Why do CEO's love staring at everyone's face on the company-wide video calls? 

The modern workplace is fraught with nuances that your average medieval peasant could never understand. Hybrid schedules, lunch breaks, and cubicle drama aside, the biggest concept for contention in the workplace has become the fated webcam. Managers, bosses, and higher-ups insist that their employees show their faces on virtual meetings, invading their homes on screen and demanding their employees reveal the inner workings of their living room, home office, or even the coffee shop they decided to work in today. 

But why must we show our faces in a meeting? 

It remains a mystery why C-levels can't fathom a workplace monologue without an audience, but there are many employees who have found a workaround for this conundrum anyway. Many modern employees downright refuse to show their faces on video calls, finding loopholes and virtual backgrounds that reflect their disdain for mandatory meetings that could have been an email. 

Blurry taped cameras, webcam "malfunctions," and uploaded images from a hybrid office are some of the ways that clever employees get out of the vulnerable video call obligation, but there are a few, even better ways to completely hide your personal life from the business world.

I've worked remotely for almost 5 years now, and I've never been a fan of meetings, virtual or in-person. Regardless of the reason for the meeting or its pertinence, I've found that revealing my laptop location, explaining my new background, and doing unintentional MTV Cribs-style house tours was never a part of my job description. 

Luckily, I like my coworkers, and I like my job, but if I ever felt creeped out by the voyeuristic nature of the modern work-related video call, I'd employ a few of the techniques below to try and staunch the prying eyes of corporate in the sanctity of my home, too. So if you've ever felt weird about taking a call from your cell or blurring your background on a video call for work, you're not alone; at least now you'll be equipped with 25 clever ways to refuse on-screen face time with your workplace on a video call. 

"You weren't using it anyway."

There is apparently a very specific type of neighbor logic that develops when somebody leaves town regularly: if an object exists and you are not physically looking at it, it slowly becomes community property. Parking spots seem especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. Sure, maybe somebody lets you borrow their spot once or twice for a guest, but somewhere along the way certain people start interpreting "temporary favor" as "profitable business opportunity." And honestly, secretly renting out somebody else's parking spot on an app while they travel for work feels less like harmless opportunism and more like the origin story of a future HOA supervillain.

In many households, shared resources such as a car can work smoothly when everyone contributes fairly to expenses like gas and insurance. But what happens when that balance breaks down, and it's no longer a fairly shared resource? The person covering most expenses would probably feel frustrated for subsidizing everyone else's convenience. 

It's understandable that a parent may encourage siblings to share a car. It seems more practical, and it allows them to share costs. Siblings can agree on basic rules, and that's it. Fair enough. But if there's someone who clearly is taking advantage of the situation, maybe it's time for mom to step in… 

Well, not the case here. The sister is not getting any help from her mother, so she stands her ground and earns herself some respect. 

When exactly does "homemade comfort food" transform into a scene from a low-budget kitchen disaster movie?

There is something deeply humbling about cooking failures because they usually begin with overwhelming confidence. You buy fresh ingredients, put on music, maybe even whisper "chef mode activated" to yourself for emotional support, and then suddenly the recipe starts fighting back like it holds a personal grudge. The onions burn while the chicken stays mysteriously raw, flour somehow ends up on the ceiling, and the final result looks nothing like the beautiful photo that emotionally manipulated you into trying this recipe in the first place. Honestly, every great home cook is probably just somebody who survived enough disastrous meals without completely giving up on garlic and optimism.

When does being generous with family stop feeling thoughtful and start feeling like somebody else is volunteering your wallet for you?

This husband is not actually against helping family members or giving gifts occasionally. The real issue is that shared money, shared products, and shared effort keep getting treated like automatic family resources without any real discussion beforehand. Whether it is paying for outings, covering extra expenses, giving away profits from their honey business, or refusing reimbursements because "that's just how family works," the situation slowly became less about generosity and more about boundaries. From his perspective, gifts should be intentional decisions both partners agree on together, not assumptions made automatically every time her family is involved in something.

