Don't get discouraged by cooking fails… let's use them as fuel to laugh (and order takeout).

I have a complicated relationship with cooking. I love food, I love trying new things, and I can spend way too much time watching someone prepare an incredible meal online. But actually getting into the kitchen and recreating it myself? That's where things can get dangerous. Suddenly, that "easy 20-minute recipe" has me questioning every decision I've made in my life.

The problem is that recipes always make everything look so simple. Mix this, chop that, put it in the oven, and voilà! Meanwhile, I'm standing there wondering why my dough looks nothing like the picture and whether something is supposed to smell that burnt. And once you've already spent an hour cooking, there's really no turning back. You just have to trust the process and hope dinner eventually becomes edible.

I also think cooking fails are one of those things that are much funnier after the fact. In the moment, watching your cake collapse or realizing you've destroyed dinner can feel devastating. Give it a few hours, though, and suddenly you're taking pictures of the disaster and sending them to everyone you know. At least the failure gave you something to laugh about… even if it didn't give you something to eat.

And honestly, I have a lot of respect for people who keep trying. Cooking is basically experimenting until you figure out what works, and unfortunately, some experiments end with a smoke alarm instead of a delicious meal. That's part of learning.

So, if your latest culinary masterpiece looked nothing like the recipe promised, you're definitely in good company. These 21 cooking fails prove that sometimes trusting the process works beautifully…and sometimes the process betrays you completely.

The classical 'Petty employee turned CEO' story that never occurs

At some point in our careers, we've all had that one coworker who thought that if they sided enough with the management team and worked as their informant, they would give them a better position and make them the company's CEO.

You're probably going to find out about it anyway, so here's a little preemptive truth-telling: That never happens. Ideally, an employee who flags persistent issues is retained and heard, but often they are either ignored without reward or disciplined for speaking up.

With that, I'm not saying the employee is an unsung hero; I'm simply saying that his efforts won't earn him a raise and management will likely realize he's being too extreme and escalating minor stuff.

Maybe my opinion will be a little too superstitious around this topic, but bear with me. I believe that if you leave people like this to their own fate, they'll eventually encounter the consequences of their actions on their own, without anyone's help. And in this case, I think those consequences will be negative.

Given this situation, would you confront your coworker, escalate the issue to your bosses, or just keep yourself away from the drama at all costs? I would definitely try to discuss it with all coworkers except him (rather than the internet) before arriving at any conclusions.

Did he wrongfully reject a job that could've been great, or did he act perfectly after a very clear red flag?

I don't know if interviews have always been like this or if it started happening after the job portals started getting bigger and more sketchy places started being advertised there.

I have heard so many anecdotes lately of people going to shady interviews or receiving suspiciously vague contracts that I started to wonder whether companies have always been like this or if it's a new thing.

In my mind, the rise of freelance work has made companies a little too flexible, and sometimes they send generic and vague contracts, and you are supposed to trust they will hire you for what they said they'd hire you for; but that's another topic.

I understand the double standard here, and that if  the employee had shown up 30 minutes late, they would've immediately cancelled his interview, but I don't know why I'm inclined to give the company the benefit of the doubt here; maybe it's just because I'm too easily manipulable, but please hear me out. Not every mistake is indicative of how the company will act in general; although it's good to be careful of these things, it might have been just that, a mistake.

I think in the end, sadly, as most job-related things are, it's all a matter of how much you need a job and how many options you have available. If you can afford to reject any sort of sketchy attitude around work, you should, but if you can't, you might as well be a little inclined to forgive a little sloppiness because you don't have many options to begin with and you have to pay rent next month.

I suppose this employee considered other things before leaving, and that the half-hour wait was the last straw; so if that was the case, all I have to say is: Good for him.

Would you have done the same?

Can entitlement be cured?

At this point, it seems like I'm looking for stories to prove my thesis about entitled people who don't realize how entitled they are because they've never worked in service and don't understand it.

To be fair, you don't have to have experience waiting tables or answering the phone to understand that the same person who's kindly telling you the restaurant is understaffed can't say no after you find a way to make a reservation, regardless of what they just told you.

