Have you ever finished a job interview and wondered what the interviewers are now saying about you to each other?

You step out of the interview room, and the two people who just asked you a million questions are still there, leaning closer to each other to discuss whether or not you impressed them enough to hire you for the job.

Even if you do move on to the next level, you will never find out what they said about you in that room. That conversation remains a mystery, something only the two people present will ever know about… Unless you are the job candidate who shared the story below.

This candidate was fortunate enough to conduct her interview via Zoom, an online conversation between her and two interviewers. After the interview was finished, the interviewers asked the candidate to leave the virtual meeting room so they could use the space to discuss the overall business. Then, 30 minutes after the candidate left, she got an email with the recording of the entire meeting, including the conversation that followed the interview.

Everyone wants to know what other people say about them behind their back, and this candidate is no different. She immediately clicked the recording and listened to the entire feedback about her interview. She actually got a chance to hear exactly what the interviewers thought of her, without any filters or rephrasing meant to spare her feelings. We can imagine it was quite refreshing.

Whether or not the interviewers found out that the recording was sent to the job candidate remains a mystery, and who knows how many candidates before this one got the same opportunity. 

If that were to happen to you, would you have listened to the recording, or is it better not to know? And would you have come clean and told the interviewers about the mistakes? Let us know in the comments below…

Do you get the "Sunday Scaries?"

If you don't know what that is, I am so jealous. It is basically the fear you start to feel in the pit of your stomach on Sunday night as you mentally prepare to go back to work on Monday. It's like, we hardly get any days to ourselves, just two! And one of them is wasted on feeling nervous about the upcoming work day. When will we get a good half-and-half work week? Like, three days working, four days play? Or, fine, I'd take four days play three days working. It's annoying, but UGH I need an extra day to myself. Please cooperate, overlords! I need more honk shoos, I need more time to hang with my friends and family, and I most definitely need more me time. That will probably be used to scroll through memes for hours, but let me live my life!

Until that impossible day comes, all the employees of the world and I will meme about the workforce forever. You want that report by the end of the day? How about a meme featuring Jim from The Office? Or can I interest you in a still from SpongeBob that perfectly represents how I feel about all of your micromanaging? Your pickins' are below, boss!

When love becomes entangled with financial decisions.

The movies that taught us how to act and feel when in love forgot to mention stuff like mortgages, inflation, and the cost of airplane tickets. When we enter a partnership, we do so without knowing what pervasive bad habits our loved ones have and what damage they'll eventually cause in our relationship. That unknowingness is, in part, good because if we knew everything from the get-go, we would never form any kind of couple.

The story this husband shared on Reddit is about a thoughtful observation he made about his wife, and his doubts about how to navigate the aftermath.

Influencers are a good way to discover places and products, or just a way to make people more addicted to consumerism?

Influencers are either the ultimate trend, what everybody loves, or the people who can make a product go viral in just one video. Or they are entitled individuals who believe they deserve different treatment and free products just because they have followers. These influencers are quite new, and that is why most people haven't accepted them yet as real workers. That is also why they haven't yet figured out their place in society.

Work has changed. That is visible not only with these influencers but also with remote jobs, offshore representatives, and telemedicine. None of these jobs have figure themselves out completely. So, should we fully disregard influencers as workers? That is up to you, but maybe we are too critical about them, or maybe, just maybe, these people are quite entitled, leaving us with an awful image of them.  

Maybe this hotel worker who came to Reddit to tell us how fed up he is with them has a point. The experiences that he had were bad, they were not only disrespectful but also mean, petty, and deceitful. But is that enough to consider all of them some kind of parasite that we need to get rid of? Sometimes they seem to be like aspiring celebrities that really want to be taken seriously, but are only known to some and important to none.

In ten years they are two possible futures for them, mainstream recognition of the profession or complete disappearance from Earth. Maybe the places that don't use them in their favor for publicity are missing big time. Or maybe it's even better for them to separate themselves from the Internet's fame to gain actual customers that aren't biased by some pseudo-celebrity that was paid to say they like something today and that they hate it tomorrow.  
 

Can you support your friends without becoming their default babysitter?

It takes a village to raise a child… or at least that's what people say. And honestly, I agree with it. Life is hard, parenting is hard, and having people around who are willing to help can make a huge difference. Most of us have no problem showing up for the people we love when they need a hand. The problem is that sometimes the line between helping and being expected to help starts getting a little blurry.

