You know it's not a great place to work when employees band together to walk out. Literally.
Unions were basically created for this reason, by having the working people band together to fight against being mistreated by corporations, they create power in numbers. Even without a formal union, there is still power in numbers--no company wants to be tasked with explaining themselves like that.
u/PegBundysBonBons asked:
What happened at your work which caused multiple people to all quit at once?
Here were some of the answers:
50. Droppin Like Flies
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I worked at a Wendy's in Toledo. Management was all over us. Didn't do anything, floors were filthy and greasy, lack of cleaning tools for grout, food was never fresh, constantly smoking cigarettes. I started my first day with about 10 other people, the next day me and two other people remained.
49. Keeps Going Down Down Down
I have two stories! The first is after graduating college, I worked as a roofer for the summer until I could land a job in my field (journalism). August rolls around with >105 F. My whole crew quit when owner wouldn't let us come off roof until it was finished. It was a 2-day job but he would have gotten a tip from homeowner if we finished in 1 day.
And number B: The newspaper I worked at for 14 years had lay offs. 110 people cut down to 70. Then cut down again 6 months later to 40. Then cut a THIRD time to 16. I made it past the first round but not the second.
48. High And Dry
The owner branched out and opened a new location, problem is they didn't do proper hiring for it. At the same time our assistant manager had left for better opportunities. His great idea was to sunder the team in half and fill it in with all new people. The guys that got sent to the other location were also unhappy because it was an extra half hour away too.
Both sides were doing terribly because of being short-staffed and tensions were high from being mismanaged because the managers were also inexperienced from being newly promoted too.
47. Silence Is Not Golden
Nothing fun here, but I recently left my last position starting completely over in a new department.
The primary reason was leadership had started to suck. All the way up into the executive for our whole biz unit. No communication, wouldn't discuss what was going on, complete silence when people would leave the company.
On my last day, 6 other people also left. But management won't acknowledge there is a problem.
46. We Are Worth It
A big company nearby got a new government contract and needed to stand up an IT team ASAP. One of the PM's at the company knew the manager and used linkedin to look up the entire IT staff. They then offered every member of our IT department a 20-50k raise, plus a normal 8-5 schedule (my company really wrings people out). They all put in a two week notice the same day.
The IT director has a permanent complex from this.
45. The Cycle Unbroken
About 7 years ago I was working for one of those door to door energy salesman scams. That was a rough part of my life. Since it was 100% commission based, I had several weeks in a row where I didnt make a single dollar. Same with the rest of the team. We were all beat down and tired and not getting anywhere. The 4 of us decided not to work that day and spent the afternoon hanging out in the car. We helped each other out with resume wording and how to apply for jobs and we all quit when we returned at 5:00.
Don't really care what happened after that, but most likely another craigslist ad was put up and the boss suckered a brand new group into working there too.
44. This Was Calculated
A new general manager who tried to run a well oiled, happy work environment like his prior military background. I was the floor manager, and I put in my notice along with the kitchen manager and bar manager exactly two weeks before the Christmas rush.
43. District Managers Have No Idea Ever
I worked at a chain of buy/sell/trade media stores (I was a manager) and a higher-up manager passed away suddenly. From then on, two district managers worked there several days a week, and they were so difficult to work with/made the job significantly less fun, that in a month the store had lost about 6 employees. I left soon after.
42. Homophobia Ain't Cute
A manager came out as a lesbian and got fired. Nobody could prove it was because she is gay but all the employees knew that was why. We all loved her as she was the only closing manager who actually guided new employees and gave everyone assistance when needed. She would actually personally cover for any break unless she was needed for something important. The entire night shift at this fast food place included all freshly graduated high school students who had been there for two years except for one junior who just started. We all quit on the spot. The only other trained closers were all the other managers and two girls on vacation.
This was years ago but it still makes me angry.
41. It's LITERALLY Always The Republicans
My current company, and several others, were snatched up by some venture capitalists. They fired a lot of the essential personnel, are wringing as much money from the clients as they can, and are going to sell off the pieces.
Loads of people are quitting (about 20% so far) after loads of people were laid off (another 20%).
I'm here watching the place collapse because my gig is pretty sweet and I need the insurance until the end of the year, but I don't expect the company to be around in 2021. All of the acquired companies will fail. The venture capitalists will make off with a few million. The working class gets completely screwed.
But hey, that's what happens when you don't vote for your own interests, Americans. It's also what happens when all of you refused to join me in forming a union to fight back against management.
40. Solidarity
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Worked at a big ski resort, in the retail/rental shop. The shop manager had a New Year's Eve party, and everyone was invited. Drinks for all, including the under 21 crew. Joints were passed around, and some other substances were consumed as well... The next day, the same manager had everyone at work take a "random" drug test. He was probably pressured from above, but still a jerk move. Everyone on that shift failed and lost their jobs. In solidarity, we all quit the next day. HR offered everyone their jobs back who didn't take the drug test. A couple went back, but most did not.
39. Wrong Emails
One Sunday night an spreadsheet with everyone's pay listed along with notes on what the owners thought about them showed up in every email account. Except the owners.
Monday was a fun day.
38. No Amount Of Money Is Worth This
I worked at a hospital on a step down (from critical care) unit. It was a small hospital and our unit had about 40 employees. Eighteen left in a 45 day period, starting when we got a new boss. She wasn't a horrible person, but she was very indifferent. When HR finally met with us, two things came up repeatedly. The schedule was a crazy mess. The boss would change it without telling us, so we would show up when not needed or not know we were supposed to be there. Second item was the feeling that the boss didn't give a damn about us.
They listened for three hours to the evidence of that stuff and then told us if we decided to stay, sign this agreement to not complain. (The money was better than most area hospitals.)
