there and pick it up. I agreed, once, wanting to help her out, and since then, I have picked up at least a dozen other packages for her, all on different occasions.

Now, while I love my sister and enjoy helping her out, I am not her delivery person, and at some point, it stopped feeling like I was doing her a favor and became a weekly errand that I didn't know how to stop. And the most annoying part was, I knew that if it were the other way around, she would have no problem telling me she can't do it. Me, on the other hand? I was simply too nice to set any boundaries.

I wish I could say that I stood up for myself and told her it was becoming too much, but the reality was that I eventually moved, and the clothing store she liked ordering from was no longer close to where I lived. It became unreasonable to ask me to pick it up, and she caved and started paying for delivery. I am still slightly disappointed with myself that I never told her how I really feel about all her "favor" requests.

At least the employee in the story below decided to stand up for themselves and tell their coworker that her demands are crossing a line. After agreeing to pick up her lunch one time, it became a daily occurrence. Even on days that the employee didn't have any reason to leave the office, they still spent their lunch time picking up an order for someone else. 

One day, they decided it was time to put a stop to it all.

Host with the most

I have the strongest opinions about this story, but let's bear with her, because I presume we all know what it's like to be in love and how hard it is, sometimes, to see the red flags for what they are. It starts with a long-distance relationship; can you guess where it ends?

Sometimes someone is just not built for a job, is fine to just give up.

The corporate world is always criticized, but they have one great thing that should be applied in every single kind of job, training. Having a specialist in their field explaining things to someone who has never been in the industry before is actually amazing. Is a great way for the new hire to learn about the company and the best ways to do the work, and it is also good for the longtime employee because they get to have a fresh view that can be helpful to automate processes or to see how customers may see their services. Is a great way to keep a company always evolving and up to date. And it also produces great new workers who are following the steps of an already excellent employee. It also makes the working environment more friendly as it breaks the ice between new hires and previous employees.

Even though it sounds like a great idea with really positive outcomes, it has its problems. The training has to be for a certain period of time, during which a great employee will not be working or performing their job as usual. This may cause problems due to a lack of available employees. Also, some new hires may need a lot more training than others, causing the training step to extend and lose a valuable employee for longer periods of time. Something that is also a problem but not really taken into account usually is the fact that many longtime employees don't want to be training new people. They just want to do their job, and this training may seem like extra work for them.

This Reddit story got me to think about that last point. Nobody really asks the longtime employee if they want to train someone. They just have to. In this case, the employee had no problem training, but when faced with a difficult new hire that wasn't really learning, he didn't get the support he needed, which made him lose a lot of valuable work time to someone who could just have been helped by somebody else. All the training shows as extra work to an employee who should have only been doing his job. 
 

If you don't treat your employees right, why are you surprised when they decide to leave?

The interesting thing about the story shared below is that it was shared by a manager who was shocked when one of their top employees decided to resign. Usually, we hear more stories from the perspective of the one who quits, in which they explain what exactly led to their decision. But, when you read the same story from the perspective of a manager, it finally sheds some light on what is going through their heads when they treat their employees so badly that they have to quit.

The manager who wrote the story below is genuinely baffled by the decision of their top-performing employee to quit, even though they explain it so clearly to anyone who reads the story.

You see, the company decided to do some restructuring of the team and the leadership, which led several people to be promoted, and some, like this one employee, to essentially be demoted. The employee is now lower on the organizational chart, and not only that, but he is also expected to train a new manager without anything in return.

To anyone reading this, it makes perfect sense why the employee decided to resign and refused any attempt to negotiate. It doesn't matter what the company's intentions were, or what their plans were for him in the future… He was being stepped on all over, and he refused to accept it any longer.

So why was the leadership so surprised when they heard of the resignation? One manager explains it all below…

Since when has a couple's personal finance arrangement become everyone else's business?

A couple with prenups, separate inheritances, and a full financial plan for marriage still can't seem to get past one detail: $700 a month in rent. His mom and sister call it unfair, his best friend finds it odd, and none of them seem to notice how much thought actually went into this arrangement. This isn't a story about money; it's about who still thinks they get a vote in someone else's relationship.