That's why this story stood out to me. The OP wasn't refusing to babysit because she hates kids or because she didn't want to support her best friend. Actually, it was the opposite. She had already agreed to watch the kids because her friend wanted to get her nails done and have a few hours to herself. Honestly, that sounds like a pretty good reason to call in the village. Every parent deserves a break now and then.

But then she found out something that completely changed the situation. The kids' father wasn't working anymore. His plans had been cancelled, and instead of staying home with his children, he wanted to go watch a World Cup game at a bar. That's when the OP decided she wasn't interested in driving across town just so someone else's parenting responsibilities could become her problem for the evening.

And if I'm being fair, I can understand why she felt that way. Helping out an overwhelmed friend is one thing. Becoming the default backup parent whenever Dad would rather be somewhere else is another. The fact that there had already been issues with last-minute changes and babysitting sessions stretching longer than expected didn't exactly help either.

Of course, setting boundaries is a lot easier in theory than it is in practice, especially when the person involved is your best friend. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. Nobody wants to hurt someone's feelings. But sometimes saying no doesn't mean you're abandoning your village: it just means you're reminding people that villages work best when everyone contributes.

It seems that missing the flight wasn't an innocent mistake.

Some errors, like forgetting a name, missing an appointment, or saying the wrong word, may be read as expressions of a wish or a conflict that has not yet surfaced through words. Seeing it through that lens, the fact that the girlfriend from this story missed the flight might not be  'just carelessness'; instead, it can signify a much deeper truth. Well, to be honest, that truth doesn't seem to be that much deeper. Apparently, if you scratch the surface just a little, it emerges.

There is nothing worse than seeing an ugly truth, but well, I might be jumping to conclusions too fast; let's at least try to give the girl a chance first.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, which is convenient when you're a butcher, because everything in your shop is already at exactly the right temperatureMost people who get wronged spend years fantasizing about a dramatic confrontation: a speech, a scene, maybe a strongly worded Glassdoor review. Our guy didn't need any of that. He just needed a walk-in freezer, a good memory, and a former boss who, as it turns out, had been helpfully ruining his own life on everyone else's behalf for the better part of five years. The dish was ready. It just needed someone to serve it.

"The Curious Case of the Farmer Dad"

As we get older, our roles in relation to our parents often become reversed. In short, we become the parents, and they become the children. This doesn't always happen, but when it does, it becomes a source of profound distress. In the case of the daughter who shared her experience with this, I think it's more of a 'the dad never grew up to begin with' situation, but we'll see.

Lately, I've come to terms with the fact that I've idealized adulthood my whole life, and I used to think older people knew things I didn't or had some common special wiring that came with age. Turns out, they don't. Your level of maturity has little to no relation to your age whatsoever, and some people remain blissfully teenagers for all the course of their lives.

What's more important: a trip to Bali with your boo thang, or a 10+ year friendship forged in the mechanics bay of a project car?

This young car enthusiast thought that he and his life's work were more important than some girl, but his buddy and partner in car stuff disagreed. With his name on the title, the friend went behind his homie's back and sold the car they had been building together so that he could bankroll his vacation. Now that's a betrayal that Caesar himself wouldn't have seen coming. Et tu, brute, sir. 

Everyone hates their HOA, so why do they still exist?

Well, the answer lies in their power over us. Rendering residents powerless helps larger groups take over a property, and like a meticulous contagion that infects every level of this metaphorical food chain, the HOA is the apex predator poised to consume everything. 

Yet this one woman stood up to them anyway. 

Like David and Goliath, one email was enough to face off with a laughably terrible HOA. 

After months of watching their community get the short end of a "budgeting" cut, plants were all dried up, trees were pruned into submission, and shrubs were reduced to sticks and berries. But this woman, who later went to Reddit's r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit to share her tale, refused to sit idly by as her complex was turned into a desert. The plants were all dried up after the HOA cut the landscaping budget, but this woman's infinite well of rebellion was showing no signs of drought.

From scapegoat to saviour.

Sometimes parents perceive one child as more competent, intelligent, or strong; as a result, the other children under the same roof are favoured and protected, while the other is expected to endure and handle everything as an adult would. In the story below, I think the brother who tells it was put in this position because he's the oldest and witnessed the family's hardest times.