The fact that the same person who hacked the reservation is now asking on Reddit whether she was the A… ehem gives me hope though, could that mean she will start noticing that probably no one is against her and 'doesn't want to serve her' and it's more of a 'they couldn't deny serving you if you made the reservation even if they really were understaffed' plus that they'd obviously fight to keep up appearances even though they were working twice as hard to give the customers a good experience overall?

To me, something has led the OP to wonder whether she was in the right, and that might be her own empathy trying hard to surface. In my mind, an attitude like this would only be partially justified on a very special occasion, you were planning to go to that restaurant on, and you forgot to make a reservation.

I get it; sometimes, as a customer, you just want what you want, and you'll try different ways to get it, but adding a little empathy to the mix can't hurt. I'm assuming the meal was uncomfortable for everyone involved, or maybe they didn't care if the servers were suffering as long as they had their much-desired meal. I don't know; maybe I'm being a little dramatic.

In the end, they got what they wanted, and the restaurant could provide it to them, regardless of whether they had to work some extra hours that day; but either way, something about this story doesn't sit right with me. Still, I'm curious to know: Would you have done the same? Were there no other places in town to eat out?

What is that film you always thought had an awful ending, but nobody else seems to notice it?

With certain films that I used to watch as a kid, I remember thinking that the "happy ending" wasn't happy at all. Apparently, I wasn't the only one. The thread below uses The Truman Show as an example, a film about a man who has lived he's whole life in a world built for him and that has been live-transmitted on TV. The premise of the movie stuck with me when I first watched it. I always believed it was more of a horror movie than a coming of age. The story of Truman felt like a nightmare, and the ending wasn't much better to me.

At the end, we see Truman escaping, but did he really? He had almost zero knowledge about the real world and was already completely traumatized by the way his life developed over the previous years. All he knew was that filmed and staged life. What did he have outside? I never understood how it could be seen as a happy ending when we know that his life will never ever become normal. It's sad to think about it, and even though it is great that he could get free, he never really will get free. So is it really a happy ending or just a better ending than him getting stuck forever in the TV reality?

Apart from this movie, several others gave that same sensation. At the end of the film, I wasn't feeling cheerful and hopeful as is expected with a happy ending. I just felt weird, uneasy. Not believing that the star of the movie was actually happy and especially not wanting that to be the end. Apparently, a lot of people had this sensation with different movies, which took them to describe it in the thread below. But what about you? Do any of those films make you feel truly cheerful at the end? Or did you just accept it was a happy ending because of the kind of music it was sounding during that scene? Sometimes we do not agree with these endings, and they do not really generate the feelings they intend with just the scene. So they resort to certain music that gaslights us into believing the ending is hopeful when, in reality is just as sad as the rest of the movie's premise. 

Many of us have been mistaken by a customer for an employee of a store. But have you ever had a manager make that same mistake and threaten to fire you from a job you didn't even have?

I think that some of us must just look like we're waiting and willing to answer any question a complete stranger might have. It doesn't matter whether or not we're wearing clothing that remotely resembles the store's uniform… we just give off that vibe.

Maybe we just have a sense of familiarity or an openness about us that makes us seem approachable. And that approachability translates into some subconscious signal. A signal that causes some of the perpetually confused people who wander this earth to single us out and latch on to.

I have always thought that people can somehow smell the fact that I once worked a former life in retail and in the service industry. That this somehow clings to me like an aroma that gives me away wherever I go.

Whatever it is, if, like me, you find yourself constantly being mistaken for an employee of a store when you're out and about in the world... than you know exactly what this is about.

For the rest of you. Well, lucky you. You can go about your day without being accosted in the store by an expectant customer who is frustrated that they aren't being helped. And, they are frustrated that you aren't offering to help them.

That's when you turn to them and say, "Hey, I don't work here, lady!"

Still, sometimes, as much as you try to explain to them that you don't work there, they refuse to accept it. Through stuttered sentences, you fail to explain to them that, in fact, you don't work there, like you already said. But, ears firmly closed, they'll eventually threaten to get your manager or something when you, the "employee," refuse to serve them.