My own story was when they suggested that they might not be able to give me time off for my son's wedding out of state. I never took much time off, and my son is in the service, so I pitched a huge fit and quit. I'm not sorry. Money isn't everything, and I learned that a boss who doesn't give a damn is even worse than a micromanager.
37. Oh The Treatment Inside Is Frightful
Worked at a Walgreens over the summer during college. Holidays come around and it was my last Christmas before I joined the military and wanted to go home. Management was being incredibly short with everyone regarding time off and decided that they didn't want to close for Christmas, and the only fair way to divide time was that every single employee had to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Two managers walked out along with 3 or 4 other employees in addition to an overnight shift guy they fired earlier in the month. Everyone was sick of their bull and how they were treating their employees so it was almost a poetic revenge seeing everyone quit the week before Christmas. Their most torturous tactic was to play a holiday cd of Christmas music that only had 10 songs on it and looped every 30 minutes on a six hour shift. So many people kept shutting it off they put a CCTV camera on it and threatened to fire whoever touched it.
36. False Claims And Creations
I used to be a supervisor and one day I get a call from my manager saying one of my staff filed a complaint against me saying I threatened them.
This staffer was known to always be out for attention but management and corporate took what they said as fact before even asking for my side of it and they "suspended me indefinitely"
90% of the staff quit the next day after I told them what happened.
The kicker? I wasn't even THERE on the day the staffer claimed I threatened them but management didn't even bother to check the schedule.
35. Overstretched
The restaurant that i worked at as a server was a mess. We would only have 2 servers during the busy times of the day and then only 1 server opening & closing the restaurant. Our boss could have had more servers working at a time but refused so he could save some extra pennies. The restaurant was huge and seated max like 60 people.
So, during lunch and dinner times, me and the other server would literally be running everywhere, trying to serve the customers. We barely got any tips as well since, the service was slow. 2 servers can't possibly give good service to 50 people at a time.
The kitchen staff was also short so the food would come out very slow as well. We never got paid on time and we would always have to work over our actual shifts because there would always be so much work to do when we were closing the restaurant. It was our responsibility to finish everything and make sure it was ready for business the next day. The only reason people worked there was because the people were great, the staff was one big family. We all quit because it was so exhausting and our boss was so entitled and expected us to work way above the job description.
34. Always A Bad Manager
We got a new store manager. She figured out that the less money she spent on overtime, the bigger her bonus would be.... so she cut ALL overtime. Our company works by giving employees small contracts and then handing out overtime, so once we were all cut down to our contract hours (I went from working 30-40 hours a week to 4. Yep, FOUR HOURS A WEEK), everyone started leaving. I just got out this week!
33. Fancy Going Down
I used to bus tables at a restaurant. The way it worked was that bussers did all the worst work while the waiters smoked and did nothing. But the promise was that if you put in your slave labor for a couple years, you'd get to be a waiter, where you'd be making six figures (it was a fancy restaurant) for doing next to nothing.
After 2 and a half years there, I asked about a promotion to waiter and was told "yes, you've been doing such a good job, just keep it up and we'll move you up next week." That went on for another 8 months or so and it became clear they were just stringing me along.
I'd been tracking the money I was making the whole time, and it was way under minimum wage. Around $2.50-3.00 an hour. So there was no reason to work there if the promotion wasn't coming. I shared that info with the other bussers and we all quit on the same day.
No notice or anything, just none of us showed up on the busiest day of the year. A few guys actively sabotaged things the night before leaving: hid trays, filled catsup bottles with water, left one of the freezers open.
The restaurant still tried to open and it was a disaster which indirectly lead to closing down after being open for like 70 years.
32. Not Planning
They announced mass layoffs of everyone that started after a certain date. 73 people. They also said they expected everyone would perform their jobs as normal and that no vacation time would be approved before that date. The next day 55 people didn't show up and the plant practically shut down that day, because the people that were being let go all worked the same shift.
31. I'm Not Gonna Train My Replacement
They had a policy where everyone doing similar tasks earned the same.
Then they started hiring new people with 20% up to 40% higher salaries and refused to give a raise to the older employees, who were supposed to train them.
30. Contractors Gone Bye Bye
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About a decade ago, NASA began doing background checks on all contracted employees. Of all the NASA centers, the Jet Propulsion Lab is the only where the employees are contractors and not civil servants since it's managed by CalTech. When it was announced that the background checks would be done for all new and current employees, some sued saying it violated their privacy.
Long story short, the case made its way up to the Supreme Court, and the Court ruled in an 8-0 decision that the NASA background checks did not violate any such constitutional privacy right. As a result, a bunch of people quit and left JPL.
29. Crash And Burn
I used to work for a medium sized Midwestern retailer, at the corporate office. The company spun off it's hugely profitable division to it's own IPO, which didn't go so well. After that, things got tight. Finally upper management decided to thin the herd out - so they encouraged early retirements. A few went. Then they did a analysis and restructure of the IT area. Between programmers, support, networking, etc.. about 300 people or so I think. They took mainframe specialists and put them on desktop PC support. They split up the networking/desktop support team and had some on store support, some stayed as networking, some to mainframe work, etc.
They pulled rights from some of the team who were qualified and certified (NetWare days) and gave the rights to the data security team, one of which took the class, but refused to take the cert test for fear they'd fail. Level 2 and 3 support persons for the corporate offices were sent to take help desk calls for the stores. Not knocking the help desk by the way, excellent crew - but when you put someone there untrained, and have no support setup, it's not a "good career move with room for advancement", as the IT Director described it. Set up everyone to fail.
Thus began the mass exodus over a year. It got to the point, there were weekly emails "we wish X good luck on their future endeavors" Almost everyone eventually left, and some of those that didn't, eventually had their jobs cut. They lost a lot of quality people that were dedicated to the company and it's success.