As children, we see the adults around us (especially our parents) as almighty figures, and as we grow up, hopefully we begin to understand they were never so powerful or intelligent; they were just normal people confused and making mistakes just like us. After all, it's our first time alive (that we know of). I'm purposely trying to convey a weak moral stance for now, given we're only introducing the story, but I actually think the parents in this story have way darker motives lol.

Getting fired at 58 after 20 years at the same company should feel like a crisis. For this guy, it mostly feels like a long-overdue exit

And fter 35 years of sitting through meetings that could have been emails, writing performance reviews for goals nobody actually believed in, and pretending that quarterly metrics represented something meaningful about human existence, the universe finally did this man the courtesy of firing him, and somewhere in the severance paperwork, tucked between the COBRA forms and the non-disparagement clause, was the retirement he had been too busy to ask for.

Is it wrong to reject a sentimental gift if it doesn't fit your wedding?

Let me answer that for you: no, it's not! Absolutely not. Listen, I only hope that one day, I get to have a wonderful mother-in-law because some of the stories about them are just pure nonsense. If I were the OP, and it was my wedding, I'd not feel bad at all for refusing to play an AI-generated song that's only going to embarrass me, my fiancé, and his entire family in front of almost 200 people.

I'll say, though, is it a wedding without some family drama? And I don't know why, but mothers-in-law are the ones who become the stars in every single conflict that emerges from a wedding. It's just they are so entitled all the time, thinking the event is more about them than the couple that's getting married. I understand they might feel emotional seeing their babies get married, all grown up, but that doesn't justify an immature attitude towards the daughter-in-law, in this case. 

And, something that I also noticed, is that the partner (the son of the MIL) never has a comment to say about it, or decides to put his own mother in place. Quite the opposite, actually. They tend to avoid those kinds of problems, as if they weren't their own, and continue with their lives. No matter the position he's in, or how entitled the mother is, I believe he's the one who needs to reject the song, and not his partner, who earned the anger and the silence from his own mom.

Weddings are supposed to be fun, and a moment for the whole family to get together and celebrate the couple. It's not worth it to be arguing about something so childish, like a 5-minute song that's not going to be played. I think maybe the nerves make everything more upsetting, and people tend to be more sensitive around these kinds of events… But, it's still a wonderful occasion to leave the egos aside, and to all contribute to make that night a one to remember forever. 

How much should an adult who still lives with their parents share with the rest of the family?

We're not talking about sharing feelings; you should always share your thoughts and feelings with people you care about. We are talking about physical objects you buy for yourself, but have to keep at your parents' home because that is where you live. Some belongings can be easily stored in your room and held safely if you don't want anyone to use them, while others are more difficult to hide or prevent people from claiming ownership of.

When I briefly went back to living with my parents after college, the main person I had to worry about was my little sister.  Even though she was still in high school, we were roughly the same clothing size, so she would constantly steal my clothes and even shoes whenever I wasn't there to stop her, and it truly annoyed me greatly. There I was, working hard for my money and saving every penny I could to treat myself to a nice dress or a fancy pair of pants, while she was still living off my parents and stealing every new piece of clothing she saw on her daily raid of my closet.

The only way I got her to stop was by putting a lock on my closet and ensuring she can't get in there while I was out at work.

Clothes are not the only thing your family can claim while you're all living under the same roof. The 20-year-old college student who shared his story below is currently fighting off family members from his PS5. The funny thing is, they were all super judgmental when he announced that he intended to buy the game console, and they claimed he should use his hard-earned money on things that would better benefit the family. But as soon as the PS5 was purchased, they suddenly wanted him to put it in the living room or allow everyone to play it whenever they wanted.

What can this college student do to ward off his family from something he worked so hard to buy for himself?

One favor from friend to friend turned into the realization that her roommate might have been stealing money from her. 

After paying her roommate for utilities every month for three years, one woman discovered a past-due notice that raised some uncomfortable questions about where the money had actually been going.

When a fairytale becomes your reality

The 'evil stepmother' trope is one of the oldest family archetypes in literature and mythology. It's present in Cinderella, Snow white, and countless other folktales. I'm prone to thinking clichés exist for a reason, and I'm sure modern psychology eventually started paying attention to why this figure appears so consistently.