That's what happened to this customer who was approached by a woman, another fellow customer. He explains that this type of thing happens to him frequently, even when not wearing the color of that store's uniform. But he did happen to be wearing a red polo at the "red polo uniform" store on this occasion. So an understandable enough mistake, in this case, on the woman's part.

This instance took on another level of absurdity when the manager themself failed to recognize that this stranger was not their employee. It probably says something about the turnover of the store that they mistook a customer for a fresh-faced new hire.

Are you always expected to say good things when giving a reference for someone?

When interviewing for a new job, one of the most hated stages is when you're asked to provide references. This means that you either have to dig up numbers of old coworkers and bosses who would be willing to say nice things about you, or find someone in your current workplace who can talk you up and wouldn't tell anyone else about your search for a new job. It is generally a taxing mission.

We've never been asked to be a reference for someone else, but we imagine that if someone asked us, we would want to be as honest as possible, which is easier said than done. Of course, you want to give your honest feedback about what it was like to work with someone, but if your experience with that person was not positive, being honest about it can ruin their job prospects, and that is a heavy burden to carry.

But what should you do instead? Lie? Let a workplace hire someone based on a false recommendation? That doesn't sound very fair either.

The best solution to this issue is to simply not give the reference in the first place. If someone you didn't enjoy working with asks to put you down as a reference for a potential job, the kindest thing you can do for them is decline. You will obviously have to explain yourself and be honest with them about why you can't give a good reference, but it's better that they know and work on it than for you to hold it in.

Unfortunately, that is not the route u/sirthevinegar took…

All jobs teach you something, and some of those things can really change your perspective in life.

Sometimes we think that the time we spent at a certain job was a waste of time. We were there because we needed the money, and as soon as we could, we left. It happens. Almost everyone I know has had one of those jobs. I even had one of those. But, in reality, things aren't as linear as we think. We may believe that our time there was just for money and that leaving was the best decision, and there is no doubt in that, but maybe it wasn't a total waste of time. Maybe you learned something after all, something that will become really useful someday. Every experience is an opportunity to learn, and thinking that you are in the wrong place can be the biggest teach of all.

Over the years I've gone through different jobs, some I loved, some I hated. That's what happens when you are building a career. You start in places that you hate and are always thinking about leaving, till someday you find the job you actually like. In my case, I remember I hated working in customer service. Everyone was so mean, and I always felt like people had no respect for me or my job. It was sad, and I had a really bad time working there. But that doesn't mean I didn't learn a thing. It actually taught me so much about communicating and dealing with people that it made me grow as a person. Nowadays, from a distance, I can really appreciate my time there and the impact it had on me.

I'm sure that a former job that you had, that maybe you hated, has taught you something you still put to use today. And that lesson could be shared with others. So, whether you want to share it or if you want to learn more about other people's experiences at previous jobs and what they learned about it, I would totally recommend that you check out the thread below. You will read secrets that former employees have gathered while working in different industries over the past years. 

There are times when the company does not know what's best, but that doesn't mean they will listen to other opinions.

Not every role can be a winner, and every once in a while, an employee is going to take a job at a workplace that seems to be going nowhere fast. Quite a lot of companies are run in ways that are neither sustainable nor profitable in the long term, and not only are the workers some of the first to notice that, they are also the first to face the consequences when things get tough. Almost all employees are considered to be some level of replaceable, after all.

When it is a role that they are invested in, or they simply do not want to quit that paycheck, it can be frustrating for those who work for a failing company to try to get their voice heard about the issues they are dealing with. More often than not, the bosses are more interested in what works for them than what may actually produce results and some level of employee satisfaction at the same time. There are a lot of people in management roles who probably shouldn't have that level of power.

Are we supposed to do anything other than what's written in our contracts?

This story came off as really peculiar to me. Of course, I'm not an alien, and I understand it's normal to sometimes go the extra mile in our jobs, and that's what pushes the quality of our work upward. I understand you can't go back and rewrite an employee's first contract for every minor deviation that comes up later, but I definitely don't think it's fair to judge an employee for anything other than what he was hired to do.

