what’s the pettiest thing you’ve done at work (or seen done)?

by Alison Green on May 9, 2019

One thing that’s funny about work is that people can really, really worked up about things that they’d be far better off just letting go — think, for example, of 12-paragraph rants about office supplies or the person who threw away a coworker’s mug as an act of revenge over work assignments.

I want to hear about the pettiest thing you’ve ever done at work, or seen done. Share in the comments!

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  1. No Mercy Percy*

    Two of my coworkers fighting over a shared Excel file. Delilah would keep unsharing the file, thus kicking out Ripley. Ripley in turn, who gets in before Delilah, unshared it and locked Delilah out. Their manager Sylus had to intervene.

    They share a cube next to me, so I had a very entertaining front row seat.

      1. Minocho*

        Is it Thursday yet? (My game this weekend is cancelled for Mother’s Day. Totally legit, but I want to play!)

    3. No Mercy Percy*

      Thank you, fellow Critters! Fortunately, today is Thursday! Go home, watch the show live, and not work tomorrow is how I want to do this. :)

        3. Peggy Sue*

          Huge TAZ fans right here. I’m on my third re-listen of Balance right now.

        4. whingedrinking*

          Huge TAZ fan! I went to PodCon in January and was delighted by how many cosplayers there were. (Quite a lot of void fish. Void fishes?)

      2. Anna*

        *raises hand* I have shamelessly stolen from the Balance Arc for the game I run for friends. My heart is so happy to see fellow fans here.

        Also, can we geek out this weekend on the off-topic thread so we don’t continue to derail? :)

    4. Ben H*

      Goodness, shared files are the worst. It’s too easy to accidentally delete hours of someone else’s work, and can be difficult to track changes.

      I’d suggest your office select a more manageable solution.

  2. LSP*

    I had a coworker just stop speaking to me completely out of the blue (as far as I was concerned). She would literally turn away from me if we were in a group and I was speaking, and she wouldn’t look me in the face, like ever.

    I had no idea what had happened, as we had been pretty friendly before, and I cannot think of a single episode where things could have gone wrong. I considered confronting her, but since we didn’t actually need to talk to each other for work (we worked in the same section but did not actually work on any of the same things), and she was a woman in her 60’s who decided to freeze me out instead of communicating with me, I decided I didn’t really care what her reason was. I saw her get seriously angry at other people for really stupid reasons, so I figured something similar was happening here. Eventually she retired and I moved on and her not speaking to me never caused me a problem, but she was obviously seething over something only she was aware of.

    1. Troutwaxer*

      But how could you not know about the terrible thing you did to her? How could you not know? (I had a girlfriend like that once. It was hell.)

      1. Nobby Nobbs*

        I had a friend who did that. She knocked it off when I refused to grovel, and we’re friends to this day. I suppose it helps that she was a literal child at the time.

    2. MCL*

      We have a support staff member who does that (they facilitate shipping/mail delivery for my building). It’s always for a petty reason. Luckily I don’t have contact with them much, but it’s super dramatic and has to be frustrating for their manager.

      1. RUKiddingMe*

        I wont put up with that then.

        I had one person I (eventually…after many, many conversations) had to say to them: “Do you *want* to work? Do you want to work *here?*” They said “yes,” so I told them, then grow up and be professional.

        It worked and she’s still here five years on. ‍♀️

        1. AnnaBananna*

          I tried that once, and it got worse. It got so bad that I had to start taking her off tasks because she had become this seething tornado of emotional vexation, and I don’t have the patience for that crap. She too was older. She didn’t take the news well that she was no longer responsible for departmental purchases. The next day she deliberately used her pcard to purchase personal items and then tried to hide it. (of course it didn’t occur to me to take the pcard, because Emergencies) I was able to catch it while reviewing her expense reports and she was out. She was incredibly well loved, and this was not the first time she had freezed me out.

          Not surprisingly, even though she was ‘well loved’, the culture changed dramatically for the better when she was gone.

          1. AnnaBananna*

            For the record, I tried to manage her with kindness for almost three years until I started looking for reasons to let her go.

    3. snarkarina*

      I’m currently involved in a similar situation, but I know what my infraction was (I have been given some plum assignments she was passed over for, but I can’t control what those above us decide to do).

      I will smile and be polite all the same and will occasionally address her directly in group settings putting her in the position of either HAVING to respond or freeze me out with witnesses. It’s funny that sometimes being the bigger person can be petty in and of itself. ;-)

      1. Yvette*

        ” (I have been given some plum assignments she was passed over for, but I can’t control what those above us decide to do).” Honestly for some people that is all it takes and in her mind you probably sucked up or curried favor in order to get them.

        1. Crooked Bird*

          But if SHE’d gotten them of course she would not have been culpable. That would have been merit-based.

      2. Alexander Graham Yell*

        I responded below about this exact thing! In the end, I was actually given a bump in my performance review (that came with a very comfortable bonus) because while she froze me out I remained cheerful and kind and tried to include her in things. (I also created a paper trail asking for things so I could document her not responding to me while she was supposed to be training me.) I wasn’t trying to be nice, I was trying to make sure everybody saw that she was being super rude and I love that it worked.

      3. The Cosmic Avenger*

        YES! I’ve said it before, but when people are being passive-aggressive, acting like you’re 100% without a clue can often drive them NUTS because, like you said, they either have to give up or get extremely explicit about their aggressiveness. Works best when there are witnesses. :D

        1. Elizabeth West*

          Hahaha, yes, this works really well. I used it on BullyBoss at OldExjob all the time. It was glorious to almost hear the wind go out of his sails.

        2. Helena*

          Remember there was that letter about a poster who got disciplined for failing to notice she was being frozen out by the office mean girls?

          She was completely oblivious, but had accidentally reacted in the most effective way. They were furious she hadn’t noticed.

        3. Elan*

          I tried to do this with the mean girl at my office–she started side-eyeing me, looking down her nose, being super chilly if she had to speak to me, for no apparent reason–with no success. For a year I tried being polite, cheery, treat her the same as everyone else in the group, and she persisted in trying to make me feel her dislike (and ramped it up by beginning to do the same to my work friends). So as a last resort I’ve tried pretending I just don’t notice her (we don’t work together directly, so it’s not hard), and instead continuing to be friendly with all of her friends, and…that has actually kind of worked? Suddenly she’s tried being nice to me (but I don’t “notice” her, so I act surprised that she’s there). It’s the weirdest thing.

      4. LSP*

        That’s exactly what I did. I just acted friendly and polite and like nothing was wrong, because as far as I know, nothing was wrong. *shrug*

      6. btdt7*

        I’m going to be a contrarian here since I had a more senior workplace bully who would try to put me “on the spot” by fake-chirpily addressing me in front of others. I did finally confront them in front of others by asking to be left alone, and asking that they only speak to me when they had to for business reasons.

        The nature of what they were doing was harassment (I am leaving out a LOT of other behaviors, mistreatment and undermining activity). I had one person ask me what took me so long.

        The “publicly shame them into greeting you” stopped immediately after I spoke up, along with a bunch of other things and the person quit a few months later. The entire office mood was dramatically better after they left. Now they are Facebook- and real-life- trolling their ex’s new significant other with similar behaviors.

    4. Hooray College Football*

      I had something similar happen, but I knew what she was angry about, because she went to my boss to complain that I had accused her of something based upon the fact that I had shared a case that I thought was of interest to our law practice. She actually took it personally, as in, I was implying the facts of the case were applicable to her. Nutso. After that, we both transferred to different branches, but she continued bad mouthing me to anyone and everyone. Even the new people got an earful about me, but especially the managers wherever she went. I didn’t worry too much, because she had a pattern – eventually everyone ended up on her bad person list. They eventually learned that she was the kookasaurus. I had a special email folder with an automatic rule for her junk mails labeled “crazy Jane.”

    5. Boop*

      Until you got to the part where the coworker retired I was wondering if you worked in my office! EXTREMELY similar things happen here.

    6. SignalLost*

      I had that happen! To this day, the best I can come up with is that my life is pretty high-drama and she handles stress even less well than I do so my life, the life *I* was living, was stressing her out. The other option is that the office sociopath (seriously, we did personality tests and everyone else scored at least 90% on empathy; this woman scored less than 10%, agreed it was accurate, and noted it was something her relatives said about her to her face) was manipulating her, which is highly plausible; the woman who stopped speaking to me is the last person left from when I was there, aside from the sociopath – and now it’s just the two of them.

      It was really hurtful at the time – we were good enough friends we were thinking of starting a side business – but in hindsight I just want to ask what the hell is wrong with her. The silent treatment isn’t actually normal for adults in professional relationships.

      1. Anon for this*

        I had a new boss give me the silent treatment over something relatively ridiculous. It was the impetus to start job searching. Two months later I was out for a better paying job with a promotion at their only competitor. I’m not the only one who experienced/left over this type of behavior, I do not know why the CEO puts up with it.

        1. Wendy Darling*

          I had a boss just kinda ghost me once. She didn’t cancel my 1:1s she just stopped showing up to them and didn’t answer my follow-up emails.

          She only ever talked to me to yell at me so I was actually cool with it?

    7. magic dave*

      oh man I worked somewhere where 2 best friend/colleagues fell out because the manager went with one person’s idea over the other’s. The one who’s idea wasn’t picked obviously felt deeply betrayed that his friend thought he had a better idea and he just refused to speak to him, making work difficult. He was (fairly quickly) told by our boss that he didn’t care if they were friends but that he’d better start acting professionally or there’d be trouble. Other guy basically had no idea how he’d lost his best friend

    8. Tea Earl Grey. Hot.*

      Oh, lord. I’m dealing with this with colleagues in their 30s (which I also am). They will talk to me for work reasons if they absolutely have to, but it’s clear that they’re annoyed about something and unfortunately I don’t have the ability to read minds that they do. The one I have to talk to the most frequently also has an I Am Always Right And The World Is Stupid attitude (which has gotten her into trouble more than once), so I tend to grey rock at her when we have to interact – especially because she seldom is right.

      I don’t get the silent treatment. Just say what the problem is so you can resolve it! Come on!

    9. AKchic*

      I have a boss who does this. He won’t even forward emails to me. Then he found out I was documenting his lack of communication, and how he was making coworkers communicate on his behalf when he found out I was documenting the information freeze, so he finally started talking to me again. Too bad I didn’t stop documenting the childish behaviors, and already reported them to HR and the union.

      He’s had so many grievances filed against him, and I’ve already made it plain that if this company wins the contract again, I’ll be leaving because the company has no intention of replacing him, even with all of his problems.

      1. Still_searching*

        I have this as well, can you share with me how you documented – I am at a loss of how to document this

        1. Cats and dogs*

          I don’t know how they did it but you can keep email folders of all of your correspondence so if you reply following up, make sure to reply to your previous message with no response to show you are following up because no response and always bcc yourself and put it in the folder. (I know it’s in sent but this makes it easier to keep track of.) I had to do this with an employee who ghosted a position that a colleague in a different office and I were co-managing.

    10. CupcakeCounter*

      I have a coworker who will do this whenever you even think she might have done something less than absolutely perfect. We are currently in a standoff because she made a major error that cause significant impact for a lot of people that weren’t her. After spending 3 very stressful days getting it fixed she made a comment about me being behind on my work and how it threw off her schedule. I very quietly lost my shit on her.
      Her response was a shocked face, a “you sound like you are mad at ME” comment, followed by walking into our bosses office and shutting the door. Yup – the 43 year old mother of 4 tattled on me.
      I did not get into any trouble since the incident was very well documented and I owned my portion of the issue immediately.
      I also received chocolate from 2 coworkers for telling her off. They aren’t her biggest fans either.

      1. RUKiddingMe*

        Wait, wait…SHE did a major screw up and then complained that your time spent on fixing it was causing her issues? Oh god please I need details of “very quietly lost my shit on her…” if you care to share. My haw is on the floor over here.

    12. oldfashionedlovesong*

      This happened to me too! She was in her 30s, I was in my 20s, and we’d actually been quite friendly up until that point for almost two years. But one day literally without warning she stopped speaking to or looking at me. To this day I have no idea what I did to her, although I had seen her treat other people the same way over a tiny slight that sometimes they didn’t even realize they’d done (not smiled at her in the breakroom, etc). At first I tried engaging with her like normal, but she just would give me one-word answers or ignore my questions entirely. If I was talking towards the end of a meeting or asking a question, she would just walk out of the room. This affected my relationship with the rest of her team (one other colleague and a manager) because the three of them were all extremely close and collegial and spent a lot of time together in the manager’s office which was right next to my cubicle.

      I happened to be (very secretly) job hunting at the time, because the entirety of that place was a flustercluck I needed to escape. So it just so happened that about 8 weeks after this started, I submitted my 4 weeks notice. Her manager cheerfully said to me “oh that’s why you haven’t been chatting with us much lately!” I was so browbeaten by everything at this point that I just said “oh, yes, I suppose so” when really I wish I’d said “No, it’s because T has been giving me the silent treatment for the last two months!”

    13. Wantonseedstitch*

      This happened to me with a roommate in my sophomore year of college. We started out by becoming friends really quickly, staying up late and chatting until the wee hours. Then, at some point, she stopped talking to me unless it was to snippily nag me to wash my dishes or something. When I had friends over to the room, she ignored them too (even if she wasn’t doing homework or anything). I never figured out why it happened, but I went from feeling hurt to just rolling my eyes about it.

    14. ginger ale for all*

      I stopped socially talking to someone at work. She would use what she found out about people and twist it to evil ends. I would work talk to her but nothing more. Cordial work wise, distant socially. I didn’t figure it out until a few years in that she only had acidic gossip about other people.

    15. sheworkshardforthemoney*

      “seething over something only she was aware of” sums up a lot of work interactions. This is what keeps AAM in business!

    17. Square Root Of Minus One*

      Happened to me too. Apparently she was mad I wasn’t seeking her approval about something that was my responsability and not hers, and beyond being dismissive and irritated with me all the time, she went to tattle on my boss about my work ethic, and to who know who else. Luckily my boss knows better, but my standing with my team, my self-confidence, and any trust I could have in her all lie shattered on the floor.
      Given the numbers of comments on that one, it seems to be a populated category of people.

    18. Vicky Austin*

      That’s never happened to me with a coworker, but it has happened with a suitemate in college. To this day, I have no idea what I did to piss this woman off, but I clearly did something as she refused to talk to me. It wasn’t even a case of her just being a jerk, either, because she was nice and friendly to everyone else.

    19. Cakezilla*

      I had the same thing happen! Thankfully it only happened after I put in my notice to leave the job (the person apparently thought I was “betraying” the company by leaving), so I didn’t have to deal with it for that long. But I still end up seeing her at a lot of professional events, and even two years later whenever I run into her she just glares at me.

    20. Jo*

      One of my former managers stopped speaking to me when I wasn’t performing well at work. It was due to me letting things slip somewhat then dealing with some mental health issues so I struggled to get back on track. I also didn’t loop her in on this, so to be fair I can see why she got annoyed and jumped to conclusions, however pretty much any other manager I’ve had, if they have to bring up a performance issue or feedback, they do it then move on. With this manager, every time I went over to speak to her, I’d get glared at. She made it clear she didn’t have patience for me or my questions, made snide comments and it got to the point where I’d try to speak to other managers if I had needed help with something. She made it clear I was a nuisance and that she didn’t want to have to deal with me. She was supportive if you were performing well but took it as a personal affront when I wasn’t. I know it was ultimately me that let things slide and it’s not her job to mollycoddle her team but the way she dealt with it was pretty rubbish.

      1. bleh*

        I had a colleague (in her forties) stop speaking to me and another colleague for SEVEN YEARS. We had made mild criticism of her work, which is apparently not done in CrazyJane world. She also: openly cried at meetings, lied about the other colleague “threatening her,” continued to lie even after going to arbitration and being told (by an arbitrator who is not meant to take sides) she was wrong. Because she was in the mommy club, everyone allowed her to continue, despite how disruptive she was. I left.

      2. Chrissimas*

        I had a former boss that stopped saying Good Morning to me or basically any social niceties once I was no longer her #1 worker. She was just horrible.

        1. starsaphire*

          I had a former boss who would give me the silent treatment every time I took a sick day. No lie; I asked a co-worker to reality-check me and the co-worker said, “Yep, she does it to me too.”

          The whole next morning, until lunch time (because our team often lunched together) Boss would walk past your desk, no look, no wave, no words, no reply to your “Good morning,” nothing. Then around noon, everything was normal again.

          Weird. Soooo weird. Soooo pointless.

    21. I was young once*

      My boss stopped speaking to me. I think she just decided she didn’t like me. My office was by the front door so she walked by every time she came or left the building. She would walk through the front door, pause and glance into my office as she said good morning to the woman at the front desk. She’d then make a sassy side eye and would walk away. And in case that was not conveying her point, she wold bring in cupcakes. Three cupcakes to be exact. And there were 4 of us in the department. I was then clearly not asked to take a cupcake.

      2. ginger ale for all*

        Perhaps on a three cupcake day, it might be the time to innocently say that you thought she was on a diet? I would only think this though but not say it.

      3. Sad face emoji*

        Haha I also have a cupcake story… one day my boss brought in two of everyone’s favorite cupcakes, but only one chocolate one… you guessed it, I was the only one who liked chocolate. She asked me to pick first, I looked in and immediately saw what was going on and feigned disinterest. She then angrily said that everyone was waiting and I was holding them up. So I took the chocolate one. “Figures” she said.

          1. Deejay*

            She’d probably have taken offence at that too. “Oh, my cake’s not good enough for you?”

        2. Adminx2*

          The pettiness in ME suddenly envisions a slow motion “dropping” of the cupcake all over her shoes.

          1. Over 60 & Forever Young*

            W.O.W.!! How awful that you experienced such petty “ish”… relatable sadly. And upsetting in a low key way that something as heavenly as cupcakes would be used for evil purposes! All kinds of wrong!

    22. NicoleK*

      I stopped socially talking to someone at work as well. I got tired of hearing about her anxiety, insecurities, and overall incompetence. Additionally, at the time, I was pretty much helping her do her job. Carrying her weight at work became too much. Now, we only communicate about work and mainly through email despite our cubes being next to each other.

      1. Loux in Canada*

        If I hadn’t moved divisions, there is a good chance I would have eventually done this with a coworker of mine who sat not two feet away from me. That, or I just would have stewed quietly and eventually exploded. :) She would ask me questions a few times a day, and when I mentioned it she said, “I don’t ask you that much! I just like to confirm things!” Yeah, but I was kind of known as the resident go-to/tech girl in our little section of 8 people… so everyone asking me things a couple of times a day/week really added up!

    23. BlackCatMama*

      I’ve been on the other side of this. A woman who I was really close to started to behave in really toxic and self destructive ways (heavily drinking, drug use and cheating on her husband) and wanting me to participate. I wasn’t interested in the path she was on and tried talking to her about it multiple times because I was concerned. She simply called me judgmental and that I needed to be more supportive. I distanced myself and didn’t share with anyone what was going on. I later found out she told a large group of people we both knew that I was a terrible person, a horrible friend and she had no idea why I threw our friendship away. It was very isolating and sad but I refuse to enable toxic behavior.

    24. Nobody Nowhere*

      Oooh, I have one of those. She’s very good at the tasks associated with her job, but randomly stops speaking to different people in the office. Some of them don’t work directly with her & really haven’t had the chance to piss her off. She’s done the same to me from day 1, alternating with periods where she speaks to me with her voice dripping contempt, like a cartoon villain. It’s really quite amusing when viewed from a distance.

    26. Snub Nose*

      I did this with a coworker, though not quite to the point of turning my back. I’m a trans man, which she knows, and she (unrelated to our work together) signed an open letter saying that trans women aren’t real women. She was obviously very puzzled about why I shifted from being warm and friendly to being terse and cutting conversations short, but I honestly felt no need to enlighten her. It’s up to her to reconcile the concrete reality of having a trans coworker she likes with the abstract politics of TERFiness that are an unexamined part of her passionate feminism. (Ironically, the passionate feminism was part of why I liked her so much. Oh well.)