It was no shock that the company eventually went out of business. Just shocking how long it took.
28. No More Shafting
Me quitting started a chain reaction. I was a bit older that most of the others working around me and took on the 'work mum' role. We were all getting shafted with pay. I took it all the way to the top and he had to backpay us all a lot. After I quit, most of my colleagues did too. The business closed three months after I left.
27. Making It Clearer
Myself along with the five other managers had our hours cut without being given a reason. About a week passes and after constantly insisting someone tell us why, a manager from a different shift says some questionable things about my working ethic.
Instead of speaking to them or anyone above me about it, I walk in on my day off, uniforms and key in hand and am met with,"what are you doing, you can't just quit?". Well I can and I did, by the next day another manager and a few crew members have quit. I didn't make it through the weekend before the owner calls me asking to reconsider quitting as there is no way they could keep the place running with the few managers left. I finally got the answers to my question after asking for so long, all it took was multiple people quitting on the spot for them to realize if there's a problem, address and then you can start dealing out punishments.
26. Front The Line
Probably too late but I've got two:
A manager who was promoted from frontline with zero supervisory experience, and who was prone to flippant mood swings started micro managing everyone in a portrait studio I worked at. She would breathe down our necks and try to correct our photo techniques which had never received complaints or concerns, and then demanded we start trying to hardsell higher photo packages so she could get a sales bonus. 3 of put of 4 of us quit within 2 months after she was promoted and staff was hard to attract for the position.
A restaurant manager at a well known restaurant chain would verbally and physically abuse the male staff, and sexually harass the female staff constantly. It got so bad that he got into a fist fight with one of the kitchen staff. A few weeks later, there was a collision that one of the staff died in. The funeral came and he refused to let anyone take time off, including the close friends that worked there, take time off. He kept this up and despite the complaints to HR nothing was done so a little of half the staff quit the following week. I think he has since been charged.
25. Mess With The Bull
I used to work at a hotel as front desk. Every year they did a week of front desk appreciation and housekeeping appreciation. The year I worked there they did the front desk week and we got a ton of free stuff, dinner paid for, gift cards, etc. Then the general manager got promoted to corporate and a new manager came in. Housekeeping's turn came up, but they didn't do anything for them. Tons of excuses and a few weeks later two of the women are coming up on their 10 year anniversary.
This is supposed to be a big deal, they are promised gift baskets with tons of stuff, but the anniversary comes and goes and they don't even get a "thank you." It was also around this time that people were planning on doing the immigrant protest. Basically don't show up to work if you're an immigrant for a day. They're having the morning meeting a few days before the protest is supposed to go down. The general manager goes on this rant about how everyone better show up that day or they can just not bother coming back.
Well that creates a storm. All of these women had been working hard, barely calling in and hadn't gotten any recognition. And a few of them had been working there for 10+ years. So they all walked out, the entire housekeeping staff. The general manager tried to call in the front desk to clean, but none of us were trained for it. So him and the assistant manager ended up cleaning 100+ rooms by themselves. They didn't finish until 9pm.
24. The Director Wanted This
Oh boy i have a good one.
Company i worked for decided to move our offices about 200 miles away, near a bigger city. This wasn't communicated to any of the staff until 3 months before the move.
At the meeting, when the director informed us of the change, he tried to play it off as a good thing because we would finally be near a bustling city and all that.
Problem was, not one person considered their entire work force would now have to relocate or catch trains several hours each day to get to work.
Unsurprisingly, everyone ended up quitting and finding closer work within weeks, except one person who lived 5 minutes away from the new office. That person? The director.
23. Bye, Newsweek!
Worked at Newsweek. A couple of political reporters had just published a story investigating the idea that the magazine is allegedly funded by a Christian cult. In response, leadership fired the reporters and all the top editor staff. Anybody who could afford to quit on the spot did, and the rest of us started applying to jobs right away.
22. The Way Is Never Plagiarism
Small office job (+/- 10 people). Manager messed up and promised a lot more than we had to a customer, we had a ton of work to do for free to them and no time left to work on things that could be billed. Everyone came together and worked nearly 300 hours per month for half a year so that the company could keep its regular operations and at the same time fulfill the contract with the new customer.
When the storm was finally over they hired a new guy with a better salary than everyone else in the company, without giving anyone a raise.
In a couple months he was the oldest employee they had. A few years later I learned he was fired because the only thing he knew how to do was to oversell himself. And also because he published a coworker's work on a magazine under his own name.
21. One Is Despicable
My old manager was very abusive. Called me a really bad word, another coworker a racist derogatory word for Hispanic, called a black customer another racist word, called us names for wanting time off during the summer. We went through 9 employees in a three month period. She would punish employees if they did something wrong by giving them 9 hour weeks, 3 hour shifts each day. And force us to clean walls and corners of the floors.
We all got together and went to corporate. She is no longer with the company. From what I hear, people at her new job despise her.
20. Teamwork Dissolves
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My boss/owner had kids and turned from being nice to everyone and organising staff nights, to being all about the money and profit. People who had been there 10-25 years started leaving because they weren't treated with the respect for the work and overtime they put in. Lost 5 top employees last year and I'm the second to be leaving this year.
He sacked/forced out (we still don't know which) a really good manager and he hired his mate to over see customer support. Safe to say it went down hill as new people weren't trained and staff didn't help each other as much because there is more pressure on individual performances.
19. No Heat?!
Friend of mine worked in Overnights at a Grocery store, the manager would let them wear headphones and on down time let them relax and goof around a bit.
New management came in, and made mandatory that all overnight people must do 35+ each and turned heat off at night and would have to do paper work on breaks.
On the 3rd week, they had a "Mutiny" and 2/3's of the department trashed the place and quit.