Despite paying over $2,000 a year in HOA dues, this person has now gotten the silliest possible warning letter from that HOA

If you don't live in HOA territory, you should thank your lucky stars. As for the people who do find themselves under the rule of an HOA… they're just swimming in fees and fines and warnings. Like this person, who shared exactly what happened to garner a form letter demanding that they should do with their vehicles. 

What would you do if the new hire who took your job after you were laid off reached out to you via social media, looking for advice?

We, who work day in and day out, build our thoughts, our patterns, our lives, and our minds around our working lives. We're constantly pushing forward following a path, trying not to look over the edge at the drop-offs on either side of an appalling job market and economy. But all of a sudden, we're out there in the middle of it, floating, all of the noise of that life we had been living up until that moment just falls silent and drops off, and we have all of these neural processes that are wanting to do work that is no longer there.

And I can think of very few things that make you feel more disconnected from the world around you, outside of maybe the loss of a loved one or a severe health problem, than a period of unemployment. I won't argue about which isn't worse or use idioms like "the world is turned on its head" for fear of getting accused of using AI. My meaning here is purely in the sense of detachment, almost as if you're floating above the world as it passes by around you.  

I think it's pretty easy to feel like you're falling behind as things feel like they're rushing past you, too. And it's not really like you can just go door to door to businesses and hand them your CV like older generations seem to think you'll be able to. That cold calling with a piece of paper and a firm handshake will somehow allow you to circumvent AI-powered shortlisting processes and avoid the pitfalls of quite literally hundreds of fake job listings that are, at best, just there to scrape your personal information. 

But don't feel down on yourself. At the end of the day, it's probably not really about you. Just like an AI is deciding whether or not you get an interview, the decision for the layoff was probably also made by someone divulging all of the business's financials and secrets to OpenAI's databases in order to get ChatGPT to tell them what direction they should take the company. 

I would say that at least the moment you walk out the door on your last day, there's some finality and moving forward. But I've written that already a hundred times and that's clearly not always the case.

How do some neighbors manage to use something constantly while still insisting it is somehow everybody else's responsibility to pay for it?

This homeowner thought splitting driveway maintenance would be a pretty normal conversation, especially considering the neighbor uses the shared access road nonstop for his business, deliveries, visitors, and everyday traffic. Instead, the situation slowly turned into one of those bizarre neighborhood power struggles where basic logic completely stops applying. After rejecting a 50/50 split for snow plowing and maintenance, the neighbor somehow decided offering 15% was "fair," then later escalated things even further by declaring the homeowner should cover 100% of the costs instead. Naturally, things only got messier from there.

How would you respond if you found out that your employer was tracking your every move?

Transparency is paramount in the workplace. If employees are expected to be upfront about their productivity and efficiency, then the same should be said of the reverse. After all, most workers have a concrete list of known performance indicators to meet, and if they are fulfilling those tasks and responsibilities without giving anyone any grief, then their methods of completing their work should not necessarily be an issue, right? Wrong!

Apparently, at this company, remote workers who were not as easy to monitor were being tracked in ways that were not known to them. When this author received an automated email that his so-called "engagement score" dropped and that he needed to have a "wellness check-in" with human resources, he started to dig deeper and ended up learning that exactly how this engagement score was calculated.

Have you submitted your PTO days yet?

No? Well, you'd better get to it! I know they say they only need to know two weeks in advance, but let's be honest… They always react like it's some big surprise. "Oh, you're leaving for two weeks tomorrow?" Yes, Linda, I submitted my PTO, and it was approved three months ago; this should not be new news to you. So go ahead and submit those vacation days for August right now, just in case. And if they try to give you problems about it closer to your off days, just respond with a meme. 

Time isn't always on your side, but when your career is on the line, most employees do their best to be present during work meetings. 

Unfortunately, not everyone is as timely as their nearest coworker, and some workers have provided some of the worst excuses to explain their tardiness. 

Oftentimes, the best excuses are the simplest. Introverts know this best when they try to get out of social events, but the more elaborate an excuse, the more confusing the story gets. When it comes to work excuses, too, workers need to be mindful of their excuses and their explanations, hoping to keep their managers both aware but delightfully uninformed of the details of their debauchery. If you're late to a work meeting, why not blame the traffic? Why would you elaborate on some crazy story about a train breaking down or a lightning strike on the freeway? Keep things simple, keep things easy. 