      1. LabTechNoMore*

        Yea, I did this to my coworker who monolouged about Israel-Palestine every chance they got (I’m Palestinian, which he knew because he specifically asked my ethnic background, whereas he has zero personal connection to the conflict, cultural or otherwise.), called me a terrorist his first week on the job, and was relentlessly contrarian about my work. Looped my boss in, drama ensued, followed by my giving the silent treatment, but enjoy my job 1000% more now that I can get back to fretting over normal work problems again.

        2. LabTechNoMore*

          Oh! But back on-topic, and on a lighter note: as part of the above ensuing drama, I agrily threw away the office sugar cubes (twice!) to spite everyone.

          NB: I’m the one who brought them in. …Both times.

        4. Seeking Second Childhood*

          He *called you a terrorist* the first week you worked together??? He’s lucky he didn’t get fired on the spot.

          1. LabTechNoMore*

            Boss was out that week, and he used it in the context of grossly mischaracterizing how another demographic views people of my background, so calling me that word by proxy. And that wasn’t even the most offensive thing he said. He’s the armchair cultural anthropologist-type racist.

            …I’ve decided I’m going to throw away the stirrers today

              1. Over 60 & Forever Young*

                + 1 million!! @LabTechNoMore, I’m sorry you were subjected to this. Revenge of disseminated sugar cubes and coffee stirrers is justifiably warranted.

    27. Epitome of passive-aggressiveness*

      I also had a colleague stop speaking to me out of the blue once. It was really awkward because we worked closely on a number of projects. Eventually the other person told me that they’d stopped talking to me because I was being passive-aggressive to them. (And the silent treatment isn’t passive-aggressive?!?) About a year later, they suddenly started acting normally again. It was very weird, and they never explained what I had done. We don’t work together anymore, luckily.

    28. Bluephone*

      I had a coworker like that. And if she did deign to talk to you, she was rude and bitchy anyway.

      She left almost two years ago and even but though there’s been a lot of negative things since then (all new executive staff, changes to our paid leave, threats from a fired employee, etc), knowing that Frosty the Bitca isn’t here has made it much easier to deal with those other problems

    29. Loux in Canada*

      Hey I had this happen to me! I was a student employee at a company and this dude in his late 50’s, who was previously very friendly with me, just stopped talking to me out of the blue. I was so distressed. I had no idea what I’d done. Later on when I was almost done with my work term, he comes up to me and says, “So, do you know why I stopped talking to you?” Uh, no… “Well, that one day in the cafeteria I was teasing you and you said, ‘Just wait until I go to HR!’ I know it might be a joke to you, but this is my livelihood and I can’t have you risking it.”

      1) I would never have gone to HR, 2) yeah I was dumb but I was also 19, and 3) why not just TELL ME???

      In the end I realized that, honestly, he had kind of been making meanish jokes for a while and it was really bothering me. I guess I kinda snapped. He wasn’t that nice after all, honestly, in hindsight. Now that I’m a bit older I can recognize these situations a lot faster, and handle them much better; mostly, by not “feeding the troll” and removing myself from the situation.

      Phew. That was a rant. I actually had completely forgotten about that situation until I saw your post. Man, factories are petty places.

    30. 2 Cents*

      This happened to me to, except coworker was my age and I ended up leaving before she did (she might still be there). We had to communicate for work but it was so awkward. Eventually, I came to terms that it was HER problem, not mine, since I had no clue what I’d done.

  3. esra*

    I cannot wait to read these.

    I wish I had some good petty stories, but I’m not subtle enough. Working in marketing, you end up getting to see people’s most petty sides come out when it comes to leftover swag and free stuff. No one is more fussy, petty, and downright insufferable than when they’re complaining that the free t-shirts you designed for a trade show don’t match their skin tone.

    2. Jessen*

      As long as you don’t design white t-shirts. For a volunteer project that requires working outside. In summer.

        1. Seeking Second Childhood*

          Just imagine being female and getting rained on with males around. It can get ugly.

    3. zapateria la bailarina*

      OMG THIS. i HATE dealing with complaints about the free stuff i order for trade shows.

      the most recent one i received was a sales guy complained that we didn’t have any shirts in size medium… when literally 6 months ago he’s the one who told me not to bother ordering shirts smaller that size large.

    4. Peaches*

      Seriously! I don’t work in marketing, but my company an annual trade show where we give out about 75 free prizes via a ticket drawing (we have about 150 guests, so about half win free stuff). At our last trade show, we had several nice ballcaps with our local NFL team logo on it. My coworker walked one of the hats over to a lady whose number had just been drawn for the prize and said, “here you go! Do you like the Chiefs?” The lady, arms crossed, looking completely ticked said “Not really”, grabbed the hat apathetically, and slid the hat across the table she was sitting at as if she was just disgusted by it. Later, my coworker and I passed by the same lady, who was complaining to another person that it was “completely unfair that some people had won TVs, while she had only won a hat.” Our trade show is free for guests to attend! She should have been thankful she won anything.

      1. Liz*

        OMG people can be so petty and childish! Her behavior reminds of tricky trays I’ve attended. Which essentially is gambling; you buy tickets, put them in the container of the prize you want to win, and if your number is picked, you win. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been and heard people pissing and moaning because they haven’t won anything and other tables are covered in baskets. I sometimes want to say to them “you Do realize this is no different than putting your $20 in a slot machine and hitting the button until its gone?”

        1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

          These are the same people who very much don’t understand the way gambling works.

          I love hearing people whine about the Monopoly game they do at Safeway/Albertsons. “Nobody has ever won the jackpot, what’s the point?” It’s a free game of chance, you’re going to buy those groceries anyways, either play and see what happens or just don’t. They live to complain about how everyone is a crook and a thief because they don’t get free buckets of money for existing. Even if we gave out buckets of money, they’d complain that it’s all 20’s or not enough 100’s or something.

          1. Nobody Nowhere*

            “Free buckets of money just for existing.” This has to be a thing in some parallel universe, probably designed by Terry Pratchett :-)

          2. Idran*

            To be fair, it did legitimately turn out that the McDonald’s Monopoly game was a big scam (by an employee, not the company) to funnel jackpots to whoever a specific person wanted to get paid off that ended up tying into organized crime and a big FBI raid.

            For real, look it up. It’s wild.

            1. Story Hospital*

              Is that why they don’t do McDonald’s Monopoly anymore? I honestly miss it. I thought it was a lot of fun. That scam story is wild, though.

              3. Autumnheart*

                I never won anything good in McDonald’s Monopoly, and thought on many occasions, “This is BS! This game must be rigged,” but I was still surprised when it was revealed that the game really WAS rigged!

                I don’t live in a Safeway market, and I miss a good store contest.

                1. Jennifer Juniper*

                  I should hope not! You’d have no privacy if you lived in a grocery store :D

            2. R.J.*

              One summer they did one with scrabble stickers, where you were meant to send in whole words for a prize. My brother and I spent a road trip working to spell “gimmick”!

            3. Róisín*

              I spent way too long reading articles about this thanks to you, and I am… gobsmacked. What a tale. Someone should make a movie about this.

          3. RUKiddingMe*

            I won $1000.00 this year. I never get anything other than a “free bagel or donut.”

            1. Bryce*

              Nice! I won a loaf of bread. By chance it was fresh from the bakery and tasted great.

            2. Former Employee*

              I got the “free bagel or donut” coupon, which I need to give to a friend before it expires.

              I ‘d never played before and can’t believe how many duplicates pieces I got. I also can’t believe how tedious it gets, matching all the little pieces to the “board”.

              I would have been happy with a $5 or $10 win. I wonder how many players actually win even such small amounts and what that represents, as a percentage and in terms of the odds.

              A $100 win is pretty impressive.

              Congratulations!

              1. Bryce*

                The App is very useful for that, they have a “game piece tracker”. You still need the actual pieces to win but you can just scan a QR code on the back and it’ll tell you if you have any new ones and keep a checklist. Near the end of the sweepstakes (when I’ll usually have everything but one piece in every category) this REALLY cuts down on the time required to go through them.

        2. TootsNYC*

          actually, one of the ways people cheat on those is to wrinkle the piece of paper they put in.

          I was drawing names from a hat for a bunch of prizes once, and I flat-out threw the crumpled one back in when I realized I’d drawn the same person’s name four times in a row for the same reason (as I tossed the slips in my hand inside the jar, the crinkled one settled in).

          i tried it once myself later for a drawing at work and won–I felt kind of guilty, so I shared the prize with my team.

    5. Librarian of SHIELD*

      Last year we did a grand prize drawing at the end of the summer. The winner of said grand prize (which had been living in my office while we waited for her to pick it up, and was so much fun that I was sad to have to look at it and not be able to use it) complained about how we had gone for a lower quality brand and that the prize was too “juvenile” for her to enjoy. She asked if she could have another prize instead, and I said I had to check with the higher-ups who were in charge of the contest. She took the original prize home that day, and when I called her to say that we did have an alternate prize we could trade her for she asked if she had to have the box to trade in the original prize, because she had thrown it away. And then she got mad at me when I told her she needed the original box if she was going to exchange the item.

      All of this over something she won for free from the public library.

      1. I Speak for the Trees*

        Wow. I feel you on this. I work for a non-profit and have had people complain about raffe wins, etc. Granted, sometimes I see their point – like when the bald guy won a very expensive salon cut and color – but usually it’s just complaints for no reason. That said, the woman who won the “vibrating massage pillow” (meant for the lower back or feet, but the butt lots of jokes) was extremely gracious about it even through she didn’t really seem to want it

      2. Dewey Decimator*

        I think I have met that patron in my library as well. I also had a woman complain that the prize drawing was fixed, simply because she didn’t win. I would also like to point out that I never had a kid complain. They just like winning. Sigh.

      4. Vivien*

        I was in charge of a raffle at my work that invited the public in to show off our new products. Two ladies found the FB event for the raffle, had absolutely NO INTENTION of purchasing any of our products, and camped out right next to the raffle bowl the entire time (making it hard for me to do my job at the front desk) and got mad at me for shuffling the bowl of tickets after they waited to drop their tickets in at the top right before the drawing.

    6. Mademoiselle Sugarlump*

      A friend works for a large bank in the investment department for people who have investments of more than 50 million dollars. They put on “how to invest” educational events in places like Aspen that she gets to plan. Of course there are goodie bags with things like iPhones. She has stories of these millionaires – some celebrity ones – asking if they could have extra goodie bags for, you know, their daughter and son who didn’t come along.

      1. esra*

        Oh, the stories I could tell about celebrities being cheap af when it comes to swag. No one, no one is cheaper and grabbier than the wealthy.

  4. Paloma Pigeon*

    Toxic co-worker took offense at Dilbert (Dilbert!) comics that were posted in the kitchen and had been posted for years before she was hired because one of them dealt with salary negotiations and she had decided to advocate for raising salaries of program staff who didn’t report to her and she accused our Executive Director of posting them as an act of harassment. This person was a piece of work, to say the least.

    Here is the Dilbert she found offensive: https://dilbert.com/strip/2013-02-16

    1. SusanIvanova*

      The VP of our smallish tech company decided to move people’s offices around just because he could. He even admitted that was the reason. So someone put up the then-recent Dilbert where Wally is gloating about being in charge of cubicle assignments and calls himself “Lord Wally the Puppet Master”.

      It whooshed over the VP’s head. He signed the next email about office assignments “Lord VP the Puppet Master”.

      https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-04-20

      1. Richard*

        Sounds like he got the joke to me. Just because someone doesn’t care that you’re making fun of them doesn’t mean anything whooshed.

      2. Jadelyn*

        I mean, he obviously got it. He was just the type of person who finds people being upset with him entertaining.

    3. holly*

      Honestly, I think that is a pretty inappropriate comic for anyone at a directorial level to post, regardless of timing.

      1. Shad*

        I’m not seeing where it’s suggested that it was actually posted by a director. I took the entire accusation, both perpetrator and timing, as something toxic coworker imagined.

      1. Black Bellamy*

        This is why I can’t appreciate Degas the anti-semite, Caravaggio the murdering whoremaster, Gaugin the syphilitic pedophile, and of course the raging misogynist Picasso. #notallartists!

          1. Kettles*

            I think they meant Picasso and Adams shared similarities in terms of misogyny and general terribleness – in that class they’re fairly comparable.

        2. Kelsi*

          I mean you can divorce the art from the artist if you want to, but all the folks you mentioned are dead and are not receiving direct or indirect financial support (and yes, sharing comics counts as indirect, it’s advertising) from my consuming their art. So it’s not really a good comparison.

          Maybe talk about Johnny Depp, Orson Scott Card, Woody Allen? And you’ll find there are plenty of people (myself included) who can’t appreciate their art or find it within themselves to support it because of what sort of people they are.

          1. Vicky Austin*

            Or talk about Harvey Weinstein? Bill Cosby? Louis CK? I can no longer appreciate any of their art/comedy.

            But what did Orson Scott Card do?

              1. I'm A Little Teapot*

                From what I’ve heard, he’s just pretty nasty. Goes beyond homophobia.

                1. many bells down*

                  Yeah, I had a fantasy novel of his, “Hart’s Hope” and WOW it’s messed up. Waaaaaaay beyond homophobia.

                2. Vemasi*

                  Yes. You would think from Speaker of the Dead and other writings that he is pro-equality, but he is homophobic and I believe anti-semitic. He also talks over women in panel discussions.

            2. On Hold*

              Orson Scott Card is an enormous homophobe and has thrown a huge amount of time and money into it. If you want to be upset about him, google around for his multi-page essay about how he doesn’t hate us, he just despises us and everything we stand for.

              1. Vicky Austin*

                Ugh. I have several of his books and I’m going to consider getting rid of them.

                1. Elizabeth West*

                  I had a couple of Dilbert books (I bought them at the flea market, so he didn’t get any money). When I found out what Scott Adams was really like, I threw them away. Right into the bin on top of the nasty old banana peels.

              2. Phx Acct, now with dragons*

                UGH. Heyzuz chucknuts. I’ve got a kid named Ender.

                Is 14 too old to rename?

                1. Autumnheart*

                  That’s funny, I know someone whose kid is named Ender. So either you’re the person I know, or there’s more than one.

            3. D'Arcy*

              Orson Scott Card literally called for keeping anti-sodomy laws on the books for the purpose of “sending a clear message that [LGBT people] cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens”, and also to be selectively enforced against “uppity” gays in order to terrorize people into being straight or at least staying in the closet.

            4. MM*

              In addition to the points about homophobia below, he’s also a raging misogynist crank. Goes on and on about how the gynocracy is trying to feminize men by buying them v-neck sweaters.

          1. Rachel B.*

            Degas may or may not have begun life as an anti-Semite, but his work from the Dreyfus affair on makes it very clear that he absolutely was one. For example, take a look at his Portraits at the Stock Exchange, particularly the face you can see in reflection. Gauguin was not strictly a pedophile, but he had sex with, raped, or took as mistresses a surprising number of very young teenaged girls, in Martinique and especially Tahiti.

              1. Aro*

                It sounds like he might have been an ephebophile (attraction to adolescents) instead of a pedophile (attraction to pre-pubescent children). Both are equally icky, but there is a technical difference.

            3. Kelly*

              Gauguin is problematic in more ways than his sexual relationships with teenage girls. He was also awful to his long suffering wife, abandoning her and their kids to move to different places in search of the exotic, from the Caribbean and eventually to the South Pacific. He was also very much of his time in his attitudes towards the people in Tahiti with his colonialist attitude. Most exhibitions on Gauguin over the past 30 years acknowledge that he was a terrible person to the women in his life and his appropriation of non-western cultures in his work.

        5. Susana*

          Oh! I was in Oporto, Portugal, traveling alone, and there was a big Dali exhibition, but at a museum not really in the center. I love to walk, and kind of underestimated how far it was. I walked maybe 5 or 6 miles to the gallery, but so glad to get there to see the work of an artist I’d always loved. Then, I’m reading all the bio stuff at the opening of the exhibit and learned he was a Franco-ite. I sort of felt like throwing up or leaving, but I had come so far! So I saw the exhibit. Took a can back to the center and had a lot of port.

      2. Rita*

        In one of my jobs at an online publication, our editor-in-chief was just a terrible writer and not the sharpest pencil in the box. It was my job to edit his work before it went up, and there were inevitably a ton of mistakes to fix (the one I always remember was using “epitaph” instead of “epithet”). I didn’t even usually do an actual edit, just fixed obvious errors. Nevertheless, when he got the doc back so he could post it, it would be redlined to high heaven.

        Every time this happened, he would spend the rest of the day combing the site for mistakes in other people’s pieces, and would call them out as he found them, often in articles that were months old.

        I hated the days when I knew I’d have to edit his work.

        2. Susana*

          But..spellcheck issue maybe? I filed a piece once in which I meant to say Democrats were determined to defeat Trump. Except that I wore “defat” Trump and spellcheck didn’t catch it. Fortunately, I caught it before it went into print – but after two editors missed it…

      3. Teapot analyst*

        I used to have a Dilbert about planning sick leave in advance, because we had a manager who was trying to make that the policy (the manager was offsite, so it wasn’t confrontational but rather supportive of a coworker who needed more sick leave). I took that down at some point, and would refuse to put up Dilbert (because Adams is a jerk), although now I rely on XKCD and this one:
        https://images.app.goo.gl/LeBNf2a5KobSU91f8

        2. T R*

          Interestingly, I tried applying for sick leave in advance at my work recently (doctor’s appointment, and I wouldn’t be working for the rest of the day.) The tool we use would not allow me to apply in advance – we can only apply on the actual day, or after the fact.

      5. Frank Doyle*

        Being a bigot towards LGBT folks is not “politics.” Being a pedophile is not “politics” either.

        1. Steven Meowder*

          I’m not going to turn this into an LGBT debate, and to be honest, paedophilia was the last thing on my mind when I posted this. But there are plenty of other political issues – abortion, illegal immigration, gun control (again, not here to debate, just listing some examples). It’s not always about the gays.

      6. Steven Meowder*

        Those ban attempts go both ways. Look at the attempts from leftist groups to shut down movies like Unplanned, Gosnell, or The Red Pill. And this week there has been an outcry from liberals to shut down South Park, which I think is hilarious because when the show started, conservative groups were the ones to complain.

        1. RUKiddingMe*

          You know this isn’t a political forum. Maybe don’t start in on politics when no one else was?

          1. Steven Meowder*

            Oh sorry, my bad. I’ve seen progressive talking points discussed often on here, so I just assumed conservative opinions were also allowed…

      8. PhyllisB*

        I’ve always loved Dilbert. I don’t know anything about Scott Adams. What makes him such a jerk?

        1. Anastasia Beaverhausen*

          “The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.”

          Yeesh. I just did the D: face.

    5. Paper Librarian*

      Any chance the co-worker took offense because she’d heard Scott Adams was a misogynist? I honestly don’t know too much about him or his cartoon, but I’ve heard rumors he’s pretty anti-woman for over a decade. Not to say that exempts her from being a piece of work. XD

      1. Jules the 3rd*

        It’s not rumors, it’s explicit things he’s said, like “women are treated differently [than men] by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone.” I used to love Dilbert, had a couple of his books, was proud to be labeled ‘Alice’ by the tech support team I was leading, back in the early 90s. I threw them all away / stopped reading when he started saying things like this.

        I pray the XKCD guy stays as reasonable as he seems to be.

        1. Lucy*

          Oh lawks.

          Randall at XKCD has some good history of sensitivity so I’m confident in supporting him.

          1. Hey Karma, Over here.*

            Randall is a bit harsh on people who are not as scientifically talented as he, but overall, he’s good guy.

            1. Lucy*

              Except there’s the underlying joy of “lucky ten thousand” so at least he acknowledges that he’s being mean when he does sneer.

              1. Lucy*

                “Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.”

        2. Vicky Austin*

          I’m as feminist as they come, but as I am not familiar with that quote, I wonder about the context in which he said it. If he was saying that he personally felt that women were on the same level as children and people with intellectual disabilities, then yeah, that’s misogynist. However, it’s also possible that he was saying it in the context of, “This is how misogynist men are, they treat women like they’re immature or have low IQ’s, and I hate it and it has to stop.” It’s hard to tell without the context.