The Redditor who shared this story suffered through years of gaslighting, suspecting something was wrong (bath products disappearing, missing keys) while unable to pinpoint what. Finally, one day, the truth came out. Once we discover something like this, the next logical step is wondering: Why on earth would somebody in her position do something like that? And that's what we're going to do today.

Good Samaritan or nosy worker who likes meddling in other people's business.  

Sometimes intentions are good, but the outcome isn't. No matter how great your idea is, you should consult your coworkers before meddling in the business and displace every document they use. In this Reddit story, the employee does seem to want to do good. He saw a problem and a solution so clear that he didn't stop one second to ask, or at least for advice, that he was going to change everything in the file system. I'm not sure if he's a genius or a moron.

That feeling you get when you find something in your workspace that is completely misused, cluttered, or disorganized is universal. Everyone has found that little –or big– thing that they know it would just take a few hours to solve, and it will change the complete management of the office. You have seen it, I have. The thing is that nobody has the time to take care of it, or at least nobody wants to take extra time to do it. The difference between all of us and this employee is that he took the time, every Friday in the last 30 minutes of his shift, to delete, organize, and clean the shared cloud.

The big deal began when people started noticing that the main documents that they use every day weren't where they were supposed to be, and others were simply deleted from existence. I actually think that this worker just got excited that he had found a way to fix an issue. Most probably, he thought of himself as a genius who was going to get a rise or some kind of congratulations for his hard work. Instead, he ends up being someone who has to stay in the shadows because his coworkers are mad at him. What he did is not wrong in itself. It's actually just really disrespectful that he didn't ask before deleting and changing stuff. 
 

What's the point of a notice period if the employer doesn't use it to ensure they have the quitting employee's tasks all covered?

Your employee is doing you a favor by announcing their departure two weeks before they actually leave, so if you don't use that time wisely, don't expect them to give you more time.

Unfortunately, many employers blatantly ignore this advice and do the exact opposite. They might be hurt by their employee's decision to leave, or they might simply be bad planners, but you constantly hear of employers who contact their ex-employees with questions and demands after they're already gone. Which leads to the question: What should the ex-employees do about it?

If we're being frank, no one should concern themselves with stuff regarding their last job from the minute they walk out of the building for the last time. As soon as you stop getting paid for the job, their tasks are no longer yours, and you can empty your mind completely of anything involving that job. It's time to move on.

Does every employee follow that strategy once they leave? Probably not. Many ex-employees find themselves answering calls from their former coworker and employers, answering questions no one was responsible enough to ask during the notice period. Unless they block these people, they might never stop hearing from them…

The employer in the story below, who shared it on Reddit, however, knew better. During their two-week notice period, there was radio silence from all of the upper management, clearly upset about their leaving. On their last shift, an hour before it ended, one manager decided to call the employee up and start giving them tasks to do. 

Annoyed that the manager waited so long, the employee simply said 'fine' and finished their last shift. No one could stop them from walking out of the building, and any remaining tasks are officially no longer their problem. If anyone has an issue with that, well, bummer to be them.

'With all my worldly goods I thee endow'

Marriage vows typically contain a phrase that refers back to the "what's mine is yours and what's yours is mine" idea; the way we think about that union has been ingrained in us for centuries. However, when one thinks of that, one thinks of shared belongings, goods, food, and shelter, not about claiming authorship for everything our partner has done before we were even in the picture. The woman in the story below is surprised, with good reason, by her partner's attitude towards her creation and asks us if she is at fault for the drama. Given the overt overstepping of boundaries, I'm going to preface this by saying she is not, but it's always interesting to read and analyze how and why humans sometimes act ridiculously.

Stories about young people being delicate, too-easily-offended snowflakes aren't scarce or special. But this story is very special, because scarcely do we come across such a spectacular backfired demand. I hope we get to hear a ton of stories like it, but for now? One of a kind, like, like, a snowflake!And in this snowflake of a story, someone's younger coworkers spend a whole meeting explaining that punctuation is basically emotional violence and that everyone needs to adopt a new system of tone indicators to make the workplace safe for their dainty little hearts. My response would be inappropriate, but these seasoned older employees did what they were asked to do: went home and studied the list all weekend, aced it, came back Monday using every single one correctly, and got reported to HR by Thursday.Looks like, among the other things the newly employed babies in that office didn't learn till now is: Be careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it.