The workers in this next collection did exactly the opposite. While many of their excuses for tardiness were valid and true, perhaps they didn't need to divulge every single detail of their lives in the opening few minutes of their company call. Because the more we draw a line in the sand between work and our personal lives, the better off we are as a whole. Bosses don't need to know about the wardrobe chaos in the morning or the washing machine explosion in the communal laundry room. They just need to know a brief reason why you were late, without all of the messy details. 

Keep scrolling to chuckle at the less-than-professional reasons that these creative coworkers thought up to try to get out of trouble. Being late for a meeting is one thing, but cooking up some elaborate excuse is an entirely other offense. Funnily enough, some of these excuses are so colorful they belong in the museum of modern tomfoolery right next to the workplace silliness collection. At least these coworkers will laugh it off the next time they're sprinting into the office with sweat on their brow and a broken high heel in their laptop bag…

Did you take a limousine to prom?

Who knows when this tradition started, but for many proms in the U.S., parents will rent their teens a limo to take to and from prom. It's just a nice way to make a fun, lasting memory for your kids. When I took a limo back in cough2010cough for my senior prom, the vehicle was just four couples of close friends. It was epic and turned into a core memory. However, the planning of who was going in the limo was made very much in advance. The parents discussed it together, booked it, etc. Once it was booked, almost several months in advance, then that was it. If another person wanted to join the limo, they simply couldn't. 

Unfortunately, for this teen who clearly is not good at planning, he missed out. But tell me why he sicked his mom on them instead of facing up to his consequences? Oh, probably because his mother is also entitled…

Everyone has an opinion about who should play James Bond, but nobody is embracing the ridiculous truth about this long-running franchise.

Yes, casting is currently underway for the mysterious actor who will inherit the unnecessarily immense responsibility of playing the fictional MI6 spy. Naturally, fans online have all sorts of hot takes and theories regarding who should ultimately take up the mantle now that Daniel Craig has concluded his run. 

If you really need a job, can you actually afford saying 'no' to an opportunity that comes your way?

We always hear people talk about the job market in a way that makes you feel like there are zero open positions out there for people. We keep getting told to hold on to our jobs, no matter how bad they might be, just to get that monthly salary and be able to get by.

This also seems to imply that if you are looking for a new job, you should jump on every 'yes' you're told, even if you don't think it's the best option for you, because who knows when the next yes will come along?

That's much easier said than done, because a job candidate can detect many red flags in a workplace even during the job interview, and no one wants to start a new job already knowing that they are going to hate it. Sure, it might be your only 'yes' in a whole, but what's the point of a new job if you're just going to want to quit the moment you get there?

Those are basically the reasons why the job candidate below decided to refuse to keep interviewing at a certain workplace. For the moment, they got to the office for the interview, they could tell that something about it was off, and that suspicion only got confirmed when the interview started. An interview that consisted of the boss reading the job candidate's resume in complete silence, refusing to talk to the candidate or ask them any questions. The boss then proceeded to tell the candidate they would be in touch, and that was it. The candidate did not utter a single word during this "interview".

When the workplace called to tell the job candidate that they want to move to the second interview stage, the candidate said, "Thanks, but no thanks." They knew this place was bad news, and they preferred staying on the job market for a while longer than risk starting a job for a boss they'll probabaly wouldn't be able to stand…

In this economy, nobody can afford to lose their job. 

Alas, when life happens, there's not much the working man can do, though, right? There are instances, however, when workers could have done a little more to try to protect their precious careers. And this is a compilation of all of the worst ways to lose your job. 

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to build a career. You go to school, you do the work, you take the low-paying internship, and still, HR forgets how to spell your name after your 3rd promotion. 

After decades in the workforce, many get tired of the day-in and day-out monotony and forget how to properly act in the workplace. These transgressions, these oversights, really, can blind employees and make them forget all of the hard work they've put into their day job. It's not like your well-being and future are riding on this paycheck… 

Some people don't realize that in the moment and have made some really big flub-ups in the workplace. More egregious than spilling coffee in the break room or microwaving fish leftovers, these workers in this next collection might have to consider switching industries completely after the mistakes they made. As dumb as they are, you're at least smart enough to know better than these forgetful workers who neglected to notice their audience, their setting, or the people around them before doing dumb, silly, and downright questionable things at work. 