Is the office bathroom the new water cooler?

Remember in movies when office culture always made the water cooler station gossip central for employees? Apparently, hydrating was code for yap o'clock. But, we're all about the personal water bottles now, so going to the water cooler isn't much of a thing anymore. Does that mean bathroom breaks are the new time to chat?

According to Redditor u/Neat_Caterpillar_ and other Redditors commenting on her story, bathroom breaks at work are most definitely not the time for a conversation. And I wholeheartedly agree! Like, leave me alone, Karen, I'm trying to do my own kind of business. Dang. How stressful it must be to have to worry about an employee pinning you down for a chat every time nature calls. This Redditor just got her first "big girl job" and she's loving it. Except for one little thing, the office chatty cathy. She's a sweet older lady co-worker who just seems excited to have another woman in the office, but she always, I mean always, gets up to go to the bathroom at the same time. Then, while they're literally both in stalls doing their thing, she keeps a conversation going. 

"So when my bladder is just trying to do its thing while I'm also expected to hold a conversation, that is not peaceful. At all," the Redditor says. We're all about scrolling on the company dime, and that tends to happen most often in the bathroom. This chatty cathy, however, is actually the "sweetest," so this new employee doesn't know how to get her to stop and not offend her. 

That's when Reddit comes in to help guide you on your most strange endeavors, even one where you have to tell a sweet old co-worker to let you use the bathroom in peace. 

Frozen feet

Weddings are life-altering events; when we're getting closer and closer to them, our opinion changes, new fears arise, and we might feel called to call it quits. It seems that's what happened to this groom, who decided to run away right before his wedding, letting down everyone's expectations. Sometimes, it's okay to run away in fear, but there will come a day when you have to go back and confront everything you ran away from. It seems that he's not the type to confront at all, and he might stay on the run forever, but will his best man find a way to forgive him?

Should this employee be expected to inherit responsibilities that were never part of her job?

An IT employee is pushing back after management appeared to have assumed they would take over the workload of a departing coworker. The coworker was originally responsible for timekeeping, but eventually started handling payroll and business operations, expecting a promotion that never came. Now that he quit, the manager is expecting the OP to take those extra duties.

How unfair is it to up your daily workload because someone who took these extra responsibilities is quitting? This is not the OP's fault whatsoever, and she should not be the one completing these tasks without having a promotion or extra compensation to make up for it.

The worst part of all is that the manager is now saying that the new role has all of these extra responsibilities, and that's why she has to be able to complete them. In her defense, what does payroll have to do with IT? Nothing as far as I'm concerned.

I stand firmly with her in this story since this extra workload is not something she should be worrying about. Once in my lifetime, I started to please a boss that I had by taking over a bunch of extra stuff that was not related to my position. Although I ended up making more money, the amount of work and the stress that it caused me was not worth it. That's why there are detailed job descriptions that outlines were someone's work starts and where it ends, so there're no misunderstandings. 

What is it with all these entitled customers and their way of expecting to have free things just because they demand them?

What is it with people and free things? You aren't going to have something that costs money for free just because you make a scene and demand it. You are a child with bad parents who can just throw a tantrum and expect every little –and big– thing they want to have it. It doesn't work like that. Things cost money. If you don't have the money to pay for something that you want, then you don't get it. It's that simple. People aren't going to make exceptions just because you REALLY want something. Work hard to get the money to pay for it or forget it.

The problem with entitled people, like the one in this Reddit story, is the fact that they think that just because they want something, they deserve it. As if employees and service workers owe them something, so now they can ask for anything they want for free. In what mind? These customers aren't only entitled, but they also don't think. A rational person would never think that just because they want something, they can get it, like with the story of that man who took food from the hotel pantry just because he was hungry, or this guest who wanted a free upgrade of his room. Nobody who actually thinks before they act would ever ask or do things like that. It's insane, and the entitlement service workers have to put up with is unimaginable.