          1. The Dread Pirate Buttercup*

            He’s… said other things that make his context very clear. Search wehuntedthemammoth.com for his name if you’d like to be disappointed.

          2. Peridot*

            It’s really, really obvious. He’s done and said a lot of things that place him squarely in the “terrible person” camp.

          3. Locket*

            The context isn’t great, either.

            “The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.”

            …

            “I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.”

            The context is gross to both men and women and anyone in-between. I don’t recommend it.

            2. Adam Scott*

              I dunno, sounds to me that he’s merely suggesting that if you’re arguing with someone who wholeheartedly and adamantly thinks the thoroughly debunked wage gap is real, then it’s probably not worth spending your energy on them.

              I’d say it’s more poor wording than evidence of misogyny.

              1. Vicky Austin*

                The wage gap has NOT been thoroughly debunked. There is plenty of evidence of it from many credible sources.

                1. Adam Scott*

                  Like who? I’ve seen it thoroughly torn to shreds.

                  There is an *earnings* gap explained by career and lifestyle choices; but there is no wage gap. It is illegal in essentially all western countries.

                3. Autumnheart*

                  Wage theft, union busting, and firing people for medical reasons are also illegal, and rampant.

          4. Ego Chamber*

            “It’s hard to tell without the context.”

            Alternate option: If you’d like the context, seek it out. If we’ve all misjudged due to lack of context, point that out. I find it pretty gross that gross people are so often defended sight-unseen by people who want to lean on “the context” without actually knowing anything about the context.

            (I’m not attacking you, this isn’t specific to you, just a general problem I have with this argument.)

            1. TootsNYC*

              I find it pretty gross that gross people are so often defended sight-unseen by people who want to lean on “the context” without actually knowing anything about the context.

              Especially in the age of Google.

              Do some research before you argue. And do the other folks the courtesy of assuming that THEY didn’t make their judgment without a little research of their own.

              Unless YOU are in the habit of making a judgment without research, there’s no reason to assume that everyone else is. And if you do your own research, you’ll discover whether their judgment has context.

              Knee-jerk defending people is Not Cool. Especially not when you can find it with a little time.

              If it’s worth the time to argue back, it’s worth the time to research first so you have more context YOURSELF.

        3. Lynn Whitehat*

          Exact same.

          Reading comics is a voluntary leisure activity. I can no longer enjoy Dilbert.

        5. PhyllisB*

          Jules, I didn’t see your response when I asked my question. Sorry to hear Scott is a scumbag.

      2. Paloma Pigeon*

        No, unfortunately. And I am so upset about Scott Adams being a jerk, because Dilbert comics kept me sane for so much of my 20s when I worked a series of temp jobs.

        Honestly, if she had just protested them in general or said ‘Hey, I think these are inappropriate’, it would have been fine – but it was the fact that she accused our boss of putting them up on purpose to harass her, when 1) they were up when she came in to interview, for heaven’s sake, let alone for the months before the whole salary thing came up and 2) our boss could not pick Dilbert out of a comics page if his life depended on it.

    6. Vicky Austin*

      First of all, I love your screen name. Since paloma means pigeon, your screen name is essentially Pigeon Pigeon!
      Also, your comment reminds me of the time a coworker got in trouble for posting political cartoons on the bulletin board. While most of the people in that office had left-of-center political views and it was generally a safe place to vent about Donald Trump, the executive director felt that posting the cartoon went too far.

        1. Decloaking for important commenting*

          I thought Paloma meant “dove”! Uh-oh, I have a friend who either seriously misunderstood the provenance of the name, or played a huge joke on her child…

          1. Just Employed Here*

            Wikipedia tells me

            “The distinction between “doves” and “pigeons” in English is not consistent, and does not exist in most other languages.”

            so I think your friend’s kid will be OK…

          2. J Kate*

            Doves and pigeons are in the same bird family (Columbidae). The Spanish word (paloma) is the same for both of them!

            1. Carpe Librarium*

              Yep, I just call them all pigeons.

              White = dove = bird of purity/peace
              Not white = pigeon = rat/vermin of the sky.
              Racism bleeds into aspects of society in ridiculous ways.

              Though to be fair, I don’t know much about pigeon naming history and when they were determined to be the same from a taxonomy standpoint, it could have to do with local varieties in different regions and the languages of those areas across.

              1. Vicky Austin*

                Racism does effect all aspects of society, but I don’t think the use of the word “pigeon” is necessarily an instance of racism. It’s my understanding that all pigeons are doves, but not all doves are pigeons. Also, pigeons weren’t always considered to be the filthy rat-birds that they are today. For several centuries, people kept them as pets. The flocks of pigeons that hover around every train station in America are the descendants of pet pigeons that escaped.
                The dove of peace is a different bird species that lives in the Middle East and was mentioned in the Bible. It’s merely coincedence that this particular dove only comes in white, while pigeons come in all colors. I’ve even seen an ocassional white pigeon in a flock of grey, brown, and black birds.

              2. Pandop*

                Not all pigeons are considered vermin – my neighbour breeds racing/homing pigeons. I have never known what in the UK we refer to as doves being used in this way, which is another way to distinguish them over here.
                Pigeons = useful pets
                Doves = ornamental pets

              1. Róisín*

                I was going to point that out. I was taught the word as “dove” and discovered later that it’s also the word for pigeon. Languages are neat.

    7. Gumby*

      Heh. I was very very tempted at one point to put up some Demotivators (from Despair.com) to replace the “company values” posters that the former tenants of our office space had up. I did not do it but when I mentioned the urge to a co-worker they really wished I had. I think they might be more of an ‘okay in your own office but keep it out of the hallway’ thing.

      1. Pebbles*

        One of the managers here has the “Meetings” one: “None of us is as dumb as all of us.” :D

      3. starsaphire*

        I had a friend who actually did do that — and NO ONE noticed. For, like, years.

      4. Grey Coder*

        I couldn’t think of anything to contribute to this thread, but you’ve reminded me that I gave a Demotivators calendar to one job as a parting gift when I quit, with carefully selected relevant posters.

      1. Vemasi*

        It’s weird, because a lot of them can be read in a feminist way. Much like Orson Scott Card with Speaker for the Dead, apparently a lot of artists and writers just… accidentally? have good messages? That they explicitly don’t believe in?

        1. Charamei*

          A lot of writers and artists accidentally put bad messages into their work, too. It’s not too surprising that it sometimes happens the other way around (although it is a much more pleasant surprise).

        2. Just Employed Here*

          I think it shows they’ve really thought about it, intelligently and from different points of view.

          Then they’ve somehow got stuck on an inexplicably stupid point of view (maybe for emotional reasons or something), and have decided that that’s theirs.

  5. AndersonDarling*

    At a potluck, co-worker put beer in the cheese dip because a rival co-worker was AA.
    She told me after the event that she put a few drops of beer in. I don’t know what she thought would happen since it was a giant bowl of dip and there wouldn’t have been a way to taste it. It was just a sad, petty power move.

      1. AndersonDarling*

        Yeah, the co-worker had some serious issues with working with others, but that crossed into evil maniac territory. Gossip, okay. Stink eyes, okay. Sneaking something into someone’s food? That crosses the line.

        1. Drew*

          I once made queso can carne where the meat wasn’t immediately obvious and realized as the office vegetarian was about to take a bite that I hadn’t labeled it. Horrified, I tried to stop her, but she just shrugged and said, “I’m already cheating with cheese, a little beef isn’t going to kill me.”

          Still feel bad over it, though.

          1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

            “Cheating with cheese”? What? Cheese isn’t cheating when you’re a vegetarian.

            It’s nice that you felt bad and took her dietary restrictions seriously even though she was some kind of fad vegetarian who was getting vegetarian mixed up with vegan, argh. That’s why people don’t take vegetarians seriously all the time *twitch*

            1. Veggies*

              That’s harsh. I eat mostly vegetarian for health reasons, but sometimes it’s just not feasible, and since I don’t have a moral problem eating meat, it’s ok for me to eat it once in a while. Just as it’s ok for a diabetic or someone with heart problems to eat foods they typically should avoid once in a while.

              1. confidante's inferno*

                Sorry, I disagree. You don’t eat much meat, and that’s fine – but you’re not a vegetarian. Neither is the person in the story, if she’s willing to eat beef (and maybe non-vegetarian cheese).

                2. Mike*

                  All cheese is vegetarian, just not vegan.

                  Vegetarian just means you don’t eat meat (also there’s no motivation implications behind the term like vegan has). That said lots of people use “vegetarian” as an easy short-hand for their diets despite it not being completely accurate (maybe they only rarely eat meat or only one type of meat) and a “cheat” here or there doesn’t negate your overall diet.

            2. Green great dragon*

              There’s vegetarian cheese, and there’s non-vegetarian cheese (it’s the rennet).

            3. Prof. Kat*

              Some cheese is cheating, yes. Lots of cheeses (true parmigiano reggiano, gruyere, and others) contain rennet, which is taken from the stomach of a calf. There is vegetarian rennet, but only some cheeses are made with that. When I was vegetarian, I didn’t give up the naughty cheeses, but other folks choose to draw a line, and they’re technically correct.

            4. Princess Consuela Banana Hammock*

              In some countries, vegetarian means vegan. So it may not be a mix-up for that person, even though it may cause confusion for other folks who have a different context.

            5. JHunz*

              It’s equally – or more – likely that the person you’re responding to was the one mixing up their dietary restrictions

            6. StaceyIzMe*

              I don’t agree. People can exercise their personal agency about what they eat just as much as they can about any other area of their life. Are you vegan until noon, low carb until tea time and gluten free until the evening snack? Fine. As long as I don’t have to observe the same restrictions, tolerate excessive virtue signalling or pay more than a reasonable upcharge for my own special requirements/ preferences, it’s not my issue to bother with. If you wax on about the glories of organic produce, the anti-inflammatory properties of tumeric or the reasonable cost of lunch at McDonalds, I’m here to nod agreeably, maybe learn something interesting and serve what I can reasonably manage when hosting. Try to take away my privilege of choosing (literally or metaphorically) and I reserve the right to consider you a bumptious cretin.

              1. StaceyIzMe*

                Oops, missed the comment upthread where someone snuck beer into the dip. Yeah, that’s just wrong.

            7. ChimericalOne*

              That’s harsh. And not necessarily accurate, either. There’s a reason why vegetarians sometimes label themselves “ovo-lacto vegetarian” — not all vegetarians are. Veganism is simply a subset of vegetarianism. Non-vegan vegetarians *may or may not* eat some combination of eggs, dairy, and honey. And she may have been a generally-vegan vegetarian.

              I’m not sure if you’re also judging her for “cheating” on whatever restrictions she chose to apply to her diet, too, but if so, that’s also not helpful. I’m someone who practices ethically-conscious eating (in the form of greatly reduced meat intake, consumption of vegan egg/dairy substitutes when practical, seeking free range eggs and grass-fed beef when I do consume animal products) and I find it much simpler to just tell people I’m “mostly vegetarian” (nobody really wants the long explanation above, and the label “ethically-conscious eating” tends to devolve into the aforementioned long explanation). And that quickly gets shortened to “vegetarian” in pretty much everyone’s minds. I try not to eat meat in front of my coworkers so they don’t get confused (or judge), but I do eat meat about once every month or two from a specific “cheat” place, and overall, reducing my meat intake from multiple times daily to once a month is vastly significant in terms of environmental impact.

              I’ve maintained this diet for 5 or 6 years now, as well. So, just because someone eats a little cheese or beef doesn’t mean they’re participating in a passing fad when they use the term “vegetarian” to describe themselves.

              (Honestly, we don’t all need to go fully vegetarian or vegan to save the Earth. If everyone cut meat back from “daily” to more like “monthly” or “quarterly,” we’d be in a much, much better place from that alone.)

          2. Jadelyn*

            …I mean, “con carne” literally means “with meat”, so…my sympathy is kinda limited.

            1. MM*

              She said it wasn’t labeled. So the name of the thing really doesn’t come into it.

          3. Mike*

            Reminds me of the comic Leftover Soup comic where the chef comes running from the kitchen to stop his vegan friend from eating a dish with fish sauce in it.

        2. Minocho*

          I mark ingredients on my potluck food (I have friends with allergies), and I make my dishes vegetarian friendly, usually with a separate thing meat (as appropriate to the dish) that can be added by non-vegetarians.

          Mistakes and oversights happen, but violating someone’s food on purpose is just terrible. And it can be very dangerous!

          1. Bryce*

            Thank you. It’s always frustrating to try and track down who made what, find out what’s in it, and get to the table before everyone’s mixed up the utensils and cross-contacted everything anyway.

      2. Wendy Darling*

        It is horrible but also incompetent. Which I guess if you have to be horrible you may as well do a super crappy job and have no actual effect (it’s the horrible thought that counts).

    2. Observer*

      I think that “petty” is too kind for that.

      If I heard of someone doing that, I don’t care why, it would TOTALLY change my perception of that person, and I would stop trusting them.

    3. AppleStan*

      That is…beyond horrific.

      So what happened if someone who is allergic to beer or the ingredients in beer had eaten that dip?

      What if the person who was in AA also had some (unshared) reasons for being in AA, like it was a mandatory part of a suspended sentence, and they had to be tested for alcohol?

      You. just. don’t. mess. with. someone’s. sobriety!

      I think I wouldn’t trust that person with a paperclip after that disclosure.

      1. AndersonDarling*

        OH, I never trusted her before that event. She would fabricate battles with people so she could win them. She always saw competitions in what people ate (My food is healthier!), what they did on the weekends (I watched better stuff on TV!), and every detail of everything. It was a very toxic environment so none of it stood out more than the other craziness of the department.

        1. Bilateralrope*

          If someone tried something that petty with me, would it be wrong to try to lose as hard as possible ?

          Or at least claim you did if she cant prove anything.

      2. Teapot analyst*

        A few drops in the food isn’t going to have any noticeable effect. She’s doing it to make a point, not to influence anything. I still think it’s horribly wrong, but it’s a moral point and very unlikely to be a physical one.

        Food often has a bit of natural fermentation. One prevalent example is soft drinks:
        https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alcohol-soda_n_1635190

        1. Worst Allergies*

          I beg to differ. I’m highly allergic to hops, and extremely sensitive to them in ANY context, so a teaspoon of beer might have been enough to set me off and send me to the hospital.

          1. Teapot analyst*

            I’m not denying that it could be a problem for other reasons (wheat for example), but a few drops of alcohol in a large container aren’t much different than many commercial foods.

            1. valentine*

              I assume she was lying because people will admit to lesser crimes to float the idea. Had AndersonDarling approved, the fiend might’ve confessed to a/the larger amount.

        2. D'Arcy*

          “A few drops” isn’t going to have any noticeable effect if you’re only worried about getting drunk, but it can have an enormous effect on food sensitivities and allergies. Speaking as a former EMT whose best friend has a “drop dead” level allergy to milk, I have absolutely no tolerance for people fucking around with this.

      3. PersephoneUnderground*

        Yes, that’s really messed up! It actually could have made them violently I’ll if they were taking Antabuse (a common medication given to people in alcohol treatment for the explicit purpose of preventing you from drinking because it makes even a tiny amount of alcohol cause vomiting). Doctors warn people on it to be extremely careful about even having small amounts of alcoholic ingredients in their food, such as red wine sauce, even if the alcohol is cooked off it could still cause a reaction. So yeah, she’s lucky they weren’t taking that medicine or it was little enough not to trigger a hospital trip. Seriously not cool. This has been your PSA, when someone in AA says they can’t have alcohol, they might mean more immediate and extreme consequences than you think.

    4. The Tin Man*

      That right there is a garbage human being. I mean what even was the endgame, to get the rival off the wagon? To “prove” alcoholism isn’t a thing? To show anyone she told this to that she is a terrible person who should not be trusted with anything, personal or work-related?

      1. Princess Consuela Banana Hammock*

        I was coming to say this. That isn’t just petty—it’s vile. And disgusting. And despicable. And 1000% garbage human behavior.

      2. dumblewald*

        Ugh. I think it’s probably a personal satisfaction thing. While it would t be physically harmful, I have several coworkers who don’t drink for religious reasons – this would be cruel to them as well.

    5. Fiddlesticks*

      Wow. I would have reported that woman to HR, stat. Putting things in people’s food could easily be the slow start to full-on bunny boiler.

    6. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      OMFG what if they were taking that medicine that makes you sick if you ingest alcohol O_O

      That’s up there with “They’re allergic to shell fish and the secret ingredient is shrimp juice haha haha haha”, disgusting.

      Messing with food can carry heavy legal consequences. Especially since she’s telling people about it. A delivery driver recently shared a video of him dipping his junk into someone’s food because of a reaction to how little they had tipped.

      1. costume teapot*

        THIS. So much this. I’m on a medication right now that putting alcohol into my system could actually cause fatal liver failure. I have to get my liver functions tested routinely to get ahead of any damage to it. I absolutely do not want someone else making the decision to risk my life like that.

      2. PersephoneUnderground*

        Yes, this – Antabuse is the med. I explained just how hardcore it is above.

    7. Bunny Girl*

      Yikes. One of my favorite cupcake recipes is a chocolate stout cake with whiskey chocolate filling and an irish creme frosting. I made it once for St. Patty’s Day at the (really, really) laid back job that I had but I put a sign right in front saying they were made with alcohol so that anyone sustaining for any reason could skip the treats that day.

        1. Bunny Girl*

          Oh sure! I use Tasty’s Ultimate Chocolate Cake recipe, but just bake it in cupcake tins (Wilton has a good conversion chart for baking & temp depending on what cupcake tin you’re using). Then when those are cooled, scoop a little of the center out with the spoon. To make the whiskey chocolate, put some milk chocolate chips over a double boiler with about a tablespoon of Irish whiskey. Melt that and if it seizes up, just add a little Crisco. Take that off the double boiler for a few minutes then fill the cupcakes with it. For the frosting, you can just use your favorite buttercream frosting (I like the one from Two Sisters) and swap out your milk for Irish Cream and be a little more liberal with it than the recipe lists for milk.

        2. Pippa*

          I’m not the person you’re asking, but I often use Nigella Lawson’s recipe for chocolate Guinness cake. It’s delicious and really reliable – comes out great every time! I’ll put the link in a reply if anyone wants it. (Also, sorry if this is getting too off-topic. But cake!)

      2. RabbitRabbit*

        I have a colleague who makes liquor-infused cake but the alcohol is OBVIOUS. I mean, you can quite literally smell the liquor and I have joked that you could light a match nearby and set off some of the fumes. And she will only share in-person and warns everyone anyway.

        We probably shouldn’t be eating cake that potent at work, but hey.

        1. the_scientist*

          ha, my dad gets one of those rum cakes from a coworker every year and I swear I get a buzz from one slice….you can smell it from across the room!

        2. Human Sloth*

          I do this with Rum balls at our end of the year party. I do label them, but only people with no sense of smell would need the warning. It is indeed a very Merry Christmas.

      3. louise*

        I’ve made these cupcakes for years using Brown Eyed Baker’s recipe. When I went wheat free* and lactose free, I swapped out Bob’s Red Mill 1:1 flour and vegan sour cream and I swear the cupcakes got even better, which has never in the bet history of the world been said about GF treats.

        *Guiness isn’t necessarily wheat free, but I’m not allergic; merely gut sensitive to high concentrations.

    8. an infinite number of monkeys*

      At such a small concentration that seems unlikely to be enough to cause a problem, but still. That’s really, really, REALLY bad.

      An event I help coordinate involved a dinner. Our sponsoring host provides the meal, with strict instructions that no alcohol is allowed (the attendees are government employees attending the dinner as a work function and we are not permitted to drink on duty). I realized halfway through bread pudding that I was getting a slight buzz on, asked the host, and she winked and said it was made with bourbon – that was her sly little way of getting around our fussy old regulations. But at least one of our attendees abstains for religious reasons, and others might well have very good reasons I’m not aware of (and as an event organizer, never need to ask, because there’s not supposed to be any alcohol available anyway). The sponsor/beneficiary relationship makes it very difficult to be ungracious, but next year’s instructions for hosts will make that restriction MUCH clearer. You can’t sneak mind-altering substances into people without their enthusiastic consent, ffs.