At least most of us know better…

So much for trying to help out a neighbor in need

Being a good neighbor is a virtue. If you want to live in a kind and caring community, it starts right at your home. There are plenty of ways to care for your neighbors, and many of them take almost no effort. It's the little things, like returning your neighbor's trash can to their home so they don't get fined by the HOA, or helping a neighbor's kid tie their shoelace, or offering to bring in a neighbor's packages and mail while they're on vacation. 

But this guy has an odd arrangement with a neighbor, and he's quickly getting sick of it. And it's no wonder! It's costing him quite a lot of money for very little in return.

When things heated up, quite literally, in this manufacturing plant this worker was faced with the reality that they needed to leave their job, and fast… Wouldn't you have done the same under this manager?

Sprawled on the couch, one arm dangling off the side and the other holding your phone as close to your face as your eyes can still focus, the white light of the screen illuminating an otherwise rapidly darkening room as the last light of the sunset trickles through the open blinds. It's the weekend, or the end of whatever's left of it, the almost 48 hours since you left work have hardly been enough time to even fully decompress so that you can begin to relax and turn your mind to other things. You're still exhausted, and you bury your face and directing mind into doomscrolling, increasingly disinteresting, and equally depleted social media feeds, trying to keep those cortisol-spiking thoughts of the coming week from creeping in.

You can already feel the unbearable conditions of both the heat of the factory where you work and the pressure of a tyrannical manager who rules over the factory work floor with impunity, like some sort of distantly reverberated version of Nurse Ratched presiding over her ward in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

While this might all sound overly dramatic, for those of us who have been on that borderline of sanity, it's an all-too-real feeling that you don't soon forget. Every week, you start off barely recovered and riding burnout like a surfer trying to get up a wave that has long since broken, and is already rolling up into the swash and back out to sea.

And when it comes to that manager, comparing her to such an authoritarian manager might be a bit far. But, then and again, the archetype of her character exists for a reason; she, and other characters and individuals in our own lives, represent a type of tyrannical over-application of formalism. Resonant with many of the structures of society and the world around us that confine us inside the four walls of our own lives.

The almost comforting familiarity of those same structures is embracive, almost nurturing and mothering, until we seek our own individuality and stray too far from that strict expectation of structural conformity. From that point, we either return to compliance or we find ourselves faced with battling an authority.

"But," you say, dear reader. "I'm confronted by all of this waxing philosophical discussion about how trapped I am in my life. I just wanted to read a fun, editorialized workplace story that was shared online." If that's you, then by all means, don't let me keep you. Give the story below a read and see if you think they went too far or made the right call for their health and their career.

Retroactive invoicing is a bold strategy in any context. Doing it to the person who is housing you for free while paying you to tidy up is a level of confidence that deserves some kind of recognition

What is the best way to confront that one coworker who makes their own mistake everyone else's problem?

That was the question that this employee was trying to answer before she lost it at the one painfully lazy member of her team. Unfortunately, the employee might not have responded with the level of collected calm that she might have hoped for, but it seems that her coworker was asking for trouble.

People who have developed a personality where they cannot take full responsibility for their actions or for the consequences of those actions need to learn. The only way for them to do that is to call them out and to refuse to indulge their "world revolves around me" mentality.

Siblings fight all the time, but at what point is it all too far?

If you are a sibling, then you get it. The fighting is part of the job. The way siblings act and talk to each other is truly unique to siblings. Sometimes it is helpful, like when everyone else feels too awkward to tell that guy he's being a tool, call in the little sister, she will have NO problem saying it right to his face. Maybe she'll even throw in a receding hairline jab, who knows? However, sometimes it is not helpful, like if a sister blames all of her own life's drama on an older sister simply because she does not want to face the consequences of her own actions. Well, that's exactly what this youngest sister of six siblings did to her middle sister. And guess what? She still was forced to face the consequences of her actions, which were losing a supportive sister and being uninvited to her wedding.