18. When Evil Gets Rewarded
They restructured the management system. The company added one more person to the second tier of management and that person drove half the employees away, myself included. Part of me kind of wants to thank her because I left for a way better job, but she's a horrible person and I refuse to give her the satisfaction.
After I left literally 10 people followed suit. The reason I left keeps trying to friend me on various social media and I block her every time. Multiple people have tried to turn her in for bullying, abuse of powers, etc. but she's basically untouchable. The company gave her an award the same year I left for being the best in her position within the entire company.
17. Baked In The Bakery
Oh man, have I got a story. A few years ago, I was 19 and I got a job at a bakery for the summer. It was brand new that year and the owner, a 28 year old with an insanely large ego, was the densest, laziest dude I've ever met. This guy's family had owned another bakery in a town ~45 minutes away for a few years and his mother had granted him permission to open this one. It was basically going to be an extension of the main one since we weren't going to be making anything in-house. He was planning on trucking fresh donuts to the bakery every morning and was going to ship in everything else from suppliers. I got along really well with the other employees right off the bat and the guy's vision for the bakery seemed cool so I figured it would be fine. I was kind of wrong. To sum up:
We had a barely functioning (and DIRTY) kitchen in which we could make breakfast sandwiches and cannolis/eclairs. We didn't even have a prep table so we worked on top of a freezer door. It was nearly impossible to keep the place as sanitary as we would have liked, as this had been a makeshift kitchen placed in an old barn. I'm pretty positive we never received permission from the fire marshals to run the ovens and that a few of the things we did bordered on illegal since he dropped the ball on a few permits. It was not a space to be used as a bakery at all.
He was consistently late bringing donuts because he was always hungover. He owned a boat which he docked in a marina right next to a bar. The bakery opened at 7am and there were a few mornings he didn't show up until 9. He would claim there were issues at the main bakery, but he didn't know we were in contact with the bakers there who told us that there were no problems on their end.
He marketed items as his own when they were not his own. He claimed his apple pies were baked fresh with apples from the orchard his family owned- however every week we would receive frozen deliveries from a food supplier of said pies. He would openly brag about this to customers in front of us and we just had to smile and keep up the lie.
He left me to close alone on a weekend night when he failed to show up to help me. I called my two managers and a coworker who all eventually came in, helped me close 2 hours early, and we went down to the marina where he docked his boat to confront him but he wasn't there- turned out he had been out drinking at a different bar. The donuts showed up at 9am the following morning.
He did not know any of our names. We had found out about halfway through the summer that he had created nicknames for all of us, mine and one other woman's being incredibly inappropriate. Obviously, this made me really uncomfortable and I told my managers I no longer wanted to be around him by myself. He found out and was not happy that I went to them and not him directly, thus making our working relationship super tense.
The final straw(s) occurred during a week in August.
First, the wire to our freezer had tripped and it caused ~20 frozen pies to thaw out. Someone was out to fix the freezer the following day, but in the summer heat, there was no saving those pies. They had to be thrown out. The owner wanted to keep the pies and sell them. My manager put her foot down and said it was not safe to sell thawed out and re-frozen pies. The owner agreed and collected the pies to throw them out, but instead brought them to the main bakery to try to sell them there. My manager had called and warned them, so thankfully the pies were ultimately thrown out.
A couple of days later, my manager and I were just getting ready to close after a slow night and I had been scrolling through Snapchat when I came across a snap story and saw girls (who I knew were underage) drinking and partying on his boat. I showed my manager and we continued to watch snaps of our owner and girl smoking and pounding shots while pillows with his bakery logo were in the background. My manager was furious since he was supposed to be placing an order that night. The next morning when she asked how the order went, he claimed their server was down and he spent the night getting a list ready for that day. The order was 2 days late.
Final day, a Sunday: Sundays were our busiest day of the week, partially due to the crepe bar my manager had started up in the middle of the summer. She loved it because she loved making crepes, I loved it because it made Sunday mornings fun, and the owner loved it because it brought him in more money. On this final Sunday, the owner strolled in reeking of booze almost three hours late with day old donuts. We had easily turned away 100 people who came in looking for donuts, and my manager had been making an insane amount of crepes to compensate for the lack of baked goods. She had texted him something along the lines of, "Well if you can't bring us donuts can you at least bring me some eggs so I can continue making crepes for your customers?".
He forgot the eggs.
She got right in his face and called him out on everything: the lies, the disrespect, the issues with the donuts, and the shady ways he conducted business. He stood there with this smirk on his face that made my blood boil from across the counter. My manager threw down her apron, my other manager walked out from the kitchen, and I and two other girls left from behind the counter and we all just walked out of the bakery. He had to work almost every day for the last month of the season since he lost half his staff in one morning. For the next two summers, he kept opening later and later into the season and he didn't open at all this year. Can't say I'm surprised.
16. No Follow Through
The company I used to work for had an exodus of young management/administrative employees.
It's not that they were horrible. But they paid poorly, there was no defined advancement path, they abused your salary status to make you work ungodly hours, and they were the sort of place that paid lip service to improving and then never followed through.
15. Find A Way Out
It wasn't quite all at once, but at the company I used to work for we got a sudden surprise announcement that the place was being sold to a much larger corporation. In and of itself that wasn't that bad, but everyone there was already overworked and under a lot of stress. When we found out about the sale and the fact that none of us were getting even a token amount from it (in fact it led to the elimination of profit-sharing) several of us immediately began plotting our escape.
14. The Money To Run Away
The company lost a class action lawsuit on workers rights. One of the departments was forcing people to work off the clock, and or adjust timesheets to hide overtime. After the litigation which took about 18 months everybody got a check, even if you weren't impacted. My department was very good at paying people and you'd get in trouble for not collecting to when you should have, we still were included in the base payout. Those in the impacted departments though a few had been around for years and got bank. Years worth of back overtime and some interest. We lost about 35 agents in one day once those checks came in.