      The things you think you don’t need to tell people. Ugh, I’m still pretty steamed about that.

      1. The Gollux (Not a Mere Device)*

        Timothy Leary, who isn’t exactly known as a voice of moderation, gave two commandments for the “psychedelic age.” One of them was “thou shalt not alter thy neighbor’s consciousness without his consent.” This person thinks she’s being clever and rebellious, but that’s the same attitude that puts acid in the punch at a party and doesn’t people it’s electric.

        I’m not anti-alcohol, or anti-most other drugs; I am strongly opposed to dosing people with anything, including alcohol, without their knowledge and consent.

        1. Grapey*

          +1000

          I made ‘special’ brownies once (clearly ‘marked’ with cosmo sprinkles) and an acquaintance tried to trick another abstaining friend into eating one of them. Acquaintance was promptly told off and is not allowed back at any of my parties. Friend could smell the special ingredient from three feet away and was not actually tricked.

          One, do not use my special cosmos brownies for evil and trickery! Shame! I try to foster a culture of trust at my parties.
          Two, special brownies take a lot of time and ingredients to waste on someone that doesn’t want one.

          1. PhyllisB*

            When my son was in drug court I would occasionally go with him to his weekly court sessions. (No, I wasn’t being helicopter mom, the judge encouraged and welcomed family attendance.) One of the young men was being sanctioned for failing a drug test and getting arrested for beating someone up. He explained he had been at a party and someone had put marijuana in the brownies served. After he had eaten several, the “friend” gleefully told him what he did. Thus, resulting in the beating up. Not the best response maybe, but this young man was on the verge of being sent to prison for non-compliance, so I could understand his reaction. On a side note, I think the judge did, too because all she did that day was assign him community service, and set back his time in drug court.

        2. Salymander*

          Slipping something into another person’s food or drink, even a tiny bit, is reprehensible. It goes beyond petty, and into Disney villain territory.

          When I was in high school, a boy I was acquainted with showed up at my house one day. Uninvited. He offered me alcohol. At the time, I did not drink. I get migraines, and alcohol is a massive migraine trigger for me. I politely refused, and told this boy the reason because he seemed annoyed. So he *knew* the potential consequences.

          We were sitting in the kitchen drinking iced tea, and I turned away to answer the phone. When I next took a drink, there was just enough alcohol in it to be detectable. Jerkboy just smiled, and tried to lie about it, like I was just imagining things. He smiled and laughed like the whole thing was a joke, until I dragged him out of my house by the ear and slammed the door in his face. He said he was just tired of me being an uptight b*”*h. Pretty sure he had a lot of nasty ulterior motives, but I think mainly he just thought it would be funny to mess with me. Of course, it was the 1980s, so there were no real consequences for him.

          Fortunately, the alcohol he used to dose me “on the sly” was peppermint schnapps. When my iced tea suddenly smelled like mouthwash, it was really obvious what Jerkboy had done. Thus, I was able to avoid the days of blinding pain and puking misery that a migraine brings.

          I still worry sometimes that Jerkboy has improved his illicit dosing technique over the years. If someone will purposely risk another person’s health in that way just for a joke, they are clearly lacking in some very fundamental ways. Honestly, who does that? The thought that someone’s *adult co-worker* did the same thing *at work* just baffles me. WTF? Are they so out of touch with acceptable behavior and lacking in a moral compass that they think this is normal? This must be like working in an office with a Disney villain in disguise. Again, I say WTF?

      2. Jules the 3rd*

        If you were getting a buzz, that’s definitely enough to mess with people on certain meds. I know someone on anti-psychotics who got hallucinations from some liquor infused cake. He thought it wouldn’t be a problem, because it was so little, but it was.

      3. Observer*

        Please make a HUGE fuss about it – don’t wait for “more explicit instructions” next year.

        If there was enough bourbon for you to actually get a buzz, even the slightest, there was enough in there to be potentially dangerous to people. I’m NOT catastrophising here. There are SO many reasons for people to NEED to stay away from alcohol, that in any significantly sized group, you are almost certain to find at least one or two. So, when the alcohol comes in a bottle and people can drink other things, it’s not that big of a deal because you can just not drink. Even people in AA and the like can sometimes deal with it – or they have the option to bow out. But when you do stuff like this you force people to do things that could seriously hurt them.

      4. AMPG*

        I was once at a lunch sponsored by the federal government with multiple international guests, including some from Muslim-majority countries, and the vendor served a dessert with alcohol-soaked fruit in it without telling us. As soon as I tasted the dessert I turned to my tablemate to warn her not to eat it, only to find that she had already eaten most of hers (not recognizing the alcohol taste). Then one of the waitstaff came over and started to admonish her, because she was apparently supposed to have asked for a replacement dessert, except that none of us had been told there was alcohol in the dish, so wouldn’t have known to ask. It was a terrible situation all around.

    9. JJ Bittenbinder*

      There was a well-known Reddit thread a year ago in the legal advice sub, where a woman wrote in and said she had been tricked into eating something that she should not have at work (she keeps kosher and a coworker who knows this made a pie crust with lard and told her it was made with butter). A few posters connected the dots and were able to supply the OP of that thread with a thread that her evil coworker had posted the week before, in which the evil coworker had complained about this woman rejecting office culture and getting upset that they threw her a baby shower (against the employee’s religion) and it slowly came out that the evil coworker really was targeting this employee and creating a hostile work environment. It was completely wild.

      This situation you just described reminded me of that. Way to go, evil coworkers, who mess with everything a person holds dear and relies on for survival.

      1. DoctorateStrange*

        I remember that! I hope the woman that was Kosher got justice. I can’t imagine working with someone with such animosity.

        1. JJ Bittenbinder*

          There was an update in which she said she had retained a lawyer and they were “settling out of court, to minimize publicity”, so I’m hopeful she got some good cash, had a peaceful rest of her pregnancy, and is happily doing whatever she wants to be doing.

          And I hope her former manager is tricked into eating something unpleasant or somehow gets what she deserves. May every driver right in front of her slow down just as the light turns yellow, or may her every sweater sleeve get caught in her car door.

          1. Librarian of SHIELD*

            Okay, “may your every sweater sleeve get caught in your car door” is officially my new favorite curse.

      2. SeluciaMD*

        This was the first I’d heard of this Reddit thread and thank you very much for alerting me to its existence. Holy crap that coworker was banana crackers of the first order! Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees. Reddit was a nice conduit for karma there… :)

        Why can’t some people integrate the concept that what makes *them* happy does not necessarily make *other people* happy? Crazytown!

      3. iglwif*

        That once happened to me — that is, the person who fed me (and another Jewish vegetarian; yes, she knew we were both Jewish and both vegetarians) pie made with lard didn’t explicitly tell us there was butter or Crisco in there, but she did wait until we’d eaten the pie to loudly announce that lard was the secret ingredient in her exceptionally flaky crust, and laughed at our horrified reaction. I did not sue her, because what would be the point of suing a gigging jazz musician, but I never ate at her house again after that.

    11. Kms1025*

      thats beyond petty…thats some serious vindictive asshat material right there…akin to putting sugar in a diabetics food!!!

    12. That Californian*

      When I was staying at a hostel in Italy, because of a language difficulty a sober traveler at several bites of his tiramisu before realizing it had alcohol in it. The poor guy spent the rest of the meal wondering if he had fallen off the wagon after 10 years. I tried to reassure him that it didn’t count because it was an accident and not that much, but he said, “Yeah, but if I say that my brain might try to tell me all sorts of other things don’t count. I don’t know what to do.” He said he was going to call his sponsor to talk it through, and I hope he did. He was just so sad.
      I always think of that experience when I’m tempted to think someone else’s restrictions aren’t that big a deal. We don’t know what the stakes are in other people’s lives.

    13. Frankie*

      Wow, drugging the cheese dip to mess with someone’s sobriety!! That’s not petty, that’s extremely messed up.

      I wouldn’t trust that she put in “a few drops” either.

  6. Putting Out Fires, Esq.*

    We had a terrible facility for a while and cleaning was…sporadic at best. Theoretically someone was supposed to be vacuuming but this was clearly not happening. There were dead roaches around (this is the South and enormous roaches are a fact of life and not themselves indicative of cleanliness) that no one would pick up. So one of my coworkers made a post-it note tombstone for one that had been there for several days. The “tombstone” stood for a week.

    2. Clorinda*

      A colleague of mine left a French fry on her classroom floor to see how long it would take to get swept up. Answer: five months, and the students weren’t sure if it was swept up or simply disintegrated over spring break that year.

      1. Environmental Compliance*

        Our janitorial services in our dorms during my undergrad were absolutely horrible following a staffing change…to the point where the ongoing joke was to leave partially full soda bottles in a stairwell, adding one or two a day. I think they got up to about 30 before anything was cleaned (and by cleaned, I mean they threw them away, not mopped or anything).

        Thankfully by the end of that semester the college fired that company and hired a new company that was much, much, much better.

        1. Putting Out Fires, Esq.*

          I’ll be honest, I go back and forth over blame for janitorial services and the idea that grown adults need to be responsible for cleaning their environment, but that facility was hell in so many other ways and we’re already doing emotionally-hard jobs. It was one indignity TOO FAR.

          1. SignalLost*

            I’m of the opinion you should keep your workspace clean (tidy I don’t care about) and clean up messes, but I’m glad janitorial services are there to do stuff like vacuum (my office’s days end at different times; vacuuming EO(m)D would be disruptive to someone else) and I can’t imagine toilet paper would ever be restocked.

            1. Cathie from Canada*

              Side note — at the university building I worked for, the cleaning staff had adopted the practice of not throwing out any almost-finished toilet paper rolls — conservation, save the planet, etc. Eventually, the toilet stalls were littered with almost-finished toilet paper rolls, stacked precariously on top of each of the big fresh new rolls in the toilet paper holders. So I know it is ecologically unsound, but one day I got so fed up with dealing with all the tp scraps from the partial rolls that I just threw them all out, stuffing them deep into the garbage bags and making sure nobody else saw me do it.
              I guess offices make us all a little crazy sometimes!

                1. jb*

                  Because office toilet paper is generally the crappiest of single-ply kinds, and good TP is cheap.

                2. Camellia*

                  This could be considered theft, unfortunately. It doesn’t matter how much or how little is left on the roll.

              2. Bryce*

                I’m guilty of that at home, I wind up with a “take care of it later” pile of tubes on the back of the tank.

            2. WonderingHowIGotIntoThis*

              Our building is owned and maintained by a separate facilities company – who have taken the draconian view that there must be no personal rubbish containers since they have perfectly serviceable rubbish bins in a central location on each floor. This is despite the fact that one floor had those little fruit flies buzzing around said bin for MONTHS last year.
              They’ve even taken steps to THROW AWAY personal rubbish containers found on people’s desks! As in perfectly serviceable plastic tubs that people keep pens in, or other desk detritus. No thought to whether they actually contain rubbish – no! They look like a bin, therefore it contravenes their stupid policy.
              (I’m personally annoyed because my friend was bought one of those mini skips for Secret Santa, and we used to share it and keep paper clips, the rubber band ball and the occasional semi-important post it note on it – and then it was gone. Nothing else on the desk had been touched – so we know the desks hadn’t been *gasp* CLEANED!)

              1. Curmudgeon in California*

                Our office has done away with garbage collection at the desks. They give you a little bin to put minor trash in, which you then have to dump in the main bin yourself. Yet, the janitorial staff will come by, wipe down your desk (rearranging stuff, grrrrr.), but leave the on-desk garbage bin right where it was. The will vacuum the floor, though.

                This is in a crummy new open plan office, of course.

                The whole place is designed and built like people were an afterthought, the aesthetics come first, hipster and bro-culture values come next, and real people come dead last.
                – The dining/break area seats are all dreadfully uncomfortable (cheap plastic bowl chairs in the cafeteria and eating areas) and either too low (like for kids) or too high (like bar seating.)
                – The conference room seats are all too narrow for anyone not fitting the bro standard size 40 regular men or size 12 women, and don’t adjust.
                – The desk seating only fits “most” (young, thin, able-bodied), but they stole the ergonomic chairs from all of us who had ergonomic chairs. It was more important that the desk seats be “identical” than for people to have chairs that fit.
                – Half of the conference rooms have bar stool type chairs and high tables, which a lot of older and disabled folks can’t use. It’s ok, according to the university ADA office, because the other half are normal. When they end up all full, I’ll be screwed.
                – The shades auto-adjust with the sun brightness. Kinda cool from an ecological standpoint, but the glare is hideous, especially since the light level is auto set to bright, not dim. I end up adjusting the overhead lights multiple times a day.
                – All of the parking lots are a minimum of 500 feet from the buildings, even the disabled spaces, but the service vehicle spots are right up against the buildings. It takes me 10 minutes to limp from the parking area to the elevators.
                – The average age of the employees is 44 and almost 30% women, but everything is designed like it was for 20 year old brogrammer men.
                – You have to be your own janitor, and empty your own trash. The janitors come by and mess with your desk to clean it.

                1. Annabelle*

                  Hi Curmudgeon – you should be able to push back on the ADA parking lot requirements with your office/university. The ADA requires that parking is in the shortest accessible route to the building they serve. If there are spaces that are currently closer than your lots, then they should be providing ADA specific parking spots in that location.

          2. Environmental Compliance*

            For the college, all they were hired to do was clean bathrooms & restock, then vacuum the hallways and mop the stairwells. And I’m not convinced they actually ever went into their janitorial (locked for students) closets to get out a mop bucket.

            Students were still responsible for keeping it tidy, and cleaning their own rooms as well as reporting common area messes, but the reports went nowhere and that’s how we had the Soda Bottle Pyramid.

            1. Artemesia*

              When janitors were employed by public schools they reported to the principal and the schools were clean. Privatizing the service and hiring a company with a cut rate bid almost always led to filthy schools where cleaning was done ‘to the rule’ not the need and skimpily at that. At my kids school someone barfed on the wall in the restroom and it was there literally all year dried and disgusting.

            1. Vemasi*

              It depends, some are not. It depends on their contract. Some are hired only to vacuum and clean windows and empty trash. Or less than that, or more. Some offices probably pay to have someone wash their break room dishes, but most do not. It depends. Companies should be clear to their cleaning staff and their regular staff about what is expected of them in terms of cleanliness.

            2. StaceyIzMe*

              It may also be that the company they work for is being paid, but they are not being paid commensurate with the work needed. Also, there are messes in schools, businesses and other public spaces now that people would have been shocked to make years ago. I’ve been surprised by the messes in restaurants, bathrooms, on airplanes and in other shared spaces. It’s not a good look for any of us.

          4. km*

            At my last job, there was one single-occupant bathroom (small office). So happy about my new job having janitorial services so I can stop cleaning people’s pubes (one person was… a shedder), feces, and bodily fluids off of the toilet. (The guy who cheerfully admitted to always forgetting to flush was a special delight. I knew so much about his bowel health.)

      2. Bunny Girl*

        We had a manager who used to hide whole vegetables behind the food line because she didn’t think the night shift was cleaning behind it (we were). I just remember moving the line to clean it and it was a 25 minute mystery trying to find out why there was a whole cucumber back there. That manager was an ass.

      3. 2horseygirls*

        We had the test pretzel that a co-worker dropped, and decided to leave as a test.

        I got tired of hearing the complaints, so I brought my Dyson from home one night, and went over every nook and cranny. It was an average size office with eight cubicles + manager’s officewitharealdoor – I emptied the canister 5 times and actually overheated it – I thought my husband was going to kill me for a few seconds until I realized it would cool down.

        1. TootsNYC*

          My mom worked for state government and was always encouraged to keep the morale of her team up with any non-financial ways. So she said, “Can we have a CLEAN bathroom?” The powers-that-be would put in a request for a cleaning, and it was still sort of deep-level grimy. They’d mop, but there was still gray in all the wrinkles and crevices and corners.

          So one weekend she asked if anyone wanted to volunteer, and they went in and did a REAL cleaning of the bathroom, to show the janitor folks what the workers meant when they said “a clean bathroom.” It sparkled apparently.

          And when she told her supervisor that THIS was what they meant, the supervisor wrote her up for asking her people to work on the weekend.

          But they had a really clean bathroom!

      4. Vemasi*

        The company that runs our school’s cleaning staff recently started hiring current students??? And since then no one has swept or vacuumed in the library even once, and they only empty the trash like one a week. They were already not ever dusting the shelves, so I’ve been doing that. Now I have to get down on my hands and knees and pick up individual spiral-notebook leavings and hole punches from under tables.

      5. Purplestar*

        OMG, I dropped a Cheerio on the floor under my desk…left it there to see if the cleaning company was sweeping…it stayed there for 6 weeks until I sent a photo of it to the franchise owner. I just absolutely refused to pick it up. Fortunately (?) I took over the contract and we now have a new franchisee who sweeps under the desks.

    3. MCL*

      This reminds me of the growing memorial decorations around the corpse of a raccoon in Toronto when the city took a really long time to come dispose of it. I think he was surrounded by candles and flowers by the time a waste management worker eventually scraped him off the sidewalk.

      1. Clorinda*

        That’s actually lovely. Canadians can do pettiness with real style. (I grew up there, and I say this with love.)

        1. learnedthehardway*

          My current favourite is that someone in my hometown put a “For Rent” sign on a pothole and took out an ad in the local newspaper about it, describing the pothole has a “3 bedroom with all amenities”.

          1. Pebbles*

            Just this week in my local area one guy was so fed up with the potholes that he went and bought a bunch of supplies, then took his truck out to each of the potholes to fill them himself. He had a sign on the truck saying “Repairing road with my own money. Donations Welcome”.

            1. Nicelutherangirl*

              He must be related to the self-sufficient, government hating Ron Swanson, though Ron would not have asked for donations.

          2. Mr. Tyzik*

            There was a guy in the UK who got long-standing potholes fixed in his neighborhood by spray painting penises around them.

            The ones he tagged were fixed within 2 days.

            1. Cathie from Canada*

              Love it — brilliant idea! Here in Saskatchewan, where the winters are cold, the grain trucks are heavy, and there are 26,000 km of highways, it is a continuing challenge for any government to keep up with pot holes and frost heaves — we often say we have two seasons, winter and construction. CAA runs “worst road” contests every spring, and I frequently read about community volunteers trying to fix their own potholes on highways that can be virtually impassible. Must pass on to them the penis spray idea!

              1. Llama Face!*

                Yep, from another Saskatchewan resident. (Hi neighbour!)
                That old joke about europeans driving on the left and Saskatchewinians driving on what’s left gets circulated every year, for good reason.

          3. RabbitRabbit*

            There’s a Chicago artist named Jim Bachor who fills in potholes with mosaic artwork. He wears an orange hi-viz vest, puts out orange cones, the whole thing.

            1. TootsNYC*

              Several years ago there was an artist in the NYC subways who used to fill in gaps in the tile with white-tile mosaics. He got in trouble because sometimes he removed loose tiles near the spot he was working so he could get a really good seal and “fix” in that spot (and so they didn’t just fall off on their own later); they claimed he would create the gaps. He was like, “I don’t need to create them, buddy–and I don’t make them bigger, because part of the fun is fitting the artwork into the constriction.”

          4. Middle School Teacher*

            Someone in my city has been planting flowers in potholes. I believe they are petunias.

            1. Wendy Darling*

              I read an article about a town that planted a small garden in a very large and long-tenured pothole.

      2. Tesserae*

        I was just about to mention that! Somebody started it by placing a photograph of a raccoon in a decorative frame next to the body & it just went on from there.

      3. Smidge*

        There’s a dead bird on the top of a skyway where I live, we may or may not have post-its on our window RIPing our dead skyway friend. He’s been there 6 mos so far, because cleaning the tops of skyways is not a thing.