In short, I think the evaluation to be made here from the management's side is about what made the employee change his attitude towards his job. If he used to always go the extra mile, then something that happened pushed him in another direction. It could be that he has now returned to the office, or it could simply be that he finally got fed up after a long time of making extra, unrewarded efforts.

That's another thing: if you recognize an employee under your supervision who is always making extra effort and succeeding, you shouldn't take that for granted, no matter if he works from home or not. Management should always try to encourage that attitude by giving something in return.

I think this employee realized he would receive the same amount of money whether he was only available from 9-5 or made additional effort, and he chose the option everyone in his situation would've chosen.

An old boss is publicly nitpicking a longtime bookstore employee over tiny mistakes, turning ordinary work into a weird little power show.

Some managers run a shop like a workplace, and some run it like they're auditioning for the role of Smallest Possible Dictator. This one sounds like the second type. The actual book business is almost beside the point. The real product seems to be tension, public correction, and whatever strange pleasure comes from making a younger employee feel watched all day.

Incorporating a new employee into the fold can be tricky work.

When you're working a job, you probably want to get into the flow with your new coworkers. Building a team takes time, and too much turnover can be a bad thing for teamwork. You need a combination of people with different strengths and different weaknesses to complement each other. The best bosses and hiring managers know this and try to assemble teams of people who can work well together. It's a delicate balance though, and not always easy to get right. And when you add a new voice to the mix, things can go wrong pretty easily. It's not difficult to get stuck in your ways as an employee. You have your certain way of doing things, and when something comes along to disrupt that, you bristle at the change. But change can be a good thing. Maybe you're an employee who has really gotten used to the way things run. You're in your comfort zone, and you're in your flow state. But just because you're in your comfort zone doesn't mean it's the best way to do something. Sometimes it takes a fresh perspective to help change things up and get some new life force in the organization. 

These micromanaging tactics are getting out of hand.

Do bosses not have anything better to waste their time with? When I hear stories like the one below, where the bosses start to demand their employees' unimportant things, such as their Team's status always showing as available. I start thinking about how unimportant everything you do at work must be if you are focusing on the color that appears below the picture of each employee. Instead of making themselves be seen as people who are on top of everything, it seems as if they don't have anything else to do. When I hear these things, I can only compare how much work each employee does and how little the boss must be doing if they can check that.

Corporate is kind of a lie. We know that you don't need to work 9 to 5 to complete your work tasks. If you didn't stop for breaks or lunch and put effort into it, you may be able to finish everything in 4 or 6 hours. We all know that, and it's fine. But that's why most employees have mastered the act of appearing to be busy, when in reality they are done. That is the case of this user who has made everything so automated that now he doesn't have many things to spend his work time on. It means his extremely efficient, but if his boss knew he wouldn't take it that way. If he showed how quickly he does everything, he would probably be assigned a load more of work to do each day, which isn't really fair, to be honest.

So, the ultimate tactic to avoid getting more work when you do everything quickly is to appear busy. Sometimes that is harder than actually doing the work. With apps like Teams tracking you every second and showing you as "gone" every time you stop pressing the mouse for two minutes, you feel a little overwhelmed with all the pretending to be busy stuff. This employee was able to fix that, but what would you do to appear to be busy when you finished the work for today hours ago? Would you just click around to always be seen as "available"? Would you start a side project? Would you copy the tactics of this user with his invention? Sometimes appearing busy is a full-time job in itself! 

Not every employer believes in the work-life balance.

In fact, one of the first things that every employee learns is that the vast majority of companies will gladly take as much of your time as they can get away with, and if that includes unpaid overtime, even better. More than anything, the average worker has to prove that they are good value for money, and some places take that to greater extremes than others.

Unfortunately, certain industries and businesses have a toxic work culture, and working crazy, non-contracted hours isn't just something that secretly happens—it is an open expectation of the role. What's worse is that some jobs can manage to hide this until they employ somebody, and then it comes as an unwelcome surprise.

We all know that more and more individuals these days feel that working around the clock is neither sustainable nor admirable, and as a result, they are more likely to try to set limits with employers who are demanding about working hours. The issue with this is that they can often expect them to ac out in response. If it costs them the job, it may be better in the long run anyway.  