13. We Don't Play The Family Game
Not me but my sister. When she was sixteen (~16 years ago) she worked at a pizza chain. She loved it; the manager she was hired under was awesome, planned kids nights where kids ate for cheap and we played bingo, he was super cool with employees and it was just a nice place to be. Then they made him move to a different location because the owners son wanted to be the manager there. He knew nothing about managing anything.
He had a big head because his parents were the franchise owners. He is a real jerk. At this point the place is pretty much completely staffed with our family and my sister's close friends. At least 3/4 of the employees.
One day my sister was working register and there were 3 of her customers in line. My mom was a single mom and we only had one vehicle and mom needed it so a friend drove her there and mom asked for the keys. My sister checked with all customers to make sure she was okay to step away long enough to get her keys and hand them to my mom. Then she got back and started taking the order for the next person in line.
The manager walks up and says in front of the customers "what the hell was that? You don't need to be talking to your family when you have customers, that is unprofessional and I will fire you if you do it again!" my sister said "I checked to make sure that it was all right with them I was just giving her the car keys so my brother can go to soccer practice.". He said "well you need to figure out other vehicle arrangements because this isn't okay" my sister handed him her name tag and said "don't worry I will" and left.
He hardly had anyone to run the shop. He is still manager there, can't keep employees and the restaurant really sucks in general.
12. Loser University
The Dean of the University I used to attend was not happy that it was mostly a commuter school. He implemented a schedule change mandated for all courses be split apart 2-3 days per week for an hour each at MINIMUM, forcing students and professors to attend school no less than 3 days a week, other responsibilities be damned.
This erupted in major protests throughout the school of both staff and teachers all across the campus. Infuriated at the protests, our Dean then fired and shut down the entire Social Work Dept. that was heading the protests. All the professors were fired and students were forced to take another major or transfer. After this, there was a mass exodus of full time tenured professors over the next 4 years. By the time I left that college the majority of the staff had left and been replaced by adjuncts.
11.
Pier 1. I was hired by the most amazing manager I've ever had. She said if we ever need to take a call, just go to the back room, no biggie. That we were encouraged to make friends with the customers and sit down on the couches. If everything is in order in the storage we can relax. I organized the store rooms with my master tetris skills, basically turning it into 100% full to 50% full. She told me I did a great job and praised me for little things. Then a week later her mom got sick and her son came back from war and we lost her. Only me and one assistant manager who was really cool stayed on. We used to party on the weekends.
The new lady? Suddenly managers weren't allowed to hang out with plebes anymore. There was 'always' something to be done. "Time to lean, time to clean." Not allowed to sit down, ever for any reason. She was some ditsy blonde sorority fresh out of college trying to prove she was the best ever, and a total jerk. Assistant manager ended up quitting before me. I ended up getting fired. It went from best job ever to worst job ever. I think the most disgusting part was how they made me gather people's emails. If you ask, "would you like to receive emails for coupons?" 9 times out of 10, people would say no. But if you handed them the piece of paper with a pen and said, "fill this out and you'll get coupons," 9 times out of 10 people would just blindly follow orders. Made me sick after about 300 of those.
10. When Dirty Capitalism Backfires
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Canceled all raises and bonuses for everyone except the CEO, his wife (financial and HR), and his son (utterly useless IT) in a year where we have record profits and brought in almost double the clients on top of announcing they aren't looking to hire more people when we were already overwhelmed.
Good part about it was when the majority of us quit they lost almost every single client shortly afterwards to their competitors and the company is now defunct.
9. What Do You Do With A BA In Stupidity?
Many years ago in high school I worked at a movie theater. The place was pretty poorly run from the moment I started there. We never got paid on time and management was basically a bunch of lazy jerks who sat in the office talking all day and never actually did any managing. It would have been hard for things to have gotten any worse but after a couple of months they brought in new management who seemed to want to make it their personal mission to run the theater as poorly as possible.
They first decided to implement a new policy requiring all projectionists to wear ties, despite the fact that projectionists are never seen by the public, not to mention that tiny little detail that the projectionists worked around giant, rapidly spinning objects that a tie could get caught in. Management refused to reconsider the policy and every single projectionist quit as a result.
They then decided that the door people (of which I was one), who were always scheduled seven days a week, would now only be scheduled on the weekends, and refused to reassign any of us to concessions on the weekdays so we wouldn't lose hours. As a result, almost every single door person quit, including me.
After that they started imposing impossible cleanliness standards on concessions, things like requiring them to scrape popcorn kernels out of the cracks in the trim behind the popcorn machines. Concessions was there until 5 AM every night trying to meet their standards. Most of the concession people quit as a result
By my count the theater went from a staff of about fifty to a staff of about twelve in three weeks. I swung by about a month after I quit and found out that entire management staff had been fired and replaced yet again by an entirely new one, ones who actually seemed to be running the theater properly. My best guess is that the previous management had been told to whip the theater into shape and they were idiots who had no idea how to effectively do that.
8. And It Just Kept Going Down
I had worked at a grocery store for about 3 years before moving from Courtesy Clerk (basically bagger + custodian) to Helper Clerk (stocker). The grocery department wanted to save costs on personnel, but couldn't fire anyone or lay anyone off due to the union. So they started cutting back hours and literally told us "when someone quits, everyone else will get more hours."
We were supposed to be 40-hour employees and they had us at 32 hours. 2 people quit and we were down to 24 hours. A third person quit, down to 16 hours. I don't know what their plan was, but they didn't give us more hours as people left.