A stop needs to be put to these kinds of customers and their attitude. Nobody deserves to be treated how customer service employees are treated. They can't put an end to it, as they don't have the power or authority to speak back to a customer. So companies have to set a limit. There is a stop to the disrespect they receive, and it needs to be applied now. Stop these annoying customers from mistreating staff just so they can get their way, and stop benefiting the people who complain for every single thing so that other customers don't take on the same attitude. 

Social skills are real skills

Introverts and extroverts speak different languages. The same event can be experienced in totally different ways depending on whether the person experiencing it is an introvert or an extrovert. To me, it's not that extroverts refuse to respect the introvert's way of living; it's that, a lot of the time, they don't even notice things that the other person would deem so big and challenging.  In my opinion, this story is yet another example of that type of situation, and the introverted friend is asking us whether she was right or wrong in leaving the hangout early. Who are we (or anyone) to determine that? Either way, it's good that this friend wants to embrace new perspectives.

Have you ever left a job interview and felt like the company doesn't deserve to even exist? The interview was so terrible, and you were treated so poorly, that you want to stop other people from having the same experience.

Unfortunately, you can't really bring a whole company down after one bad interview. But that doesn't mean that you can't have the last word, and maybe show the hiring manager who's the real boss here. You just have to be clever and creative enough to pull it off.

These days, when a company has a bad reputation, there are several ways you can find out about it, the main one being Glassdoor. This website allows people to leave their honest reviews about a company and its people, and prevents some job seekers from signing a contract with companies that truly don't deserve their time. But leaving a bad review is not enough for some people; they seek an opportunity to actually get revenge for the experience they were forced to go through.

That is what led the job applicant who shared the story below on Reddit's r/pettyrevenge to find their revenge on Wikipedia. 

Their interview with a company's CEO couldn't have gotten worse. The CEO was an hour late, didn't read the resume before, asked irrelevant questions, tried to get personal information on former coworkers, and all that in the span of a 10-minute interview. When the applicant finally left, they discovered Glassdoor and, with it, the many unhappy reviews that were left on this company and its CEO. They also discovered that the company has a Wikipedia page that was basically an ad for the company.

This job applicant was not the only one who saw this Wikipedia page as an opportunity to take revenge on the CEO and his poor treatment of potential employees. Many turned to this page and left their mark, but this applicant took it one step further. They cleverly found a way to get the page deleted for good. The rest will be uncovered in the story below.

Missing an anniversary dinner is not great, but lying about why you missed it only makes everything worse. And sometimes, lies can reveal a much bigger problem.

In this story, the groom-to-be told his fiancée that he missed their anniversary dinner because he had been called into work. That would be a bit disappointing, but understandable, because work emergencies happen. Some responsibilities cannot be avoided, and his fiancée perfectly understood that. The problem was that it wasn't true. 

The worst part is that this man dragged his sister into his lie by asking her not to say a word about it because telling the truth would "only make things worse". And sure, a baseball game doesn't sound like an obligation or an emergency, or anything unavoidable, so of course he wouldn't want to tell his fiancée that version of events. In his mind, it was apparently better to hide the fact that he just didn't want to celebrate their anniversary that day. It seems that discussing the possibility of moving the anniversary dinner was not an option for him. "Yes, it's definitely better to lie about this and never communicate honestly with my partner." I don't understand what goes on inside the mind of some guys. 

Anyway, his fiancée seemed to believe this version of events so much that she actually praised him for caring about his job. And that was the moment the sister couldn't keep her mouth shut anymore. She had to let her know the truth.  

When you jump to your own conclusion… this can happen!

A coworker spotted an IT employee leaving the office with a couple of laptops and immediately reported them to HR for stealing. The accusation grew quickly, and the next morning, the IT employee was sitting at their office and was asked about those materials. In that moment, she pulled out all the paperwork HR had approved for her to take those equiptment to another office.

The best part of this story is how it ended: with the IT employee laughing at the coworker's face when she pretty much revealed she was the one who filed the report. I'm really surprised by how some workers can accuse others of serious things without any proof… but apart from the accusation, how about being a team player?