Tips on learning how to receive feedback

The ability to receive feedback doesn't come easily to everybody. Some people have learned the skill very early on, for example, in school or in any activity involving teamwork and a certain degree of hierarchy. Still, even if you have had those experiences, it's not an easy skill to master for many people.

It's desirable to be invested in our jobs, but sometimes, it's precisely that investment that clouds our vision when it comes to feedback. For example, one can notice that some things in the workplace are unfair, but one should be very mindful of one's own position in the company so as not to come off as 'difficult to work with'.

Our primordial task should be our top priority. After we excel at that, we can concentrate on making further contributions. The key to making those contributions in a healthy manner would be to communicate them in a positive way, not as complaints, but as ideas that you came up with, trying to make a positive impact on the company.

The thing is, once you've communicated those ideas, there is nothing more you can really do, because your job is still being an employee, and you have no management responsibilities. So if some degree of injustice remains not being taken care of, sadly, you'll have to put up with it.

Of course, one can always look for another job if one's not aligned with the current company's values, but we all know how hard it is to find one that truly is aligned. In my opinion, we will always have to accept some things we don't like or don't agree with in our jobs.

Something that is, in fact, in our control is learning how to communicate those things in a way that causes no friction in the workplace, and learning when not to communicate them at all.  If I had to help someone to learn to deal with feedback starting from scratch, I would suggest delaying the response.

The key is to remain silent when you're receiving feedback, and then take your time to dissect it and process it on your own, so you'll be clearer when you give (or don't give) an answer.

What would you advise this employee to do?

Doing the work and getting credit for it are, unfortunately, two very different things.

Starting a new job is already stressful enough without watching someone else take credit for your work. One employee automated a painfully slow reporting process with a spreadsheet macro, only for the senior coworker to train him to become the office "tech genius." Eight months later, that coworker has earned praise and a raise, and the real creator still hasn't said a word.

I was never a fan of those people who feel like they can do whatever they want with new employees. Yes, we all know that new members need training at first, and everything they do needs to be supervised. However, in this story we are talking about a guy who joined a distribution company, which some of their procedurees were long and not updated at all. Since he's good with computers, he invented a system that accelerates the process of how they would put data into an Excel spreadsheet every morning.

Marcus, the person who was assigned to his training, took full credit for this innovation and got praised by every management member of the company. Not only that, he got a raise and was invited to important meetings, where people were expecting to have his creative ideas for improving some other parts of the company. Since Marcus doesn't have any idea of how to do these things, he regularly asks the OP to solve the issues that come his way. 

The OP has not corrected anyone nor spoken up about him being the one responsible for these advantages. Needless to say, I hope he ends up finding a way to get compensated for his good ideas and stop having Marcus be praised for things he doesn't know how to get done.

Nine interviews should lead to a job offer, not a surprise salary rewrite.

Imagine clearing interview after interview, completing a major take-home assignment, and meeting roughly 25 people, only to discover the job you applied for apparently never existed as advertised. This candidate stuck through nine rounds for a role listed at $120K-$160K. After postponing the decision three times, the recruiter finally called with an "error": the real ceiling was just $95K.

We all know that the job market is crazy, and getting a well-paying job nowadays seems like the most impossible thing ever. Companies know there're a lot of candidates out there, and not only take the time they need while assessing them, but they also play around with salary rates and benefits they can offer. This leaves every single interested candidate disappointed and very angry.

This exact thing happened to this OP, who decided that nine interviews with a potential company were going to get him a secure offer for sure. This position was not only right up his alley, but the salary rate was insane, and he was more than eager to land the job. However, things took and expected turn when, after the longest recruitment process ever, HR told him that the original $120K-$160K rate was going to be around $95K.

As we can all imagine, the candidate was absolutely angry and devastated, and confirmed how extreme the job market is right now. In other times, when people had more options as to where to find employment, companies were more respectful with time and were not as playful as they are now. We hope that this person can finally find a job that is willing to pay him what he deserves, and that he doesn't have to go through this process again without any more disappointment.

Some people really forgot what thinking is

AI-generated ideas all sound the same; it doesn't matter if they come from the free version of the LLM's or if they come from the most perfectly designed model to date, or whether you've prompted it to exhaustion. They sound bland and style-less, especially if you are looking for them to be creative.