7. Impossible Standards
I was hired by the new owners to replace the existing manager. I was under the impression that he was moving on to another job somewhere. So after about 4 days I ask him where he's headed and if he's excited. He just looks blankly at me and says "I'm not going anywhere. I'm just training you as the assistant manager, right?". The look I gave him must have been a great tip off because he got up and walked into one of the new owners offices. After about 30 seconds they were screaming at each other, then he just storms out of the office, grabs his stuff, give me the finger, and leaves.
Over the next few days I'm trying to calm things with the employees. They're not faulting me, but now have a very bad taste in their mouths about the new ownership. Over about a 7-10 day time period my team shrank from 15 people down to 3. I hobbled along with that the best I could while we tried to hire new people, but the new owners were offering so little we had trouble finding people. After 3 months or so of that I started to get fed up and overwhelmed and when the owners started to get on me about missed deadlines I had had it. We were still only at 5 people, 2 of which were brand new and still training. They didn't allow me to refuse work or push deadlines out, they expected the same output as a 15 person team. So after my third day in a row of being berated for missing a deadline that was impossible to make, I quit.
6. And You Gotta Make Me Go To Court?
When I was 16, I worked in the concessions stand at a minor league baseball stadium. Minimum wage at the time was $5.15/hr, this job payed $8, and it was always in the evenings so it was perfect work for a high school student. The only bad thing was our management was TERRIBLE. The main manager would throw toddler tantrums about once a shift over stupid stuff, like not ordering enough of a specific beer (she did the ordering) or running out of pre-cut lemons for tea.
One night the stadium was running a promotion and it was incredibly busy - easily 2-3x the normal volume of customers. We were all working our butts off handling multiple roles each with absolutely no downtime. Although we all cleaned as we worked, nobody had a chance to do thorough cleaning for the whole shift because of the never-ending horde of hungry baseball fans.
The manager showed up 3-4 hours late per usual and throws the biggest tantrum ever over the unswept floor. Finally, she announces "Listen up you lazy jerks! Minimal work gets minimal pay. Everybody is being paid minimum wage tonight because you slobs won't clean up anything."
Both of our bartenders and the bar back quit on the spot, which caused a chain reaction. We all took off our aprons and hats to leave. She blocked the exit and was red in the face from screaming, so one of the cooks climbed out of one of the big serving windows where we served customers, so I did the same and most of the staff followed. Bear in mind that this all happened in front of like 200+ customers. Of course, my final paycheck "got lost" so I had to file a wage theft complaint with the Texas Workforce Commission.
5. No More Projects
I did landscape construction. The cheap owner kept taking bigger and bigger projects while never hiring more help. We were all overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious. One of our foreman quit and I followed suit a few days later. Two more guys quit the next day. He was down to three guys for the obscene amount of work he wanted to do. Of course everything gets way behind schedule but he's convinced it's not his fault at all. He went out of business less than a year later.
4. Listen Or Suffer
I was working for a very large IT company, before the tech bubble burst we had a meeting with our "new director and the VP"
They were tired of people complaining about things that should be changed at the job and how they managed people.
So they sat around 200 of us down in our auditorium, and the director said she didn't want to hear anymore complaints on how she was running things and if we didn't like then there was the door and that there was no way we'd leave such a great job.
Well there was a mass exodus and probably close to 50 people left within 2 months.
She and the VP were "re-orged" and given 0 reports, they were gone after a round of layoffs happened shortly after.
3. Mistreat One, You Mistreat Us All
Working at a local restaurant that had recently changed owners. Multiple issues came up: difficulty getting off for important things, hiring people to work in kitchen who were bad at their job but cheap, cheaper ingredients, etc, as well as owner just kinda sat around and drank while there not doing much. Things were tense and after a few months we were really just hanging in there cause we liked each other (previous owners were a sweet old couple that set a great vibe). I know some others and I were already looking for a job.
Anyways there was a young mother who waited tables there and really needed the job, couldn't afford to be between jobs. One night she got a call that her grandmother had a severe stroke, was unresponsive, and was not expected to make it through the night. She asked to get off and start her 3 hour drive to Dallas, manager says of course but the owner says no. Manager and owner got into a verbal fight in the back, the waitress ended up pleading her case, crying. Manager said that if the owner wouldn't let her go, he was done. Owner ended up firing them both on the spot. Within the next 15 minutes everyone who hadn't been recent hire ended up walking out of the building.
2. Adios Muchachos
Restructure of the way we're paid. What I used to do involved about 40% client interaction, 20% team/coworker interaction, and 40% paperwork and case coordination stuff. Based on what we do that means only 40% of the time is technically billable, and there are really sticky rules for what is and isn't billable. So, logically, we were being paid on a salary model. Cue management saying we can only make money for the time we have that is actually billable.
1/4th of the department quit. Two of us on the same day.
1. I Caught You All
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I'm the manager of a retail store and I had found out a cashier was ' 'stealing' product by scamming reward card benefits. I came up with a detailed incident report to present to this employee and I was under the assumption it was just her. After I confronted her in a reasonable manner she freaked out and got really angry and quit on the spot. She was using fake accounts instead of using a customers reward card to get herself points and redeem them for product/gift cards. So the customers weren't getting the points they are owed which is a headache for me if they notice and complain.
The next day every other cashier called me and quit and after thinking wtf just happened I found out they were all in on it and were using this lady's fake card on their shifts too. So I'm down four cashiers and I have one left. This same day my last remaining cashier disappeared for twenty minutes. Turns out she was in the bathroom with another employee doing the nasty. She quits because her dad is a cop and doesn't want to find out she got fired for this and she also asked me if she should go to urgent care because she didn't take her tampon out before they did it and she couldn't find it. The guy also quit because he 'didn't care and was moving anyway' . I was down to literally managers only.
When we're intoxicated, or even the slightest bit tipsy from having a little too much to drink, our immediate perspective on things is hazy.
But there's nothing like a bit of alarming news or a jarring incident to snap us out of the fog and focus on the moment.