      4. Elizabeth West*

        I should have done this for the armadillo on my block last year–it took eight weeks for him to decompose. In the heat of summer.

    4. Holly*

      This reminds me of when I was in a job where I had to schedule people for training classes at certain sites. When a site would close up, myself and my colleague I was friends with (we were young seasonal help) drew a pictures of the tombstone with the site name on it so no one would book people there. We received a complaint from our manager that it was offensive to someone because of their religion.

      1. Seven If You Count Bad John*

        I an a colleague are in charge of the Team Newsletter, which no one takes seriously except our manager, who sucks and isn’t going to change. For this edition I proposed an Obituaries section for the people who left the team (quit, fired, transferred, whatever) because it’s been a revolving door for the last 3 years. I don’t expect that’ll make it past the planning meeting but it made me feel a little better.

        3. Seeking Second Childhood*

          Survivor.
          There was a point where our company hadn’t changed out a photo of customer support & tech support for years so many had left so…we Xd out the ones who had left and labelled it the same way as our Survivor pool. And kept adding Xs until one day someone from Marketing spotted it in our department and it was 70% outdated people. They rewrote that brochure.

    5. AnonEMoose*

      At our local Renaissance Festival, someone started a memorial to a dead mouse found on the grounds. This…escalated. To the point that someone built a mouse sized model of a church building. Complete with a wedge of cheese as the steeple topper. A couple of years later, it’s still there.

      1. AKchic*

        I love this. We get bears at our renaissance site. And moose. And just about any other Alaskan wildlife critter in a city area backed against a national park (we’re on 10 acres).

        I don’t think anyone would ever notice a mouse-sized church, though.

        1. AnonEMoose*

          The church isn’t the size of a mouse…it’s a size that mice might be able to attend. So it’s something like 18 inches or so high at the top of a steeple. I do have fun watching people notice it…little kids get absolutely fascinated.

      2. Hlyssande*

        YES! I remember that one! There was actually a funeral service for the mouse – I managed to pass by while it was in progress.

      4. Llama Face!*

        That is really cute. (Of course the only thing going through my head now is, “What is this?! A church for MICE?? It has to be at least…. 3… times the size!”) :D

    6. Live & Learn*

      Years ago a roommate and I had a BBQ at our place and with people coming and going all day flies got in the house. While I was in class my roommate killed all the flies in the house but left their bodies in place. I picked them up with sticky tape and taped them to her bedroom door with a note that said “you know what you did…”

    7. Mockingjay*

      We too have a slack cleaning crew. We have a dead Palmetto bug in the corner of our office, near my officemate’s desk. It’s been there for A YEAR.

    8. sunshyne84*

      hahaha I had a teacher in middle school that did this. He called himself The Roachfather. One of my best school memories!

  7. Petty*

    I work for a book publishing company, and we published a memoir by someone who was particularly odious. Every time I found a copy of the book on our free book shelves, I threw it directly into a recycling bin.

    1. Arielle*

      I did this with a donation to the thrift shop I worked at in college, except it was a whole set of audiobooks on cassette tape which were super satisfying to throw in the dumpster.

      1. Watry*

        I too did this a couple of times, straight into the recycling box. Wasn’t going to put those on the shelves, regardless of policy.

    2. Mim*

      I, um, turned a biography about a particularly odious, hateful poltician in the “new books” section of the children’s library so the spine faced in. I was pretty pleased that none of the librarians (who keep on top of things and definitely would have noticed) felt they needed to correct the orientation of the book for weeks.

      This was as a library patron, not employee, so I guess it’s OT. but yeah.

      1. Janie*

        My library owns a copy of a really nasty, fat-hating children’s book. I may have, when I was working there, thrown it behind the (solid wood) bookshelf at one point.

      2. Alli525*

        Yep I do this at bookstores occasionally. I’ll tuck a book behind another one, or turn it around so the pundit/politician’s face isn’t showing.

      4. Artemesia*

        I did that sort of thing at book stores regularly — put the odious biography under the pile of biographies of decent humans or travel books or whatever was less a blight on our souls

      5. Edith*

        We did something similar at my library, albeit not a public library, with a beautiful brand new hardcover set of a rather odious series of religious novels someone donated. They didn’t spend a second in the main stacks, instead going straight to closed storage. They’re still in the catalog and available to check out, you just have to ask for them at the circulation desk, which to my knowledge has never happened.

        Most of the books in storage are pretty old, so these stick out like a sore thumb. I’ll admit I get a chuckle whenever I come across them.

      6. Vemasi*

        Someone was doing this to a biography of a particular, possibly current president that I put out in our biography display, slapping it facedown. I appreciated the sentiment, but I did keep correcting it because I put it out there so students could educate themselves, not as an endorsement.

      7. Emma*

        Ha! I worked at a library when the 50 shades of grey books came out. I don’t tell people what to enjoy, but I was extremely angry that they were being marketed as kinky smut when they were actually a fictionalised textbook on domestic violence.

        So I reclassified all the copies as crime thrillers instead of romance.

        No regrets!

        1. Vemasi*

          Oh my gosh, hahaha, that’s so nefarious!

          Seeing how the warehouse has categorized the books they send us is one of the perks of my job. I do not know what they could possibly have been thinking sometimes.

      8. Elizabeth West*

        I have turned many a magazine around in stores when it had somebody I hated on the front. Books, too.

    4. Elitist Semicolon*

      At my old job, our department was required to attend a multi-day training in interpersonal communication run by an outside organization and which used a text published by a different outside org with very close ties to the Mormon Church. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with this in my sub-unit (which taught communication), and a couple of us skipped the training. One of my colleagues did us one better: she skipped the training, disassembled the book, made a beautiful array of paper flowers from the pages, and then placed the vase in the middle of our waiting area.

    7. Cat mom*

      As a librarian, I can imagine wanting to do these things, but at the risk of sounding like a pedantic bore, find that it collides with my training in ethics, censorship, and personal rights in the U.S. (Books actively promoting hate, self-hatred or violence in Youth and YA may be covered by different standards.) No judgments on others’ choices here, but this would bother me personally.

      Many years ago my local public library was asked to rent meeting space to the local John Birch Society for a day. After checking their policies and consulting with the Board, they allowed the rental. They also chose to close the library – with lots of advance notice – during the meeting as sentiments were running very high, which was controversial. I found this both ethical and difficult, and used it as an opportunity to discuss censorship as a slippery slope.

      Again, no judgments in a topic on pettiness, but rather a note on the ethical dilemmas faced by some librarians. Peace.

      2. Anomalous*

        With all respect, I think your library made the wrong call here. Not about renting to the Birchers, but in closing the library to the general public. In doing so, they elevated Birchers’ needs and views above everyone else’s.

      3. Academic Information Wizard*

        As a fellow librarian, I feel you on this. I may not like a book’s author/topic/whatever, but I can’t censor the collection and my patrons based on my personal feelings. I’m lucky enough to work in an academic library, so I’ve only ever dealt with one book challenge (50 Shades – it was not fun!)

      4. Classroom Diva*

        I appreciate you, Cat Mom! I was reading these comments and cringing.

        In a society that is founded on the free exchange of ideas, no one should be hiding books, turning them around, destroying them, or otherwise making them unusable with very (very) few exceptions (such as those you mentioned).

        Sometimes, people forget that there are alternative opinions, and–whether you like them or not–others are free to hold them and disseminate them. Moreover, if someone actually read opinions other than their own occasionally, they might find that they have more in common than they thought even with their “enemies,” and that others don’t necessarily fit easily into the “box” that has been created for them. Stereotypes and mischaracterizations abound.

        Thank you for being an ethical librarian. I really mean that. I was beginning to get depressed.

      5. Zweisatz*

        I understand where you’re coming from and I do believe it really depends on the author and book in question. But I subscribe to Karl Popper’s idea that “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” Where you draw that line is another question.
        But you know, as a German that speaks to me.

      6. Salymander*

        You make a good point.

        I am always tempted to hide, flip around, or otherwise mess with certain books/magazines featuring really reprehensible people. It is kind of satisfying and funny. Some folks are just so awful and toxic, I cringe when I see their image.

        But, when my daughter was looking for “Catcher in the Rye” at our public library, we couldn’t find any of the 6 copies that the library possesses. None had been checked out, not for ages. The librarian said that someone had been hiding all the copies of all the books that they deemed offensive. They were all hidden somewhere in the library. Apparently, this is a *thing people do* to guard our morality. Like some sort of censorship police gone rogue.

        My daughter and I searched for ages, and we were able to find two of the copies. One had the bar code, title and author’s name blacked out with sharpie. It had been hidden behind some reference books. The other copy was turned around backwards and then reshelved in the wrong place. Where the other 4 copies are, we may never know.

        I am still tempted to turn over books or magazines featuring certain (repugnant, reprehensible, odious, disgusting, corrupt) people, because some public figures really do suck. But censorship sucks, too. And it is dangerous. No matter how tempting it is to mis-shelve “50 Shades of Abusiveness” or turn over a magazine so I don’t have to see a certain political figure’s sneering face.

  8. Justin*

    In my previous job, I had a weird, bad arrangement where, most of the time I worked in one builidng doing one thing and then sometimes down the block doing another thing.

    The staff at thing 2 were very, very, very, very, very close to each other (to the point that one had a baby and the others literally chose the child’s name), so when a new supervisor (who worked in the other building) basically was like, you are all not able to manage this place without supervision, she hired a director. They were big mad.

    So right before the director was due to arrive, they all switched their desks so she’d get the “worst” seat in the shared office.

    Joke was on them since she liked the seat, the place improved, and they all slowly left one by one.

    1. Justin*

      (To clarify, my supervisor was role x, and that woman also supervised these people, who were my peers in rank, though they didn’t treat me as such. Our mutual supervisor left and was replaced by a new person who saw their arrangment as being faulty (because it was) and made said changes. Far as I know the director is still there with a much better – and not weirdly intensely close – staff.)

    2. Elizabeth West*

      one had a baby and the others literally chose the child’s name

      Oh my damn.

      1. Over 60 & Forever Young*

        +1 – Literally thinking exactly the same – weirdness at a whole extra level!

    3. TootsNYC*

      Oh, that desk thing reminds me!

      I got a job in a grouping that had been 3 people; my position (person 2) used to report to person 1, but didn’t anymore, I now reported to the same person she did; and I supervised person 3.

      About a month after I got the job, I went on my wedding/honeymoon for 3 weeks, hiring a freelancer to help handle the workload, and she reported to person 3 since I was out. During that time we moved into our new building, and person 3 and I were put in a two-person office, with one seat by the window and another by the door.

      Since I was out, the freelancer would need to sit at my desk, and person 3 and person 1 thought it was not seemly for a freelancer to sit by the window for 2 weeks. So person 3 took that desk, and put the freelancer by the door.

      When I came back, I was expected to sit by the door. I thought, I won’t be petty, I’ll see how it goes. My boss tells me, move desks if you want, and I warned them when they did this that you might want to change things.

      I discovered that people were confused about who was in charge–some of them, who’d worked with me before the move, would flat-out ask, “who do I tell?” and the new IT crew would ask my junior for permission to turn our computers off for updates.

      We had to get a new filing cabinet, so my boss said, “when you move that in, you change desks, that’s an order,” bcs she knew I was hesitant to create unpleasantness.

      I did, and the two of them (1 and 3) kicked up a big fuss.

      I was telling my mom about the confrontations, and I reported that Person 3 had said, “Is this some sort of power play?” and my wise mom said, “Did you respond, ‘Yes, it is–and I win’?”

  9. Yikes*

    My executive director repeatedly ate my food from our fridge, so one day I threw his in the garbage. I’m not proud of myself but…he makes 5 times more than me and ate my expensive fruit salad from my lunchbox.

    2. Yikes*

      Oh! I also poured out his lactose-free milk after one particular incident where he ate my whole lunch. Put the container back empty.

      I am not a crazy person! These passive-aggressive things are totally uncharacteristic of what anyone who knows me would think of me. This is what working in a toxic workplace will drive you to do. I’m embarrassed just writing it!

      1. AppleStan*

        Crazy people will infect you with their crazy, and it takes a moment to “readjust.”

      2. MD*

        Don’t be embarrassed. I honestly don’t understand how people don’t realize that eating other people’s lunches is theft. Just because you get rid of the evidence, does not absolve you of your crime! (I am clearly passionate about this topic)

        1. Yikes*

          He didn’t even get rid of the evidence in many cases. And there’s only 6 of us in the office so it was particularly obvious!

        2. Me (I think)*

          You mean, all that delicious food in the fridge isn’t first-come-first-served? Who knew?

      3. Luna*

        If passive-aggressiveness is the only language they might understand, one cannot be faulted to try to ‘speak their language’ to them.

      4. Anon for This One*

        True pettiness would be topping off his lactose-free milk with regular (lactose-included) milk. Or perhaps simply replacing it all. [evil grin]

        1. Phoenix Wright*

          I wouldn’t advice tampering with their food. Adding something unpleasant or spicy to your own, however, is fair game. After all, it’s your food and nobody else is supposed to eat it.

        2. Lenora Rose*

          Not petty, and not something to grin about. Repugnant. Beyond petty and into outright evil. Possibly physically dangerous. That kind of thing hospitalizes people.

          Throwing it out probably leaves him with an annoyance for an afternoon, rather akin to eating Yikes’s nice fruit salad. Swapping it might leave him sick for a week or worse.

        1. Yvette*

          No, it is done for the self-satisfaction! :) And can also serve as a sanity saving vent. (And I totally get it!!)

          1. Jennifer*

            Sometimes it just feels good. I don’t recommend doing it often. Just every blue moon, let your petty flag fly.

        1. Observer*

          I sure do. And, for instance, I understand why they poured out the milk and put the container back in the fridge – sure it’s petty but the boss knows that their lactose free milk is gone. In other words, the idea is to annoy him. But I suspect that throwing out the lunch didn’t bother him.

          1. Petty Betty*

            Something tells me if you were my coworker, Observer, my petty behavior would be directed at you… :)

              1. Clisby*

                Yes, you should have EATEN his lunch, crumpled up any wrappers, and put that back in the fridge.

                2. Salymander*

                  My father in law was tired of people stealing his ice cream. They would sneak in and eat “just a spoonful” as it somehow seemed ok to them to steal just a little bit. They would eventually eat all of the ice cream, and leave the empty container in the freezer.

                  My FIL was tired of finding the empty ice cream container in the freezer, so he started filling the empty containers with water. He got a big kick out of the whining coming from the kitchen every time a sneaky co-worker tried to swipe a cheeky spoonful of ice cream. Eventually, the freezer had about half a dozen containers of “ice cream” that he used to hide his actual ice cream. It was a pretty good system.

          2. Vemasi*

            I mean, there’s the slight possibility that he would be annoyed his food was gone and then realize that’s how he makes other people feel. Slight. Because most people learn that other people have feelings before preschool, and if you’re stealing workplace food as an adult you obviously don’t care.

            But yes. Vengeance.

      4. SheLooksFamiliar*

        The purpose of this thread is about being/feeling petty, not accomplishing anything in particular. It’s okay to talk about these things, Observer!

    5. MissDisplaced*

      I totally get it. Once might be an accident, but he repeatedly does it. AND he makes way more money, which makes his theft all that much worse!

      What if that was literally your only meal for the day? Food insecurity is a real issue in America.

      1. Yikes*

        Yup. I had to go out and buy a new lunch or sit hungry through the rest of the day.

        I guess I was hoping that he’d have to use regular milk in his coffee or have to forgo coffee altogether and suffer equally.

        1. Caitylynn*

          I would be tempted to go up to them and ask him, “why did you eat my lunch?”. Was there a possibility of also eating his lunch in return?

          1. Yikes*

            Unfortunately, I’m a vegetarian so his food was never an option. I didn’t have the guts to do the actual right thing which would be to call him out on it. He’s a bit of a bully.

            1. OhBehave*

              Now that you’ve given notice, it would be a great time to unleash. He sounds like a jerk who would retaliate if you stayed and called him out.

            2. Essess*

              I would add up the amount of money that you had to use to get new food, plus the amount of money you spent on the ingredients for the lunches that you didn’t get to eat and submit that to the company for reimbursement for feeding the Executive Director.

        2. StaceyIzMe*

          I don’t get why you didn’t start keeping your lunch at your desk (if you have one). Wondering if you were going to have a meal midday isn’t a great thing to have to stress about.

            1. Jules the 3rd*

              meh, I bring my cold / frozen food in an insulated lunchbag every day. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you’ve got a 2hr commute on hot busses that makes an insulated lunch bag not work.

              BUT: Yikes is the best judge of Yikes’ situation and options, and frankly, Yikes should not *have* to protect her lunch from a predatory boss. Asking her why she didn’t do that is kinda victim-blamey.

    6. Shades of Blue*

      LOLOLOL. You really got me at “expensive fruit salad”. You did what you had to do!

      I honestly do not understand why people steal other people’s food. Do you both still work there and does he still steal your food?

      1. Shades of Blue*

        PS – if you want to keep your food at your desk, those lunch pails from Costco + the included ice pack (I use two ice packs sometimes) really keep my food cold! Maybe not CDC-approved level cold…but it’s good enough :)

        1. Jojo*

          I hope he got a seed stuck in his teeth and it got infected and he needed a root canal

      1. Yikes*

        Yup. He also cut into someone’s birthday cake and ate a slice and they had to sing happy bday to her around a half-eaten cake :-0

        2. Observer*

          Now, that’s REALLY petty. And no good excuses or good stories either.

          How does anyone deal with him?

          1. Yikes*

            Many people just hope to outlive him I think!

            This is a weird workplace in that some people live on-site in a high-cost area in very niche positions and therefore are more committed to keeping their jobs than the average person would be.

            Also many of them are equally as dysfunctional and this kind of stuff is “par for the course” among them.

      2. Avatre*

        Oh, as a 14-year-old I was briefly the victim of a kid in the grade below me taking the cookies out of my lunchbox. And the soda, when I had a cold and was getting ginger ale! I would find the straw, but no can. My mom made my lunches at the time so it was some days before the existence and identity of the soda thief were discovered (on the day my entire lunchbox briefly went missing and was rediscovered sans sweets), and I was not happy. Sooooo my lunch got kept in my locker after that, which is what I probably should have done in the first place (long story, but I was naive and had been leaving it unguarded). Sadly I don’t think much of anything happened to the soda thief…

        In any case, stealing from other people’s lunchboxes is DEMONSTRABLY JUVENILE behavior and I am not opposed to answering it in kind if necessary. :)

        1. Yikes*

          Oh that makes me so sad for you! I’m going to pretend the kid was super hungry and didn’t have another way to eat. Soda was such a treat!

        2. Salymander*

          This happened at my daughter’s school. Someone was sneaking into the hallway and stealing desserts from people’s lunches. There were no lockers. Thus person also stole school supplies and personal items, and purposely vandalized some of the backpacks. This was reported to the school repeatedly, but no action was taken for months. One of the parents of these kids was especially upset, threatening legal problems.

          What we didn’t realize was that the school had an unused camera in this hallway, and the administration started using it once the kids reported this problem.

          The kid who was the culprit was actually the child of the mom who threatened the school with legal trouble. Her child was on a special diet due to a family history of health problems, and she started stealing because she wanted to eat dessert like everyone else. I guess it kind of snowballed from there.

          I am not a big fan of cameras in schools, and I felt bad for this family, they were actually really nice and just frustrated with the whole situation. The kids were in 5th grade.

          The idea that an adult (especially someone in authority!!!) is stealing their co-worker’s lunch is just bizarre. Who does that? My daughter’s fifth grade class was horrified by this behavior by another kid. For an adult to behave like this is baffling.

          The fifth grade lunch swiper is now a very responsible and trustworthy seventh grader. That is a lot more than anyone can say for the adult lunch thieves of the world!

    8. Irish*

      Lol I did this once because my boss started eating my expensive, nice pesto. And yes, I’m still clinging onto that grudge for dear life.

    9. Nous allons, vous allez, ils vont*

      Yeah, this is petty but what an asshole. He deserved it. And worse!