AIs are really good at investigating or organizing your thoughts into outlines, for example, but even if you only use them for that, you still have to be very careful because they tend to make mistakes in sourcing, interpreting, and reasoning. You can totally use their output for a first draft, but you certainly have to check the sources and everything the AI has written, in search of errors and irregularities.

I've worked with design teams before, and when AI entered the picture, things started getting a little more confusing. For example, yesterday, we were trying to develop a tagline for a campaign, and I noticed most of the ideas and copy were AI-generated, and the people who were pitching them really thought they were actively involved in the thought process with the LLM, when they actually only prompted it with a question for the model to solve.

So not only are people overusing AI, but they also think they are actively coming up with ideas when they are not. My point is that people can intuitively tell when an idea is generic and made by a bot, and that works to the disadvantage of what you want to communicate with the message you came up with by prompting the model. I believe people will naturally choose things they feel humane, no matter if they are a little bit more 'imperfect'.

At any rate, we've got a long way to go before most people catch up with that knowledge and stop favouring their 'seemingly perfect' bot's creations. If we have a job, we will most likely have at least one coworker we don't like, and we should consider ourselves lucky if it's just one, like it is for this employee.

Do you think he should leave in search of a better work environment?

Maybe book your room before you arrive at the destination.

We always talk about the entitlement that guests have and the attitude they present towards the front desk employees who are just doing their job. As if they didn't care about how they are perceived by the people working there. It's fine if you don't care about what people think about you, but that isn't an excuse to behave poorly and to justify your lack of manners. Sometimes, with these stories, like the one below, we concentrate too much on the entitlement. But there is something else that we can take away about situations like this one: the lack of thinking skills.

We usually think that the customer is demanding something outrageous or impossible because they believe they are entitled to an exception. And even though that may be the case, that isn't the only possibility. That customer could also not be thinking. That is why they are asking for the impossible: they think the impossible is actually possible. Let's take, as an example, this story. We have a woman demanding to check into a room before 3 pm. The front desk employee already explained that their policy says that check-ins are only available at 3, but the customer insists. We always assume they insist because they think they deserve the room anyway, and it may be true. But maybe she is demanding that room because her brain can't comprehend the fact that it is not possible.

The fact that customers aren't only entitled but also dumb would be a very rational explanation as to why employees keep getting involved in these kinds of situations. People don't think. They don't use their brains. That's why when they are denied what they want, they throw a temper tantrum. They think that is a way to solve their issue, when in reality, it is just making things worse over something that has no solution. So maybe we shouldn't be so hard on these types of customers. They may not be doing it on purpose. Maybe they just don't think. 

Living where you work can make the line between employee and household member disappear dangerously fast.

A live-in caregiver moved far from home believing her job involved caring for one elderly woman, only to discover that unexpected houseguests apparently came with extra responsibilities. After being asked to surrender her bedroom, sleep elsewhere, and prepare meals for the visitors, she began wondering whether being accommodating had quietly turned into accepting duties she never agreed to perform.

I think live-in jobs can get complicated incredibly fast because your workplace is also the place where you're supposed to relax once you're done working. There's no commute home, no door to close behind you, and sometimes no obvious moment when you stop being an employee. That's exactly why having clear boundaries from the beginning seems even more important in situations like this.

What surprised me most here wasn't even that Grandma had guests over. It's her home, so obviously she can invite people. The strange part was assuming that the caregiver's bedroom automatically became the guest room. She had moved far away specifically for this job, and that room was now where she kept her clothes, belongings, and basically her entire personal life. Asking her to suddenly relocate to a sofa feels like a pretty significant request.

Then there's the cooking situation. Making meals for the woman you're employed to care for is one thing; unexpectedly becoming responsible for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for additional adults is something completely different. One extra favor can easily become part of the routine when nobody says anything.

I probably would've agreed the first night too, simply because two strangers were already standing there with nowhere else to sleep. But night two? That's when I'd want my room back. Being flexible at work is great, but flexibility shouldn't mean discovering new responsibilities whenever someone rings the doorbell.