I've always tried to be a good coworker and help out if anyone has any issues with something, and things like that. If I saw one of my peers stealing office equipment, I'd most certainly demand an answer directly from them instead of reporting them asap. I feel like I owe someone the benefit of the doubt before filing an accusation that could end up affecting me, just like it happened to this woman.

The most important thing we can learn from the story posted by this Redditor is that being a good coworker is important. We spend a lot of time at the office, so having a good relationship with most people is crucial so that our days don't feel like a huge burden. And secondly, if we were ever trying to accuse someone of something as serious as stealing, let's make sure we have good proof and confirmation if we don't want to make a fool out of ourselves. 

When ending a relationship with an employee, for the employer, things are quite simple. One minute there is a relationship, and the next it ends. There's really no need to even leave that relationship on a good note, since they don't need anything from them going forward. 

But dealing with a former employee or ending an employment relationship is much trickier for employees, who need to have some sort of viable referral for future jobs. So they're especially incentivized to leave on amicable terms and, further, have some level of requirement to make sure that those terms stay amicable. 

But for employers? It doesn't really matter if they drove their staff straight into burnout as a cost-saving measure, as long as management continues to feign stupification any time someone brings bad employment to their attention, then, well, it isn't really going to affect them negatively. 

[Keep reading for the full discussion and the original story.]

Heartfelt review

Sometimes our managers are so spaced out that they don't notice their employees are having an awful time working at their companies. You might even resign without another job secured and block them everywhere, and they still wouldn't notice. If it were for them, they would call you from a different number just to ask you to post an honest review of the job online, thinking you would review them beautifully. That's what happened to this maliciously compliant employee, who managed to get the last word on the subject.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

This company paved over this woman's work, suggestions, and insights for two years, so she gave her notice and then, oh then, they suddenly knew what they got and had magic money to accommodate what she's been asking for. They say if you love something, set it free. Your employer doesn't love you to say the least, so it's no surprise they make even the breakup part hard.

They got hit with the let go cliche, she got hit with be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. This story has it all, folks. 

When so many things happen within a friendship, you start to lose track.

Luckily, most of this intense drama happens in high school and stays there. Still, years later, we find out we're paying the price to this day with numerous insecurities and sensitivity around certain topics. When we get older, we tend to cut off certain friendships the minute they become complicated and not stay around for so long, creating unnecessary entanglement. Something like this happened to this woman, who's now sharing her story, and debating whether her friend at the time was insensitive and if she herself contributed to creating unnecessary drama. Have you been in similar situations yourself? Were you forgiving about them or not?

What to do when there's nothing to do. Sometimes pretending to work is harder than actually working.

​Lately I've been encountering a lot more stories on Reddit about this issue than I used to. This could be either because now it is something that people bring to the conversation and not just pretend, or because now it is more common with this AI and more intuitive systems. We know that traditional jobs are changing  A LOT. Everything has become easier to do, which is great for the most part, but it also means that fewer people are required to do a job. Before, it was usual to see more than two receptionists at a doctor's front desk. Now you are lucky if there's one. This is because of all the new systems they use that keep the information more accessible and make the workload smaller. There is no reason to have more than one employee for that job anymore.

This has also happened in the corporate world. A few decades ago, we had an employee who was in charge of only transferring the text written by hand to a typewriter. Nowadays, that feels completely dystopian with all the new technologies that allow you to even dictate to the computer. All the changes resulted in fewer jobs and fewer employees. The advancement has been even bigger in the last 5 years, that made the workloads of corporate employees even smaller, but if they say something, they would just fire someone. So now these employees are stuck pretending to be super busy so management and higher-ups don't realize that they can do their jobs in 2 hours instead of 9.

This can't run forever. Companies are going to notice the incredible shortage in workload. This can bring two possible futures. Either they start hiring employees to work only for a couple of hours a day, or they start having fewer and fewer employees till we are all completely replaced by robots.