After 9 Years, He Finally Had Enough Of Their Crap
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“I worked in a tropical fish warehouse. The owners pretended to be nice and always said they ‘had your back’ if you were a loyal employee. They only kept 2-3 full-time employees on staff. So no one else could get vacation time, or benefits or anything like that. I worked there long enough that I eventually made it to the supervisor of the floor and full-time. They wouldn’t call me a supervisor because that would mean they owed me more money.
They never took the blame for anything. They couldn’t figure out why fish were dying, even though I was telling them why. They simply ordered too many at a time. When people didn’t want to come in on days off to help them move to a new building, it was somehow my fault. The whole moving process was poorly done. I had to get fish from two buildings somehow…and they wouldn’t take my advice. I knew they wouldn’t, because they told me that when my employees brought a suggestion to me that I should politely tell them no, no matter what. They boasted about how our process was perfect (it was not).
After 9 years of their bullcrap, they finally broke me. They kept adding hours for me without checking if it was okay with me. Thursday was a quick care for the fish day, then I spent it with my family, as my wife had Thursdays off. During a meeting where my boss was threatening to fire my assistant supervisor and I because I swept the wrong part of the floor because her instructions were vague, I mentioned that I didn’t want the extra time of putting fish away on Thursdays. I told her it was my family time, and I was never asked about it.
She told that if I wanted to see family, I would have to get a different job.
It took everything I had to not lose it. I needed to keep my income until I had a new job, but that was the last straw.
When I finally gave her my two-week notice, she looked completely bewildered. She just stared at it with her mouth hanging open. Eventually, she put on her best fake caring voice and asked why. I was dumbfounded by that question. I almost yelled, ‘You told me to! If I wanted to see my family, I would need a new job. You told me that. So I found a new job.’
She tried to explain to me that she would never say that and told me I was wrong. I told her that she said exactly that, and I had a witness, and would happily go get him to confirm.
After my two weeks and her making ‘jokes’ daily about how much my next job would suck and I should just stay, I got to leave. I handed her my keys a couple hours before I finished my work, punched out and never looked back. She called me about a half hour later and said she thought we had an exit interview and that she would be in her office for a while longer. I told her there was no exit interview because I knew how they went. She would tell me her opinions as if they were facts and not listen to a thing I said. I knew because she made me sit in on two exit interviews so I could ‘see how they ran it.’
Then I hung up and deleted her number from my phone.”
“He Hasn’t Spoken To Me In Almost 5 Years”
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“I worked for a guy, Scott, running a brew festival. I was hired on as the Logistics Coordinator, which means pretty much everything except sales and marketing fell under my umbrella. Scott put up all the financial backing for the festival, and had a partner of sorts, Wayne, who was really only involved because it was his idea and had Scott just taken it, Wayne would have sued.
Wayne was a real pain in the neck, and probably one of the slowest, dumbest people I have ever met. Everything you discussed with him was met with resistance until he decided it was his idea – after that, it was the best idea. Scott kept Wayne out of the loop on most things, which worked for me because it meant I got to do my own stuff, meet with Scott weekly for updates, and use his credit card to order what we needed.
As the event neared, Wayne dropped by our office more and more frequently, so we started locking the door under the guise of the wind blowing it open. But we wouldn’t unlock it when he came to the door. The windows were tinted, so we could see him but he couldn’t see us. This only made him more agitated and difficult to deal with.
Things really came to a head the day of the event because he wasn’t happy with where I had the company drop off the dumpster. I was on site in a golf cart full of ice bags. I was sweaty, dirty, and tired. I stopped for a moment to have a drink of water, and he approached and started really giving it to me about the dumpster. I was pretty sick of his crap. My contract was up in two weeks and I hadn’t taken the option to renew. I put my feet up on the dash, dropped my sunglasses over my eyes, and started looking at something on my phone. I told him that I wasn’t going to move the dumpster, and it was my decision and that it was final. He decided this was the best time, in front of a dozen breweries, food trucks, and community volunteers, to pull the ‘don’t you know who signs your paycheck?’ card.
I looked at him, took my feet off the dash and hit the gas. As I whizzed by, middle finger in the air I shoot back, ‘Yeah, Scott does.’
He hasn’t spoken to me in almost five years, and we run into each other around 3-4 times a year at industry events.”
There Was A Reason The Good Engineers Didn’t Stick Around
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“As a starting engineer, my first job was as a sales engineer for a company that provided nuclear safety products. This was the kind of place where, for each sale, you had to write a report about an inch thick. The manager would open the front cover, read down the page, circle the first punctuation error and hand it back, not even reading the substance of the report. Total jerk.
His boss, the owner, would bring in engineers once a week, and grill them for 30 minutes about their sales, keep pecking and making rude remarks until he found something, and then berate them incessantly. As a result, the good engineers didn’t stay long.
I needed the job, so I stayed as long as I could. I had been working a number of very large sales that were taking a while to land. After some particularly rough couple of days, the owner pulled me into his office on a Wednesday, and having noticed that my sales were down, proceeded to tell me that my performance wasn’t adequate, amongst other demeaning comments. I went home that night very upset. I mowed the lawn and thought hard about it. The next day, Thursday, I walked into his office and gave my notice, saying that I agreed with him that my performance was lacking and that I needed to find a better place to work. He grunted assent, nothing more. I went back to work.
The next day, Friday, the owner did his usual inquisition thing with all the engineers. I was last. In the intervening 48 hours since he admonished me, all my big sales landed. I went into his office and waited for the negative comments. He was really quiet, pulled out his calculator and realized that my sales were the equivalent to 30% of his annual revenue. He just looked at me and said, ‘You didn’t do this in two days!’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but they were on my list of quotes when we met on Wednesday.’
He looked at the reports and dismissed me.
Later that day, I went to lunch, took a longer lunch and came back to see everyone (but me) in the conference room listening to him expound about ‘clarity of communication.’ That was my last day. A few weeks later, I bumped into a co-worker, and we talked. It seemed that all the accounts had been transferred to other engineers, but the clients had canceled all my sales after they found I had left the company. 30% of millions of dollars.
It was a big lesson for me that micromanagement will kill your workforce morale, and ultimately the bottom line.”
He Let Her Run Her Mouth While He Collected Evidence
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“I got into an argument with a co-worker while waiting at a train station about my lack of religious beliefs. She actually interfered in my conversation with someone else and ended up becoming offended by it. We rode the same bus and train to work every day because we also lived in the same apartment complex. Well, later that same week, I got promoted to Supervisor and guess who was on my team? That’s right. The co-worker who hates me.
She was the worst employee I ever had, but I tried to work with her. Eventually, I had to write her up for call avoidance. However, she went to HR and told them that I was being unfair to her and cited her religion as the reason why. She told HR about the conversation we had but neglected to tell them something they definitely should know!