    10. Another solution*

      I would start bringing lunches filled with either food he doesn’t like or food that he’s allergic to. There was one AAM posting where a guy got in trouble for having his lunch too spicy/accused of attempting to poison someone else because that someone else ate his lunch and had some issues after eating the super spicy food.

      1. Yikes*

        Not gonna lie, when I read that letter, I had a lot of fantasies about putting something unsavory in my food! But all I really wanted was to be able to eat my own damn food lol.

        1. Over 60 & Forever Young*

          The “special chocolate pie” from the movie The Help comes to mind!

    11. Kat in VA*

      Oooh this reminds me of the AAM letter where someone’s boss repeatedly and unashamedly ate her lunch all the time!

  10. This Space For Rent*

    I’m not sure if this is what you are looking for, but at one of my early jobs one of my co-workers was a, shall we say, interesting character. She was called out about something in a meeting and was fuming at the rest of us. The next morning she came in, went into the rest room (so I hear) and then went into her boss’ office to quit on the spot. She left without a word to anyone else.

    Later it was discovered that she had removed every roll of toilet tissue from the rest room.

    1. Fortitude Jones*

      LOL! This one is my favorite so far. I mean, I get being embarrassed to be called out in a meeting, but quitting over it?! And then stealing the TP so nobody else can wipe their behinds?! LOLLL!!! Talk about overreacting.

    2. Murphy*

      That is epic.

      Not work-related, but when my mother comes to visit, she’ll turn the toilet paper roll around the other way because she doesn’t like the way I put it on. I’m not talking about a new roll, she’ll turn around the roll that’s currently bein used.

        1. Jessen*

          Rolling forward is how you find out that your cat just unrolled the entire roll while you were at work.

          1. Murphy*

            Neither my mom nor I have cats, which is the only good reason to put your toilet paper that way.

            1. Seeking Second Childhood*

              Toddlers and dogs also do the same. My dog never outgrew it…after 14 years of that dog I just get used to reaching the other way.

          2. nonegiven*

            We did that, then a little one started shredding it still on the roll instead, so we had to hide it. One of my son’s cats figured out how to get hold of the end of the paper and unroll it by pulling.

            1. Lissajous*

              I got a kitten last year, I can once again put toilet paper on the holder – rolling forwards even! – but it took a few months.

              After he discovered the joys of pulling all the toilet paper down, I started by not leaving anything on the holder at all, for about a month. No fun to be found here!
              Then I left an empty roll on the holder, again for a few weeks. I never found that knocked on the floor. The next step was when I had a nearly-finished roll, I put that on the holder, but with the ends taped down so it was no more entertaining than the empty roll, even though it was now the same colour as the Fun Thing!

              Then I did the same thing with a half finished roll, and now I can use my toilet roll holder again.

              (The kitten is a Burmese, and now a year old. An affectionate delight, but also a little monster and oooh does he have the brains.)

      3. Lioness*

        My mother actually has two toilet stands/holders?(English isn’t my first language). She has one over and one under. Guess she had enough of guests telling her.

        1. Edith*

          “Toilet paper roll holders” would be the inelegant but correct term. At least in my neck of the woods.

          This is such a hotly contested subject and I never understood why people who have this disagreement with their family members/housemates don’t just install a second toilet paper roll holder and have one of each. It seems so obvious to me.

      1. 2nd time commenting, yo*

        That is soooo funny and definitely my fave! I will TAKE THIS TP as retribution!
        It makes me wonder how people decide the petty act – I guess if I was going to to rage-petty I’d take the pen/highlighters/markers of various colors and notebooks because I love office supplies…LMAO!

    5. Bridget*

      I love this. I love this so much. I had to stifle a laugh.

      I can appreciate the level of this pettiness.

    11. Curmudgeon in California*

      That is epic level petty, and probably a satisfying level of spite.

      There are places where I’ve worked that I wish I had done this…

  11. Skittles*

    Had a client tell me to move their name down 1/32nd of inch on their biz card. I changed the name of the file to indicate it was revised, sent it back to them with a cheerful “here you go!” and they replied back it was perfect!

    4. NYCProducer*

      Absolute genius. I would live off the feeling of triumph in this case for MONTHS, maybe years!!

    5. SignalLost*

      That’s not petty, that’s sanity-saving. (No, I cannot move this stupid thing half a pixel to the left, do you know how big a pixel is? I also can’t move it half an inch to the left without destroying the whole layout. Also, pixels and inches aren’t the same thing!)

      1. Tau*

        This reminds me of the joy that is layouts in CSS. You want the button red? No problem! Round? Sure! With a dark outline? There you go! Five inches to the left of where it currently is? Uh… if I’m not back in three days send a rescue team, I’ll probably be somewhere in a pit formed of documentation muttering the word ‘flexbox’ to myself over and over.

        1. Anonomoose*

          I…once made up a non existent “change management committee” to avoid this kind of thing. There was a form. The form was *very* detailed

          3. Anonomoose*

            It was at a government job, as a web developer, with a lot of middle managers. There was a lot of bueracracy in everything else, but we were friendly and would generally just change things on request, at least for internal sites. This…was a mistake, because no one else could get anything done, so they’d go on the warpath about font choices. When I started telling them there was now a change management committee for the internal site, no one questioned it, and the requests disappeared after we introduced a form (we still fixed and improved things, just stopped swapping fonts every week). We even held committee meetings, which were really a extended coffee break.

            1. Skittles*

              This is amazing. I wonder if I could implement something like this at my job…

            2. EinJungerLudendorff*

              Can we build a small shrine in youd honour?
              Because that is a fiendishly clever solution. And it made life better for all involved to boot.

          4. Vemasi*

            Making up forms is a great way to make people stop complaining. My boss has one for parents who want a book removed from the library. You have to CITE INSTANCES with PAGE NUMBERS, and thus have to actually read the book, instead of being reactionary to something you read about it on Facebook. Most are never heard from again. And then if a book really is not appropriate for high schoolers, it keeps my boss from having to read the whole thing to find out.

            2. Anonomoose*

              I am a huge fan of your boss, and it’s considerably less petty than mine

            5. GovSysadmin*

              I run our site’s anti-spam system, and I’ve had users complain that it was flagging their advertising emails from Best Buy and other things that are obviously non-work related as spam. I just reply with a cheerful, “Sure! Could you please provide the business justification for overriding the scanner so I can record it in the change notes for our Cyber Office?”

              For some reason, they usually drop their complaints at that point.

            6. Paris Geller*

              The library I work at has one too, and I take great pleasure in using malicious compliance to show patrons how much work they have to put in to challenge a book. You want a reconsideration form? Sure thing! Let me print that with you. Okay, now let’s go over it. Here’s where you write down quotes and page numbers, here’s where you give your own thoughts on the book, here’s where you have to suggest alternatives (this one is my favorite).

        2. SignalLost*

          I adore CSS for this very reason! I first learned HTML in the pre-CSS days when I was bored at work and it was a revelation when I finally (many years later) officially learned CSS. PHP is awesome for the HTML side if it makes sense (I tend to work on sites that function best as a mix of PHP and WordPress) but even with PHP changes can be tricky to apply site-wide.

          I do not adore middle-manageritis, where people who’ve never designed anything want to have “input”. Their input is always, always, always in this vein, and there are only so many ways I can say “I can’t do that because it will completely break the layout”.

        3. Inca*

          And flexbox *improved* options massively. There was a before-time. With border-collapse and the IE magic of ‘hasLayout’

          1. Oranges*

            If you want the bad old days… email coding. Where we still code like it’s 1995.

            1. Bored IT guy*

              Was about to say just this, but you’ve already said it.

              Why can someone not add a standards compliant rendering engine to Outlook? And why does the same version of Outlook render the same email differently on different computers?

    6. Phil*

      This is sort of thing is very common in my old career, sound mixer. Recording consoles are covered with knobs
      and sometimes producers will ask us to change something, we’ll-well, not me because I didn’t do it-go for the knob and look like we changed it, not turn it at all and the mix is better!

    7. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      Ah yessssss, the optical illusion trick. Sure I changed it, doesn’t it look so much better?

    8. Montresaur*

      High. Five. On one of my first projects ever, a micromanaging director asked me to move part of a design three pixels to the left. I wish I were exaggerating, but I will never in my life forget that request. He was a peach to work with, as I’m sure you can imagine.

      1. SignalLost*

        I legit had and won an argument about three pixels in a dropshadow on a printed product (it absolutely would have been noticed) but the whole “move it 3 pixels left” is just code for “I want to feel involved.”

        2. Montresaur*

          There are of course legitimate reasons to make seemingly minuscule changes (like in your example); what makes my example petty is that it was done entirely because the director liked to find someone to pick on. He’d make requests like this just to see how much a person would take. What a waste of time, resources, and good will.

          1. Cedrus Libani*

            I’ve worked near a boss that would send everything back for corrections at least once, no matter what. Their team had long ago realized this, and would intentionally seed all of their work with at least one small but obvious mistake. Boss would notice, they’d remove the “mistake”, and then they wouldn’t have to waste time on whatever nonsense the boss would have made them do if they’d sent a polished final draft instead.

            1. Vemasi*

              Some people feel that, if they are asked for feedback, they need to give some feedback. In some situations this is great, in others less so.

          2. Cathie from Canada*

            Sybil: [something something something]
            Fawlty: What do you want NOW, Sybil? Should I move the hotel five feet to the left?

    10. Choux*

      Hahaha, this reminds me of the time I worked at a big bookstore. We had one customer who would come in and order like 9 copies of the same paperback romance novel, come in, and then meticulously inspect every single one for any slight imperfections in the corners (paperbacks were notoriously easy to “dent” on the corners). Then she’d either buy one if it was “perfect” or reject them all and we’d be stuck with them for three moths until we were allowed to return them.

      One day she came up to the customer service desk with one of these books and asked if we had any in the back (so she could inspect them for perfection). The sweetest woman who worked at the store had finally reached the end of her rope, so she took the book and said, “Let me go see.” She took it to the back and SHRANK WRAPPED it and brought it back out, saying, “We have one that hasn’t even been unwrapped yet!” The customer beamed and said, “I’ll take it!”

      That employee was my personal hero.

    11. anon for this*

      I was taking a sound design class in college, and the teacher joked that if she could pass on one piece of wisdom to us, it would be this: when running the sound board at a show, if anyone asks you to adjust the volume a tiny bit, just mime adjusting the sliders until the person invariably gives you a thumbs up.

      I was able to put this piece of advice into practice within months.

    12. LurkNoMore*

      My sister did this at a 5 start hotel bar every time someone complained that there was too much or not enough vermouth in their martini. She’d bring it back to the bartender and the bartender would dump it in a new glass and send it back out. It worked perfectly…one time, a woman even leaned back and sighed….”Perfect!”.

    13. LunaLena*

      This is, sadly, a common thing in many creative fields. Some people are just so convinced that their eye/ear/nose/tongue are so superior to others, that they notice things that the average schmoe won’t and it makes a difference to their creative vision. Or sometimes they just need to feel involved in the creative process.

      I have heard that some people (usually graphic designers or writers) will deliberately leave a couple of minor errors in their work when they send it in for approval. The recipient can then point them out and feel the satisfaction that they’ve Made A Contribution, it saves the designer or writer some sanity, and if the recipient fails to notice, they can discreetly correct it before sending over the finalized version. Everyone wins.

      1. HelloCupcake*

        As a designer who handles the majority of client communications for my team, I do this when I have a client who says “I have an eye for detail” or “I’m a bit of a grammar nazi” because then they really zoom in on those typos and leave the beautifully done design alone.

    14. Curmudgeon in California*

      The way I’ve heard this type of thing is “They just had to piss in it to make it theirs.”

      I will leave minor typos or double words in works for hire for just for that reason. If they don’t find them, I fix them. If they do, they now have “ownership”. Win-win.

    15. Fae Kamen*

      My dad was a newspaper editor and claims that he was so detail-oriented people called him “Mr. 1/32nd of an Inch” because of the changes he could spot. I guess he would’ve been onto you! ;)

  12. Anon former media grunt*

    I was underpaid and overworked in a former toxic job and admit I was not my best self at the time. We had a (very highly paid) designer who kept churning out really similar looking designs over and over. I was in the office late one day and put all of them out on the table in our publisher’s office. When they were all together you could really see how absurdly lazy the designs were. The publisher had a talk with him after.

    2. Observer*

      I don’t think that that’s petty. And I can understand why it made you nuts.

    3. Youngin*

      I work with a ton of interior designers and its kind of shocking how many of them are a one trick pony. We have built 6 homes for a client and every house, while being vastly different on the outside, had the same look on the inside. One day i was taking my niece around with me to see the homes and when she walked into the 3rd of the 6 houses she was like “Didnt we already see this house twice?” The client happened to be there with us at that house and he looked shocked. They didnt use that designer again

      1. Jules the 3rd*

        I used to watch a lot of design / home refurb shows, and iirc, that was the thing that separated Joanna Gaines from pretty much everyone else (eg, Property Brothers, though ok, neither of them is a designer): She could do multiple themes. Someone wanted rustic, ok, that’s her main comfort area and popular in her town. But I saw her do Bohemian, mid-century Modern, and marry some disparate interests, and pull them all off.

        1. litJess*

          Ha, meanwhile I was going to ask if Youngin worked with Joanna Gaines. But that could be because I have a firey hatred of open-concept living spaces. Leave me my walls, woman!

        2. Mink*

          When was this, because her designs are all the same now and appear to have been that way for a while.

      2. JHunz*

        How old was your niece at the time? Was she old enough to realize what an epic burn she was putting down, or was it completely innocent?

    4. Jaydee*

      “Hmmm…for the Teapots Unlimited Gala program I think I’ll do layout 1 in blue and yellow. For the Chocolate Teapots shareholder meeting, I’ll do layout 1 in green and blue. And for the Llamas R Us benefit auction I’ll do layout 1 in orange and green and change the teapots to llamas.”

  13. Petty Chief*

    This happened just recently.

    Our group has been reorganized several times in the last year. Because of that, our group listservs are messed up, and some people are not on them. We are having a mandatory all-hands meeting. I heard it mentioned in passing, so I went to our group’s admin and asked to be put on it. Honestly, I wasn’t annoyed because I know that the listservs are just messed up (not her fault). I told her that one of the bosses said they weren’t on the invite either. She argued with me and said yes there were. I didn’t feel like arguing with her, so I just forwarded the meeting invite along to one of the boss that was missing. I didn’t realize that sends her a notification, and she told me they were already on there (they clearly weren’t! I could see the guest list!)

    After looking at the guest list again just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy, I told her that I had noticed that a few people were missed.

    “Well I hope they contact me like you did to get on the invite.”

    I sent her an email back telling her, they wouldn’t even know about it because they aren’t on the listservs, so if there were emails, they wouldn’t have gotten them.

    I eventually just emailed all of the people I noticed who weren’t on it directly and told them to email the admin to get on the email invite.

    So effin dumb.

    1. Lola Banks*

      To be fair, if you’re on the original invite list, you wouldn’t see the people that the host subsequently adds to the meeting ( in Outlook anyway)

      1. Trout 'Waver*

        That depends. When you change the guest list, you have to choose whether to send updates to all guests or just added guests.

      2. Adereterial*

        Yes, you would. You don’t get a notification but you can see who is on the invite list by going into the appointment itself.

      3. a good mouse*

        But if you open the calendar event in outlook you should see everyone, even newly invited people. Just went through that the other day joining a project and having a friend double checking I’d been added to everything he had before I even accepted the invites from the original forwarder.

        1. Clawed*

          Seconding the above from Lola. I have had this happen in Outlook. A colleague will forward an invite of mine on to someone multiple times, even after they have accepted it, because she doesn’t see them on the invite. Unless the organizer (me) sends out an update to all recipients with a change like this, an attendee on the original invite isn’t going to see who was added by other users, including those they added themselves via forwarding.

  14. Snarkus Aurelius*

    My boss was so outraged over how filthy the coffee maker and fridge were that she took them away and would only give them back if we could “prove” we could keep the kitchen clean.

    Good thing I never used either one of those resources!

      1. The Original K.*

        Ha – the first thing I thought was “She took away the fridge? How? Where did she put it?”

        1. EinJungerLudendorff*

          My first thought was: “A fridge the size of a whole dorm? How did she move THAT thing?”

    2. NotAPirate*

      Coffee pots and fridges become the most petty stomping grounds. I swear it’s not worth the hassle, companies should just suck it up and pay for a regular cleaner. There’s way too many dynamics at play among employees, (job titles, hourly vs salary, gender, age, tenure at the company, etc) that complicate who’s turn is it to clean it. People who would normally clean up mild messes end up avoiding doing so as then everyone else thinks it’s their responsibility and takes it as permission to leave it a mess, etc. I’m so jaded on communal kitchen stuff.

      1. Not a Blossom*

        I swear, I think my current office is magical because we have multiple groups in the same suite and the kitchen is NEVER a problem. It blows my mind because at my old job, the fridge was a horror show.

        1. WonderingHowIGotIntoThis*

          I *wish* I could find the seriously petty email sent by one of my coworkers while at our previous building, basically complaining about the communal fridge. It was a work of comic genius, but I swear I could see his eye twitch every time he went in for milk.

        2. JulieCanCan*

          It’s funny, I have taken over light cleaning in the kitchen area and coffee machines (we have a keurig, a nespresso, a french press, 2 different teapot-type things, and one device I don’t understand and no one uses but it makes some hot drinks. This is for 6-7 employees. I also occasionally sweep the kitchen floor and wipe down counters and the top of the fridge, and any areas that needs it. I really don’t mind and people are pretty clean in general. I don’t clean dishes or mugs that people leave in the sink – I clean my own stuff and everyone else is an adult and fully capable of washing their plates and mugs if they use one. We don’t have a cleaning company that cleans regularly ( we have to schedule monthly cleanings for the vacuuming and more intensive stuff ) and every time a co-worker sees me doing any of the cleaning or sweeping, they act surprised and baffled and say something like “wow! Thank you so much for doing that!” like they don’t realize someone has been lightly cleaning and has to do thay in order for the place to stay looking nice. I want to say SO BADLY “Who do you think keeps it from turning into a dump? Some kitchen fairy who sneaks in at night to clean??” I mean I don’t want recognition but it’s weird that they think the floor sweeps itself and counters are shiny and clean with people using them daily.

          I don’t know what I’m bitching about, I guess it just annoys me that it’s magically clean for people and people seem shocked to realize a person is actually handling it and they act like it’s so surprising. Like “oh wow you’re actually doing this and keeping it non-filthy? We never considered how it happened!”

      2. Cloudy with sunny breaks*

        The best office I have ever worked in was one that rented office space to small companies. I think the largest groups took up maybe four offices? Most people were really polite and the best part was the office manager was amazing. She covered the front desk, we had someone to talk to when loud phone guy started swearing so the whole area could hear, and she was in charge of the kitchen. The kitchen was always clean, well stocked with all kinds of coffee and snacks. Did I mention clean? And snacks? Having someone who was paid to take care of the kitchen was truly the best thing ever.

      3. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

        The Big Boss of our office hated the dirty dishes in the sink enough that he had a box that was basically the Dirty Dish Jail.
        Everything would get dumped into the box, uncleaned. I think his plan was to throw out the contents, and he may have, sometimes.

        1. Lucy*

          When spouse and I were first dating as students he lived in the British equivalent of a college dorm, in a sort of apartment with four others. Their (long-suffering) cleaner used to box up their (crusted) dirty dishes so she could actually clean the sink and kitchen surfaces underneath.

          I was so appalled by this that I (obviously) washed every single thing in the dang box whenever I was there. I don’t think that really helped, except that it probably made her feel marginally better when I was around …

          1. Vemasi*

            I lived in one of those apartments studying abroad. I was the only one who did dishes. Honestly I was okay with it, as we were only there a few months. The thing that annoyed me was that people would take the dishes (and pots and pans) into their rooms to eat and leave them there. The doors had electronic locks so I couldn’t get them, and I didn’t want to buy anything for myself because we were only there for the summer! There weren’t enough pans to start with, as I think they were all things left behind by previous residents, and I could never track the others down to ask them for their dishes (we all had different internships and were always out with our coworkers 0n different schedules), and we all had pay-as-you-go phones without texting. I just wanted to boil some ramen, for Christ’s sake!