Sometimes alcohol isn't always to blame for our impairment.
It can be a state of mind, like a perpetual numbness from being complacent in life, and all it takes is one shocking moment to rattle us back to our senses.
Curious to hear from strangers online about this type of scenario, Redditor Known_Challenge_7150 asked:
"What’s one thing that sobered you up real quick?"
These individuals were witness to shocking events that sobered them up right quick.
Bleeding Out
"Got out of a taxi and found a naked man profusely bleeding from his head crawling up the driveway in my condo. Called him an ambulance completely forgot I was absolutely wasted until 45 minutes later when I'd helped him translate and in to an amublance and stepped in my front door."
"Later a few days later learned he'd slipped in the tub and literally crawled out for help. Poor dude. He was fine but I genuinely thought he was going to die there."
– DongLaiCha
Tragic News
"At a bachelor party and we got a phone call that the groom’s father had suddenly passed."
– accountnameredacted
Bottom Of The Barrel
"I went to visit my parents back in July. I was homeless and deep into fentanyl addiction so I lost a lot of weight. My folks could see it. They knew something was up. Anyway, I spent the night and I was getting ready to leave in the morning and I looked at myself in the mirror for a good long time. I finally had enough and told them everything. They took me to detox, from there I went to rehab. Graduated in August and been living with them ever since then. I have 160 days clean and sober."
– Crotch-Monster
A reality check can be enough for some people to snap out of it.
Like Father, Like Son
"Was driving a drunk friend home, he had been on a bender again and was smart enough to call me for a lift rather than try and drive. As I helped in to his house his mother came down the stairs and said 'your as drunk as your father' and went back upstairs. I haven't seen him drunk since then, he still drinks but the thought of turning into his dad scared him out of hard drinking."
– psycospaz
Busted
"Flashing blue lights."
– FiddleOfGold
"This sobered me up just thinking about it."
– redmaple_syrup
Losing Sight
"Woke up to no sight in one eye. I had cataract surgery so just thought one of the lenses had slipped and it was an easy fix. Eye doc says nope, you had a stroke. I loved soy sauce, teriyaki sauce and salty food, which caused high blood pressure, which caused retina damage. Over six months was able to get most of my eyesight back with medication, and all back within a year. Trying to navigate life with one eye was very sobering. Started taking HBP much more seriously."
– MissHibernia
Quitting The Bottle
"Looked up someone I went to highschool with who was an awesome guy. Found out he had been dead for 3 years from alcoholism, at age 33. I made an overnight change. I hadn't started drinking that night yet, 10 months ago. Haven't touched it again since."
– omgtater
These disturbing moments were enough for Redditors to immediately come to their senses.
Unplanned House Guests
"Me and a buddy Woke up in someone’s living room, realized neither one of us knew the people, they were just nice and let 2 drunk guys sleep on their living room floor. We didn’t even say goodbye."
– Oneinsevenbillion75
Serious Health Warning
"Elevated liver enzymes."
"And the knowledge that this sh** was gonna kill me and I just couldn't orphan my family over it."
"So I opted for recovery, instead."
"Clean and sober since June 5, 2009."
– Far_Meal8674
The Joyride
"Grew up in a rural area. The little town hosted dances at the hockey arena, everyone (adults and kids) went and they overserved everyone, regardless of age. I was maybe 16 or 17 and was absolutely sh*tfaced, and jumped in the back of someone's truck with about 8 other people to go back to someone's cottage for after dance drinking. The driver (still don't know who it was) started racing one of his buddies and we whipped around small dirt roads, flying around blind corners on the wrong side of the road, going god knows how fast. It was basically a disaster waiting to happen. It was crazy scary and I was sober and thankful to be alive when we finally arrived."
– foxfood9116
The human psyche is a fascinating thing, isn't it?
How we can automatically focus on something urgent at a crucial time, even after getting buzzed from drinking too much alcohol.
But as we're in the thick of the holidays, it's a good reminder to drink responsibly and stay off the roads if you drive to your celebratory destination.
Cheers. Stay safe. And happy holidays.
We've all complained or vented about something in our lives which, in the grand scheme of things, wasn't exactly a problem, or is very easily solved.
Then there are those who complain about things that others almost hope will happen to them at some point in their lives.
These are known as "first world problems", as they are problems that pretty much only the world's one percent faces.
From having to fly business class instead of first class, or being served Roederer instead of Dom Pérignon, these complaints are often met with amusement, bewilderment, or even anger.
Redditor jennimackenzie was curious to hear the most absurd "first world problems" anyone ever complained about, leading them to ask:
"What’s the most ridiculous 'first world problem' you’ve seen people get worked up over?"
"Tale As Old As Time..."
"I once knew a mom who was legitimately devastated, to the point of tears/grief, because a doctor predicted her 8 year old daughter's final height to be around 5'2","
"Which wasn't tall enough to get cast as Belle at Disney World."
"That was the child's (and her mother's) only dream in life, apparently."
"Didn't appreciate my suggestion that she could be Minnie or Mickey."
"Lol!"
"Only a face character would do!"- TravelLovingMom
"Must Be Funny, In A Rich Man's World..."
"My boss from about a decade ago was this insanely rich dude who always went to the bank to get fresh and crisp currency."
"He'd call the bank in advance to make sure they had some on hand."
"I think he was a germaphobe."
"He had a trash can that he'd throw $1 and $5 bills in that he thought was 'dirty' and regularly just donated it vs spending it."
"I asked him why he did this and he said it was too much trouble and asked if I wanted it."
"I said f*ck yeah dumped it into my bag and when I got home it was close to $400 in singles and fives.
"Another time, he wanted to upgrade all the computers in his studio, so we went to a store and bought 10 PCs."
"They all had $150 mail in rebates and he wasn't bothered to go through the trouble of mailing them in."