      4. Bee's Knees*

        Our janitor keeps the kitchen(s) clean, but I cleaned the keurig shortly after I started, just because I didn’t know if it had ever been done, and it made me feel better using it if it was clean.

      5. CB*

        Our office manager/administrator implemented a “monthly fridge clean out” that seems to have worked well for us. On the last Friday of each month, she takes anything out of the fridge that is expired or not clearly marked, and then does a quick wiping down of the inside of the fridge. We only have ~30 employees, so it works well and only a few feathers have been ruffled for people who ignored the big sign on the fridge all month.

    3. Zephy*

      At OldJob, it was apparently quite a challenge for staff to keep the employee break room clean. It started with passive-aggressive signs about cleaning up after yourself, which escalated to the HR lady (she was the entire HR department) threatening and then making good on the threats to throw away everything still sitting in the fridge and sink at 4 PM every Friday, then assigning cleaning duties to individual departments on a weekly rotating basis. Because apparently we could afford that pettiness, and could afford to contract an outside company to vacuum the hallways at night, but we couldn’t hire a second custodian, heaven forfend. And I guess we didn’t want to give the job to a volunteer? It was an animal shelter, we made heavy use of volunteers. I get the optics of assigning a volunteer to clean a staff area aren’t great, but the volunteers were allowed to use that space, too.

      1. StaceyIzMe*

        I’m bad, admittedly. I think everything should be thrown out at the end of the day (barring the obvious exception of “people still in building, working” past 5 pm. The facilities are there for use during the work day. It’s not a place to store your personal supply of creamers/ condiments/ leftovers. For anything that could be brought in to have on hand for the day, a container/ bottle/ baggie/ miniature other thing exists so that you can portion yourself out an appropriate supply, serve it out to yourself and move on. Gallons of milk, whole cantaloupe/ honeydew/ other melons and bags of lunchmeat/ cheeses/ breads take up more room than is proportionally available for individual use. (Also, if you have an insulated container large enough to hold a meal for a family of five, please bring extra cold packs and don’t shove the whole thing in on top of someone’s brown bag or small container of leftover Chinese food, it’s not nice.) I’ve come into a commercial kitchen to prep a meals for special events and it’s always a hassle to figure out why ten pitchers of water and a filthy double commercial cooler and food warmer almost invariably await. Yes, I’ve communicated a request for space in advance. Yes, I’ve made sure to leave the space tidy after use. Yes, I and other volunteers still wind up cleaning up in a big way before any major food prep or storage. It’s not just one party. It’s the little encroachment here and there by people who’d never behave that way in their own homes that makes it hard. Guess what? The last few events have featured prepared, carefully stored (as in SEALED!!) items on the menu because no one wants to have to clean at that level before even shopping/ prepping /cooking. That’s my petty thing. It’s volunteer work, but maybe it counts a bit. Now I need to work on releasing this annoyance…

        1. bayoucitybeancounter*

          The insulated lunch bags in the refrigerator really get me. Do the owners not understand how insulation works? You’re insulating your lunch FROM the cold of the refrigerator. Sheesh.

          1. henrietta*

            Yeah, but you’re also insulating your lunch from casual eyes, who might not be bothered to open up the bags to see/take what’s inside them!

          2. Qosanchia*

            Whenever I do that, it’s because I’m insulating my lunch from the world until I can get it into the fridge. Usually, I don’t much care if my lunch warms up, but if I’ve got something a little temperature sensitive, and one or more client site visits before I can get to the office, I need the insulation for safety, and then I never feel like I have time to unpack my lunch into the fridge.

          3. TootsNYC*

            yes, but it’s better than using the bag to insulated my lunch from the warm room! The freezer pack inside will continue to keep it cold inside, but it won’t have to fight against the gradual warming of a 72-degree office, and instead will just fight against a 42-degree fridge.

        2. WonderingHowIGotIntoThis*

          Ah, well, we used to have gallon containers of milk, but that was because it was communal – the validation team (about 6-8 people) would club together at the beginning of the week to buy one bottle between them. Of course, if you weren’t on the validation team and you needed milk…

          Office kitchens really are petridishes of pettiness (among other things – yuk!)

          1. The Gollux (Not a Mere Device)*

            I worked one place where not only were the containers of milk communal, they gave us a choice of dairy or soy milk. And I think replaced it once a week; that’s a pretty small expense for employee morale, especially since it means people aren’t ducking out at random times to buy a cup of coffee with milk and sugar.

            1. StaceyIzMe*

              Just had a small but jarring flashback! In one office where I worked on contract for a time, they used these individual creamers that always tasted “off” to my palate. (Minny Moos or something similar.) To this day, the sight of that brand makes me shudder.

              1. Curmudgeon in California*

                Working in an office with “creamer” or fake milk is why I switched to black coffee long ago.

        3. MillenialAnon*

          In my last apartment I did not have storage space for a week’s worth of food, because of how much space in the fridge my roommates would take up. I took to buying a week’s worth of freezer meals or grab and go salads on Mondays, leaving them in the fridge at work, and eating them over the week. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have needed to go out for lunch literally every day.

          1. lnelson in Tysons*

            I do not miss having to share a fridge with three other people. Especially when one of the roomies always seemed to need 2+ of the four shelves. Fortunately the store was on the way home so getting food for one or two days wasn’t as hard.

          2. Bee*

            Or you could have talked to your roommates about them taking up a disproportionate amount of space in your fridge?

            1. Pomona Sprout*

              Why do you assume MillennialAnon didn’t try talking to their roommates?

              In my experience, people who are that selfish in their use of common spaces don’t care that they are inconveniencing others, and talking till you’re blue in the face doesn’t help.

      2. Two Dog Night*

        As a shelter volunteer, I (reasonably) cheerfully* clean up all the dog shit necessary, because that’s part of the job, but if I were assigned to clean the employee break room? I’d be out of there so fast you wouldn’t see me.

        *We currently have one dog who poops in her kennel multiple times during my 90-minute shift–I think it’s an attention-getting tactic. I’m not so cheerful about those clean-ups. She’s going to make a great pet, but, man, the shelter environment is really not for her.

      3. The Man, Becky Lynch*

        Assigning cleaning duties to people/departments makes me rage. The only place that ever tried to make that happen was also the only toxic place I’ve ever worked, go figure.

        Otherwise we either hire someone to come in and deep clean every week/two weeks and make it someone’s job, assign it to someone on light duty, etc. But we’re a place where you’re not swamped with duties, so it’s easier to use these as “filler” tasks for whomever is looking to stay on the clock for the entire day.

        And even our CEO unloads the dishwasher because he’s not above such things.

        1. Grandma3*

          I and a colleague at a former job would clean the fridges every other week. I would send out an email with an amusing header (think, “Desperate smells call for desperate measures.” ) and let people know to either label or remove their leftovers or lose them. We went draconian a few times and people started cleaning up after themselves. I will say throwing out stuff was really cathartic.

        2. anon for this*

          For a while when things were very slow in my industry, my company got rid of our janitorial services and assigned various tasks to various people. I just never did mine. That’s not the job I applied for or agreed to.

    4. AKM*

      As a low-level admin who also gets frustrated by how gross people leave things (and then I’m expected to clean it), I fully support this decision.

      1. Bunny Girl*

        Yeah… We one time locked the break room for a day with a sign on the door because no one was cleaning up after themselves. It was disgusting.

    5. iglwif*

      I once worked in an office with poor insulation and really terrible air circulation, where everyone was always cold and many people had space heaters in their offices / near their desks (paid for by the company! It was bad but not THAT bad). The building was full of paper and other flammable stuff, so turning off your space heater before leaving for the day was pretty important.

      One co-worker forgot one night and our boss noticed and *confiscated her heater*, leaving in its place a note about how she shouldn’t be using it if she couldn’t remember to turn it off. There was a lot of upset and apologies in the aftermath of that one!

    6. KatieA8978*

      I had this at a workplace of mine as well!

      The kitchen wasn’t kept to the HR Director’s standards (utterly immaculate), and she sent various emails around threatened ‘consequences’ if it wasn’t kept pristine. One coffee mug got left on the bench (by the Managing Director) and she blew a gasket and took EVERYTHING out – toaster, microwave, etc – except the kettle, teabags and coffee bags, and stored it under a table in my office. Everyone blamed me because she said “XXX has your things in her office” with no explanation as to why.

      Also, all the milk bottles got replaced with the little tiny milk sachets you get in hotels (about a 1 tsp of milk per sachet) because staff were using “too much” milk on their breakfast cereal, which “cost the company money”. I’d saved the company over $25k a month in expenses from the last administrator (who ordered everything online and bought all the expensive brands because she’d never had a corporate card before) – but about $5 a week in milk was too much!!

  15. anony-Nora*

    Had a coworker whose personality really changed when she suffered a loss in her family, and she got really hostile toward me for no reason I could figure out. At the time, we’d send work to another department and when they returned it to us (in one big pile) we’d go through and give it to the person in our department who’d handled it previously; since she was giving me the silent treatment, if she got work that I had previously done she’d wait until I left the room and then throw it at my desk.

    I mean, at least she waited until I wasn’t at my desk to throw it. I was not sad when she quit.

      1. Ego Chamber*

        She still needs to behave like a grown up at work though, not like a frustrated toddler. If she can’t manage to not be hostile to coworkers, she should take some leave or work from home or whatever other solution keeps her from acting out until she can work through her grief in a useful and productive way.

        No one needs to deal with that shit at work, I don’t care what the excuse is.

  16. Muriel Heslop*

    I teach middle school. My days consist of pettiness. And that’s just the moms!

    I’m only slightly kidding – the moms are more petty than the kids.

    1. lurker*

      Middle school teachers unite!

      Parents are the worst. Though the most satisfyingly petty thing I ever did was with a student; I allow students a 3×5′ index card for every test, and they are allowed to write whatever they want on it (takes the pressure of memorization off and lets me focus on whether they get the concepts). I had a student bring in a whole 8×11 page and expect to be able to use it for the test. I tore it in half, asked him which half he wanted to use, and let him keep that half while I threw away the rest. The story made the rounds of the whole school by the end of the day. It was quite satisfying (and, I hope, a learning experience for the kid)!

      1. Environmental Compliance*

        I had to laugh at the (I can only assume) 3×5′ typo rather than 3×5″… because I had a college professor make that typo and someone actually brought in a 3×5′ notes sheet to an exam.

        1. curly sue*

          I love that kind of thing. I had worded a bonus question poorly on a quiz I gave, and it had gone through for a couple of years with students reading it the way I assumed it would be read. Then I had one who read it clearly, and by the absolute letter of the law earned seven extra bonus marks instead of one. Ended up with something like 104% on the test. All you can do at that point is salute and revise it for next time.

          1. C*

            In a science class in high school I got a question of ‘How would you describe (x)?” and…I had no idea what the actual answer was. Couldn’t even bluff it. So I answered “Very carefully using lots of big words.”

            I got credit for that answer. Not sure if the teacher found it funny or was grading her 30th test and just wasn’t really paying attention anymore or what.

        4. Drew*

          I figured out how to set my old 24-pin dot-matrix printer to make REALLY tiny type that was still perfectly legible. I used those settings to make 3×5 note sheets for tests for several college classes. After a while, I had friends asking me to do it for them, too, which funded more late-night burger runs than I care to admit.

          One prof in all that time said, “You know, I intended for this to be a handwritten sheet,” but he didn’t make me stop using it. It wouldn’t have mattered — what I usually found was that I went to so much effort making those sheets that I had memorized the contents anyway. :-)

          1. Snargulfuss*

            Exactly! I had teachers tell us that this was their way of “tricking” us into studying.

          2. Environmental Compliance*

            When I was TA-ing, I had a kid write in both red and blue pen on the notecard. She had beautifully precise handwriting, and squeezed in the letters as small as possible. I was confused until she pulled out 3D glasses – so basically, she had twice the note cards.

            We did tell her that technically she can’t do it again, but also definitely marked her test with an extra couple points for sheer genius.

            1. Owler*

              I loved that you acknowledged her creativity while still clamping down on future repeat behavior.

              1. StaceyIzMe*

                Yikes! You could photograph any amount of data and bring a magnifying glass or slide your readers down your nose. Wonder what 1 point font looks like in Arial Narrow?

            3. Vemasi*

              I thought you were going to sat that she cross-wrote it, like Edwardian letter-writing where the postal service charged by the sheet of paper. Using separate colors for that would be a good tactic.

          3. The Hamster's Revenge*

            I had to use an engineering notebook in college (1990)…the blank green ruled kind where you numbered the pages and had to sign and date every entry in case it were to be used in a court case. We had to use pen, of course, and mistakes could only be lined out (and signed and dated).

            It was ok for the smaller sections, but the analysis sections could go on for one or two pages and while I could make my handwriting sufficiently neat, it was incredibly time consuming and my hand would cramp up. So I busted out my 9 pin dot matrix printer, typed up my analyses and taped the print out into my notebook which I signed and dated.

            The instructor was so angry he turned purple. He remained purple when he called around to folks in the profession and they all agreed that they had been doing it that way for years because paid professionals didn’t have time to waste on hand writing something which could be printed. He had to allow me to continue printing and taping things into my lab notebook and he held that grudge against me for the rest of his life, so I am told.

          4. TootsNYC*

            what I usually found was that I went to so much effort making those sheets that I had memorized the contents anyway.

            I’ve heard that this is actually the point of that permission; it motivates you to study more precisely (you’re choosing what’s the most important thing to remember).

            So if your college colleagues were giving you the stuff to type in and print out, or asking you for the formatting to use on their own notes, that study trick was working. If you were passing your own out, they missed out on something valuable!

        5. StaceyIzMe*

          Okay, the really bad side of me loves the kid who had the brass to pull that…

      2. Tinybutfierce*

        BLESS YOU for allowing that notecard. I’ve forever had a terrible memory, especially for dates and numbers, and your take would have saved past school-age me a whole lot of grief about feeling stupid for not being able to recall details of things I knew I otherwise understood.

        1. lurker*

          Yeah, especially in a day and age when everyone has Google in their pocket, I feel like memorization is a huge waste of brain space.

          1. Lucy*

            I have a LOT of things memorised for work but every week I’ll have a moment of “hang on, is India 30 months or 31 months” and have to check a bookmark. Save brain space for processes, not data!

          2. Gumby*

            I feel like memorization is good brain-training regardless of what you memorize. But I do see a benefit in not judging whether someone has learned a *concept* by testing their *memorization*. And I say that as someone who memorized my way through the second half of calculus in high school and didn’t *learn* it until college.

            1. Vemasi*

              I wish I would have been made to memorize fewer dates and mathematical formulae, and more poetry. In middle school we had to memorize Jabberwocky, but I would have liked to do some Shakespeare quotes while we were reading Hamlet in high school.

              1. Seeking Second Childhood*

                We had to memorize and recite one poem…and got extra credit for doing another. I was the first to ask if I could do a third, and he gave me a copy of the poetry text to keep because it made him do happy.
                Calloo! Callay!

                1. Vemasi*

                  That’s awesome.

                  My sister took non-AP senior English, and they had to memorize a sonnet. She chose the one from 10 Things I Hate About You, since she already knew half of it by heart. She also went first for reciting (for extra credit, and even though she had been absent since it was assigned and only knew about it because a friend told her), and even though everyone said how smart that was, no one else switched to that one even if they had several more days to memorize.

                  She also chose the three shortest books from a list to report on for her senior project, which no one else thought to do (it was 1984, Brave New World, and something else like that).

              2. TootsNYC*

                My husband the history geek has persuaded me that dates are important–they help you link cause and effect.

                I said something about attitudes about trips to the New World and Sir Walter Raleigh, implying that people had reacted X way because of Raleigh’s funding of Roanoke, and he said, “Roanoke hadn’t been founded yet–it wouldn’t happen for three years.”

            2. Loiosh*

              I really wish I could learn to memorize. Obviously I can at some level, mainly through repeated use, but for whatever reason conscious memorization of something for which I have little use on a day-to-day basis requires extraordinary effort – like flash cards for weeks to get info to stick long enough to take a test. I had an awful boss who expected me to recall sales projections, cost projections, major milestone dates, part numbers, etc., when he asked for them in meetings and would visibly get huffy if I said “let me open my computer and pull up xyz spreadsheet so that I can give you an accurate number.” (Of course, he’d also get upset if, after he pressured me into not opening my computer, whatever number I thought it was turned out to be wrong.) I was so glad when he moved on.

          3. Bryce*

            My dad was a physicist with a large wall full of reference books. He summed it up pretty well: “I don’t remember every equation in those books, but I know where to find every equation in those books.”

        2. Yvette*

          I would get through tests by making cheat sheets that I never actually used to cheat. Just making them would fix it in my memory. Another trick would be to memorize a simple example of say, how to divide fractions and at the start of the test write it somewhere in the margin and then use it throughout. I never had a teacher have a problem with that.

      3. The Man, Becky Lynch*

        Being allowed to have a notecard would have saved me the time it took to pencil in all the assorted formulas into my graphing calculator case all those years ago *grumble*

    2. DataGirl*

      Speaking as a parent, parents are horrible. They are one of the main reasons people burn out in jobs or volunteer roles working with kids, in my experience.

      1. CristinaMariaCalabrese (do the mambo like-a crazy)*

        Yep, that’s why I stopped working in special ed! Loved the kids; 85% of the parents were MONSTERS.

    3. iglwif*

      As a parent, I can only shake my head and agree that parents are way worse than kids (even middle school kids, who can be pretty horrid).

      Which is why I tend to stay as far away from school-related activities involving other parents as I possibly can XD

    4. Middle School Teacher*

      Omg middle school moms. I had two siblings last year- one in grade 7, on in grade 8. This year I have neither. Apparently the mom went to Grade 8 teacher and in a fit frustration said “I guess you’re just not very experienced, like Miss Middle School Teacher is!” I keep getting glared at by Grade 8 teacher, and I wasn’t even there!

    5. Mimi Me*

      I dunno…I’ve encountered some incredibly petty teachers. My son had a teacher who I swear would have won the Gold Medal in pettiness if it was a sport. He came home one day, furious because the teacher had ripped up his homework. Apparently they had taken a test and he finished early so she told him to do some quiet work until everyone else was finished. He started his homework because he’s one of those kids who prefers his after school time to be filled with fun things. As the teacher was making her rounds to collect the finished tests, she noticed that he had just completed his assignment. She took it from him, told him homework was for home, and ripped it into shreds right in his face. I happened to be meeting with her two days later about something unrelated and asked her about it. She was so smug when she admitted to doing it. We had a lot of issues after that. :)

      4. StaceyIzMe*

        Exactly! The Petty Shoes fit on the feet of any demographic. And while parents can be really difficult, teachers sometimes try to “re-diagnose” a kid who has already seen the neurologist/ speech therapist/ reading specialist and start punishing the kid for being difficult when they don’t follow the IEP. Hand to God, a lot of trauma has been caused by this.

      5. Curmudgeon in California*

        WTF? I always did my homework in other classes. If a teacher had ripped it up I would have pitched a fit, and so would my mom.

        Instead, in one junior high class I was so obviously far ahead of the other students that the teacher said “Just work quietly on other stuff in the back”.

        Petty was when my second grade teacher would keep me in for recess and after school sitting on the floor next to her desk because I literally would not finish a page of simple, dull math problems. I’d do the first row, to prove I knew it, then I’d get bored, and saw no reason to do the rest. She insisted. I refused. She kept me in for recess and after school to make me do them. I still refused. This was in the 60s, when little girls had to wear dresses. My parents actually pulled me out of school for few weeks to get it resolved. She had to relent.

        1. Lucy*

          In my last year of school I was taking more classes than anyone else (unusual combination of subjects) so reached a deal with my maths teacher that I would do half the homework – the first quarter and the last quarter. That meant I’d always have done the introductory easy questions and the “you definitely get this” difficult questions, without spending hours wading through the intermediate wastelands.