"3 weeks later I received $1500 after spending a whole afternoon filling out all those goddamn forms."- azninvasion2000
Money Burn GIF by nog
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Who Wore It Better?
"When I was about 19 years old, I was at my boyfriends family BBQ."
"I was wearing this pretty floral sundress."
"His cousins girlfriend showed up in the same dress and she was SO mad that she went and changed."
"I will never understand being upset when someone is wearing the same thing as you.'
"Did you really think that your shirt you bought off the rack is going to be unique to you?"
"No."- mertsey627
Seeing Red! Or Blue In This Case...
"The blue of the balloons wasn't quite the same as the bridesmaid's sashes."
"Years ago my wife and I attended a wedding."
"It was very low key."
"The dinner was in the dining hall at the university where the couple met, cinder block walls and all."
"It was a Baptist wedding - no booze and very serious."
"The dark blue balloons attempting to liven up the hall were a slightly darker shade of blue than the sashes on the bridesmaid's dresses."
"The bride lost here sh*t and absolutely raved for nearly an hour."
"I can't remember how they finally managed to talk her down."- mechant_papa
south park wedding GIF
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See You In Court!
"Rich neighbors who end up in expensive court battles because they disagree about where a tree can be planted or whether the color of a fence fits in with the street’s 'amenity'."
'These disputes get really heated and rack up huge lawyers’ bills."
"The most pathetic part is after the judgement when they are arguing about who should pay the other party’s costs."
"Lots of affidavits filed citing the 'emotional distress' they had to endure, or painting themselves as brave warriors who were forced to take a stand to fight for 'justice'."
"Also lots of pompous litigants insisting that the judge refer to them by their 'Dr' title."
"An absolutely insane dumpster fire of entitled rich people problems."- ElectrocRaisin
It's Always People With Money Who Don't Want To Pay!
"I work in a public library."
"People will get so so mad if they have to be put on a wait list for a book."
"A popular book that just came out."
"Ok our services are not only free but so are the books."
"You’re welcome, a**holes."- Switchbladekitten
A Warm Butt Is A Happy Butt!
"My own."
"We have a bidet toilet seat (Fabulous! Everyone should have one!) and not only does it wash your bum and blow dry it, but the seat's heated!"
"It's shocking how much a heated toilet seat makes the whole process more agreeable."
"Except: We had a power outage and I went to use the toilet and the seat was cold!"
"Unacceptable!"
"This shall not stand!"
"I was really upset because it didn't feel good."
"Then I stopped and thought: This is the most first-world problem anyone's ever had."
"I was really pissed because my heiny was tepid."
"I got over it."- DeathGrover
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Holy Matrimony!
"Weddings are a gold mine for this question."
"People get so hyped up over their 'most important day of their life'."
"They'll destroy friendships, go into debt, and have crazy expectations."
"It's not always the couple who go crazy, either."
"Sometimes, it's the parents or another family member who feels entitled to control the wedding."
"It's just a party."
"Be considerate of guests, have plenty of food and drinks, and enjoy it."- magicrowantree
When Fast Food Isn't Fast Enough...
"Having to pull off to the side to wait for a drive-thru order to be brought out to you because your food isn't ready and there's a line building up behind you."- demanbmore
In Case You Don't Think Customer Service Employees Are Undervalued...
"I was working the return desk at a Target next to a military base so I have so many stories."
"One of my favorites was a lady who had her baby shower before revealing the gender and was livid that she had received floral newborn diapers when she’s having a boy."
"It was a huge box of super expensive, all organic diapers, that we didn’t carry and therefore could not return."
"I cannot accurately express her fury and disgust."
"How dare either suggest her boy could wear feminine diapers."
"I suggested she donate them if she didn’t want to use them and she instead threw away the entire box."
"When she left we pulled it out and threw it in our donate bin."
"There have also been multiple times where mom’s order massive toys and when we bring them out to the car they get furious that they aren’t wrapped."
"We don’t offer wrapping services."
"Here’s the thing, if you don’t want your kids to see the toys you got them for Christmas or their bit to day DON'T BRING THE CHILD WHEN YOU PICK IT UP."
'I’ve had multiple women scream and curse me out that I had ruined their kids Christmas by bringing the toys they ordered out to the car like they requested."- clever-mermaid-mae
Customer Service Waiting GIF by Juno Calypso
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Happiest Place On Earth!
"I used to work for Disney."
"That in itself should tell you everything."
"However for fun I'll give you two specific stories one form our tech department and one from my wife who worked bookings."
"I specifically worked for their call center to help with technical issues with magic band and the website."
"Suddenly got worse huh?"
"A right of passage call everyone has at least one story of is the 'Dome call'."
"Basically there is a subset of Disney Guest (TM) that believes if it rains at Walt Disney world there is someone that will push a button to encapsulate the whole of Disney property in a dome to keep out the rain."
"I'm not kidding."
"If this button is not pushed they call our tech department to angrily ask why."
"My wife worked booking."
"Pretty much everything including Bibbidi Bobbidi boutique and Pirate's league."
"These two things did roughly the same thing difference being price and theme."
"BBB was expensive did more and was focused on princesses, pirates league did a bit less and focused on mermaids and pirates."
"Lady called up my wife, and got pissed about BBB being booked up (It goes FAAAAST)."
"Karen: 'Im going to give the phone to my daughter and I want you to tell her how you are ruining her vacation by not letting her do BBB'."
"Wife proceeds to explain how pirate's league is so much cooler and how she can be a mermaid or pirate and basically gets the kid to start demanding to their parents about how they want to be a mermaid instead of a princess."- trollsong
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The horror!
Being booked into a junior suite at Disney World instead of an executive suite!
It's almost as bad as having no money for groceries, or no food to feed you children...
Said absolutely no one.