          With hindsight I can see that we were actually both incredibly lazy.

        2. Bryce*

          When grading papers back in college one student got fed up with the repetition and included with her homework a page-long rant of “why do I need to keep doing these, you just blah blah blah.”

          Unfortunately she had the wrong method. “blah blah blah” was completely incorrect.

  17. Dismuse*

    After I was diagnosed with coeliac disease my boss would only ever order pizza for work lunches and meetings. ‘Oh you can find something,’ he’d say. I would bring my own lunch and just spitefully eat bacon sandwiches at him over the table (he was vegetarian). So both of us were on the hook there.

    4. AnonEMoose*

      Mmm…bacon and spite…! (I don’t blame you a bit. These days, finding a place that can handle gluten free is just not that difficult, and as a vegetarian himself, he has NO excuse.)

    5. StaceyIzMe*

      I love this!! Some people are a little “extra” about food and believe that people fake or exaggerate allergies and other health conditions. Good for you!

    6. InsufficentlySubordinate*

      Passive-aggressive Bacon Sandwich sounds like a band name. Folk punk, maybe?

      1. The Hamster's Revenge*

        I was graveyard and had an afternoon meeting once a month that I had to get up very early to attend so I would grab golden arches for my “breakfast” and eat at the meeting (company culture was fine with this). I did this for several months until another attendee joined and she was a militant vegan. She saw me with my hamburger and had a shrieking harpy freakout in front of everyone over my pro-torture and certain death food choices. She then sanctimoniously got out her tupperware of plain brown rice and chowed down.

        You bet your sweet bippy that I ate my hamburger *AT* her from then on out.

        1. Curmudgeon in California*

          I would have started getting doubles with bacon just to be mean… Militant vegans bring out the pettiness in me.

          1. AnonEMoose*

            Me, too. I’ll do what I can to accommodate dietary needs, allergies, and so on – at minimum, if I bring in baked goods, I’m happy to explain ingredients, let people know that my kitchen has peanuts, tree nuts, and gluten, and so on.

            But lecture or attack me about my food choices, and the Gloves Are Off. I want to be clear that I would never, ever deliberately feed someone anything I know they can’t or prefer not to eat. That is absolutely unacceptable.

            But I could see myself eating a bacon cheeseburger or pulled pork sandwich or medium rare steak AT someone who had a fit about my food choices. And since I grew up on a small farm, I will see your attempted gross-out tactic and raise you with various stories from my childhood.

            You want to talk about concerns with industrial farming and so on? Sure! Want to discuss ways to eat local, cooking more at home, talk about your garden? I’m totally there for that conversation. Try to tell me what to eat or impose your morals on me? NOPE!

    9. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      I wish instead of a gluten free bun, you had just sat there eating bacon between two slabs of ham. Like your own version of the KFC double-down.

    10. Lynn Whitehat*

      I’m a vegetarian. I used to work for a company that used to order “both kinds of sandwiches” (turkey and ham) for working lunches. I think people wanted me to be pitiful and hungry. I got delicious take-out meals that everyone envied instead. “Oh no! I’m fine! Don’t worry about me! Mmmmmmm….”

      1. Vemasi*

        My friend’s (gluten sensitivity) workplace offers to let him order from wherever he wants on days when they order in and they’ll pay for it, but he finds it easier (both effort-wise and social-wise, as he finds bringing it up each time awkward, even though the office manager is totally willing and would be mortified to find he was scared of talking to her) to just bring in a big ziploc sack of pepperoni and cheese chunks. He is content with this. His wife and I agonize over the missed opportunity to get free delicious takeout.

    12. Trisha*

      It’s too bad that he was like that. We have a pizza place that offers gluten free pizzas, vegan pizza (with vegan cheese) and can cover just about any dietary concern. I always go out and ask for people to let me know if they have dietary concerns so we order inclusively. It really is petty of him not to.

  18. Me*

    I post passive aggressive comics on my white board about work. Like dilbert but not. Carefully curated and totally about my boss and useless coworker. Everyone knows who deals with them knows what they’re about despite me never saying. Sometimes you take your power back in the ways you can…like little funny comics that make you smile.

    1. jnsunique*

      In one of my trainings (Six Sigma/Lean Manufacturing), one of the trainers said that level of workplace morale is inversely proportional to the number of Dilbert comics that are posted by employees. Said as she showed an appropriate Dilbert strip. In my experience that is totally true! Even if yours are not actually Dilbert, I think the spirit applies.

      1. BeachMum*

        A very, very long time ago, I worked at a large company. They brought Scott Adams in to speak to those at and above a certain level. I think my face and stomach ached from laughing so hard. However, my boss was the pointy-haired boss, and part of my laughing was watching him laugh, clearly unaware at how similar he was to the pointy-haired boss.

        Before I quit, much of my desk had Dilbert cartoon taped to it and I had two Dilbert books on the shelf.

        In the span of about three months, my entire department (about eight people) left because of this guy, but he thought Dilbert was hilarious.

    2. Drew*

      At an old job, I had a small cork board at my desk and would occasionally post Dilbert strips to it.

      One day, my boss saw that I was posting one (that was a not-very-subtle dig at my boss) and read it. “That’s really funny,” he said. “Good thing you don’t work in a place like that.”

      Readers, I started job-hunting in earnest that day.

      1. Me*

        The people its about never realize it and everyone who works with them 100% does. It’s almost like a secret society :)

      2. AnonEMoose*

        I once started job hunting because Dilbert felt too true to be funny anymore.

        1. The Hamster's Revenge*

          After our company flattened performance review rankings into three bands of “go pack up your stuff”, “y’all” and “boss’ fishing buddy”, we all started referring to each other as “Beverly”. Management was not amused.

      3. MarfisaTheLibrarian*

        My father’s office is covered in Dilbert and similar comics, and I think, he, a supervisor, has put up a couple of them by way of acknowledgement that the situation is not always ideal. It’s a local-ish government department of civil service employees, and sometimes there are too many things that are Do This Now priorities (i.e. we’re legally mandated to deal with this in a timely manner…but one of our legislators just called and “asked” us to do this other thing)

        This is the one I think is posted in his office: https://www.flickr.com/photos/srab/8431782653

    3. Machiavellian*

      Oh this reminds me of when I was in a high school world history class with a terrible teacher. This teacher did not know her subject matter, did not understand how to control a classroom and mostly all of us students just mocked her behind her back. One day we were having a class discussion about a reading we did for homework in Machiavelli’s The Prince. Everyone in the class in this discussion realized that we were all talking about our teacher and her inability to command respect, love or fear. She never caught on.

    4. iglwif*

      I used to exchange relevant Dilbert comics with a former boss … relevant to our mutual annoyance with their boss / my grandboss.

    5. JustaTech*

      When my company (pharma) was owned by some deeply amoral people I posted a picture of Frances Oldham Kelsey (the pharmacist who prevented thalidomide from being approved by the FDA in the US) on my cube wall.

      Super obscure way of saying I thought our overlords were evil? Yup.
      Did at least some of my coworkers (and bosses) get it? Yup.

      2. emmelemm*

        I love it. Just obscure enough that every time you look at it, you know what’s up, but very little chance of it coming back to haunt you.

    6. Mimi Me*

      My last company gave us these branded coffee mugs that were painted with chalkboard paint so you could write things on them. I displayed mine on the top of the filing cabinet and every day I would write something new – always in a foreign language and always critical of my job / co-workers / boss / company. I started to gain a bit of a following which is how I got caught – my boss noticed the people who would stop to write down what I’d written and then go translate it. He did the same – on a day I’d written something about him. My mug disappeared the next day.

    7. Pandop*

      My previous line manager and team leader were very anti-headphones in the office, even though they were allowed/common elsewhere in the department (they have since left and headphones are a-ok now), as they decided that they would be ‘distracting’. So for years I had a magazine cutting about how listening to music improved accuracy in data entry (which is quite close to what our work was) pinned up. Didn’t help, but made me feel better.

  19. Kari from Up North*

    I work at a hospital. And there are some employees who entitled to park in patient parking. Where my office is located, patients walk past me everyday and I hear their complaints about our parking lots. So one morning, I stood in the lobby and as employees came in from the patient/visitor lot, I said in my sweetest voice: “Awww, parking must really suck today?” Without fail, they would say ‘yeah’. And then in my most mom tone of voice, I said, “And it’s really going to suck for our patients later today because you parked there.”

    Three out of the four, turned around and moved their car. I called the director of the one that kept on walking.

    3. Shrunken Hippo*

      As someone who has to go to hospitals on a regular basis I thank you for this!

    6. Gymmie*

      Not petty – just needed.

      Not at work, but we were at line for a hayride with my 5 and 3 year old. Some teenagers just cut the whole line right in front of us. In a very calm voice I said “you know, I’m trying to teach my children they need to wait their turn, and seeing you cut in front of the line makes it hard to do that”. They didn’t say anything, but sheepishly went towards the back of the line.

      1. Michelle*

        I hate line cutters with a passion. When I go to an event that I know is going to be popular, I always, always come early to get a decent place in line. When people come in and starting chatting with the person they went to Pre-K with a few spots in front of me, I wait a few minutes to see if they are to move to the back of the line. If they start trying to “blend” in the line, I call them out, “Excuse me. I know you are talking to your friend, but the back of the line is there (pointing)”. Most people will move on back, but if they don’t, I wait until I see an employee , call them over and loudly “tattle” on the line cutter and the employees make them move to the back of the line. I did this recently at Endgame with a group of young adults who tried to cut the line I had been standing in for 2 hours and when the employee (manager in this case) made them move, the entire line clapped.

        1. Nep*

          I had a friend hang up and sulk at me for a day because I refused to let her jump registration line for Dragon*Con. I had been in line for 3 hours at that point, and was nearly at the end. I even offered to wait in line with her again.

          I am no longer friends with this person.

            1. nym2*

              It’s gotten better, depending on the day… I work behind the reg desk. Preregister and come in on Thursday or Friday, pretty good. Onsite Saturday morning, not so much. Secret hint: if you’re registering onsite, bring cash, not card, to pay. That line goes tons faster.

        2. JKP*

          We don’t have movie lines anymore since all the theaters around me have reserved seating. I don’t miss waiting 2 hours to see a great movie, but it also means you have to buy tickets many weeks ahead for that popular release.

        3. Vemasi*

          My college used to have an annual speaker/interview, and one time there was an EXTREMELY high-profile person signed up. We queued up starting the night before tickets became available, IN NOVEMBER. The president of the university showed up in the morning when the box office opened, announced that she was releasing all the reserved faculty seats to students, limited everyone to one ticket (so that people who weren’t in the line all night could not have their friends get tickets for them), and called in university police to ensure that no one cut the line. I think she also had Catering hand out free coffee and hot chocolate. I think everyone who slept out for tickets (the line went around the building, across an entire courtyard, and around the library by the time I got in it at 8pm) got one. We appreciated it a lot.

      2. Choux*

        Ha, I had some dude try to cut in front of me in a line once. He put on a big charming smile, turned to the guy behind me and said, “I’m sure this lovely young lady will let me in front of her!” And I said, “No, she won’t.” That smile disappeared IMMEDIATELY. Get to the back of the line, bro.

        2. Luna*

          When you told him you wouldn’t, did you have the same ‘big charming smile’ on your face?

        3. AnonEMoose*

          That was so gross of him…I’m glad you shut him down!

          I’d also be willing to bet that if you had let him in front of you, he’d have tried hitting on you while you were both in line and you were therefore something of a captive audience.

          1. TootsNYC*

            well, you know, once someone has done you a favor once, they are more likely to do it a second time or to want to be helpful or positively disposed toward you.

            (recent research)

        4. starsaphire*

          Queueing up to get in to a concert one evening. My friend and I were waiting patiently in the correct line. Some dude and his two tweenage sons started to cut the line, at which point friend made a very pointed comment.

          Dude pasted on a huge smarmy smile and said, “Boys, your dad’s gonna teach you how to cheat like a man!” and sailed on up to the front of the line.

          My soul wants to believe that someone ganked him out and sent him to the back, but there were SO many people that I lost sight of him immediately and have no idea what really happened.

      4. Salymander*

        Nicely handled.

        My daughter’s playgroup used to meet at a local playground. One day, a group of teenagers decided to all climb to the top of the preschool playstructure and sit there screaming curse words. They were looking at all the parents with a triumphant expression, as if daring us to complain. Most of the parents were unsure about what to do, and a few were getting really angry and superior, which would have just made things worse.

        I went over there and just said that they could yell whatever they wanted to, but maybe they could avoid doing it in the preschool play area, as it would be hard to explain to my daughter’s teacher why she suddenly started telling her to f##k off. The kids all laughed and looked a little sheepish, but they walked over to the skate park instead.

    7. anonymous beky*

      Bless you for doing this! I once had to bring a sick, tired and cranky toddler to the doctor, but ALL the patient parking was taken. I had to lurch through ice and snow, carrying my mad toddler from 5 rows back of employee parking. I can guarantee that there were at least a dozen of employees parked in patient parking. Because I worked there. And recognized all the cars.

  20. Washi*

    One of my coworkers, when she wants my help with something, just says my name progressively louder while sitting in her cubicle across a large room from me. I pretend not to hear her until she gets up and comes to my desk. We have been doing this for months and both refuse to back down.

    2. NotAPirate*

      If ever there was a case for workplace IM. Then she could request your attention without getting up and you could have an avenue that wasn’t just shouting back across the room that you need to finish something first.

      1. AppleStan*

        I love you forever for knowing this. And mad that I didn’t say it first.

        Lana. Lana. Lana. (Deep Breath) LAAAANAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

    5. Robert in SF*

      I just reply with “I’m over here…” in a Marco/Polo kinda sing-song tempo…

    6. Owler*

      After Robert’s post, I kinda hope you answer your coworker’s call out of “Washi?” with a loud, affirmative “POLO!” and see if any of your coworkers catch on.

    7. DaniCalifornia*

      OMG we had a temp who did something similar this past busy season. One Saturday it was just her and I, so I put my headphones in because she had a habit of asking really inappropriate questions about anything and everything, so I wouldn’t have to talk to her. She kept scraping her chair (no wheels) against the ground and it makes a REALLY LOUD noise when you do so against the concrete floor. It got longer and louder and I could easily hear it above my music. Well she kept doing it and I would hear her mumble something each time. She finally walked over to my desk and touched my shoulder and I took out my earbud and she’s miffed because she was doing it to get my attention! Like, no. You say my name or come over. We sit 10 ft apart.

  21. Moray*

    A former coworker had a spreadsheet in the shared folders. She was awful to me–think stereotypical rich mean girl, only in her late twenties.

    She’d accidentally left her personal budget on the second page of the spreadsheet. There was an income line for “salary.” And beneath it, one for “mom and dad.” The “mom and dad” number was higher.

    The nice thing to do would be to clue her in that she’d left it there, or quietly delete the page. I…did not do the nice thing.

      1. Moray*

        It was in our shared files; I just casually mentioned to a friend or two that there was an interesting second page.

        1. Mickey Q*

          My boss once left a letter on the shared drive from the insurance company telling him his viagra would no longer be covered.

    2. irene adler*

      Seems some people, like the mfg. manager who is a bully, or the clueless CFO, like to scan personal papers on the shared copy machine.
      Personal papers = completed tax returns, loan applications+W2+multiple years of tax forms, medical prescriptions, titles to vehicles

      But they don’t realize everyone has access to these. Yes, I saved copies of everything.

      I know way too much information about these people. Damaging information. I’m not going to share it with anyone, but it’s fun to fantasize about what might happen if this info got into the wrong hands.

      And it’s depressing that both of them make more than I do. A lot more.

      1. StaceyIzMe*

        I dunno about this. Yes, they left the data out there. But it doesn’t seem ideal to hold onto it. If it’s found in your possession, what would you say? (Also, is it legal?)

        1. irene adler*

          Nothing. There’s nothing to find- at work. And no basis to search my home.

      2. Suuuuuper anon admin*

        My boss mails me all that documentation so I can stamp his name on it and send it out for him! And I do a lot of work purchasing with his credit card, so I have his signature, his cc and the cvv…plus I know the limit on his crazy high card, too. I could cause a lot of mayhem…

        Depressing is knowing that if it ever came to it, my boss could literally expense my salary on his credit card with room to spare for more work expenses.

        1. Environmental Compliance*

          Yeah, it really doesn’t sound petty as much as incredibly shortsighted at best, incredibly malicious at worst. Petty is passive-aggressively inconveniencing someone, not threatening to severely damage their life.

          If you’re not planning on doing anything with it…why in the world would you keep it??

      4. JustaTech*

        Tangential: our HR asked everyone to photocopy their passport because we’d had a bunch of organizational changes and basically HR was starting from scratch. My lightly paranoid coworker announced that every thing that was copied, scanned or printed on that printer was saved in the hard drive, and would HR be making sure that the copier hard drive was wiped before it left the building?

        No one else had any idea about this (myself included). HR just kind of shrugged.

        Lots of people scan and copy personal stuff at work, because who has a decent scanner at home?

        1. Chinookwind*

          I remember when a news show up in Canada came out with that tidbit and my workplace, which dealt with lots of confidential personal info to verify who was taking our licensing exams, all called up our CTO the next day to find out what the procedure for decommissioning the copiers he was planning on replacing.

          Turned out he had also seen the same show and was writing one up right that moment. I believe that a lot of companies started to do that at the same time.

        2. Qosanchia*

          I don’t know about your office (obviously) but a lot of places have it in the policy that scanner/copier hard drives are wiped before the device is replaced. There’s usually an option for this in the copier menus, and for a lot of data security reasons, it’s probably good to note that to IT before you ship the old one off.

        2. Anon82*

          Sounds like the first three minutes of every career-themed Lifetime movie. What a loon.

      6. Bryce*

        I’ve got a very simple email address (been using gmail since the beginning) and get a lot of mistyped things. I assume it’s folks who think gmail will somehow know it’s meant for username3526543, or are username at personalemail and typed gmail by reflex. Anyway, I like to flex my “hacker” skills and see what damage I can do with them. Nothing actually damaging, and I don’t save the info, I just make note of what I *could* have done and in some cases tweak noses to make it clear they need to look after info better. For example one person’s travel itinerary included their address so I knew where they lived and when they’d be out of town. They were local so I was tempted to leave a note, but chickened out. Another one was a receipt for a gas card. From that I could get into the gas station account which had a phone number, and I texted them their new password. Got a confirmation for $200 broadway theater tickets once, and another time I got an order confirmation with address for some stuff that wasn’t illegal to ship but was definitely illegal to grow. Sent that guy a postcard with “enjoy your salad and double-check your email on receipts” because I was feeling mischievous that day.

        People (including me) really don’t pay as much attention to that sort of thing as they should.

        1. Bryce*

          (for the Broadway tickets that was past my “be an imp or ignore” threshold and I contacted the theater to let them know. Wrong side of the country anyway.)

        2. Róisín*

          Ooh ooh, I have this story too! I have a doppleganger in Chicago who shares my full name – first, middle, and last. My email address is lastname.firstname — hers is lastnamefirstnamem where that last M is our middle initial. I got SOOO many emails for her. Food delivery. Appointment confirmations. Even a follow-up from a personal trainer! I knew her name, nickname, address, boyfriend’s name, favorite foods, etc etc. What I didn’t know? Her correct email address. I tried emailing back the addresses that were real people (not mailing lists) asking them to double-check with her and correct their records. Didn’t work.

          Once I got a BANK DEPOSIT CONFIRMATION, I decided enough was enough. I went back through the not-mine emails and found that clicking the link to her profile on a food delivery email just opened the profile — no password necessary — and gave me her phone number. So I texted her! And we figured out what was going on.

          I still! five years later! get emails for her. If they’re automated I can frequently change the mailing address myself by opening her profile and adding the final letter (Gmail doesn’t recognize full stops; they’re purely cosmetic), which is about as close as I can get to nefarious. Most of the time I just forward her whatever the email was with a nice note, and she thanks me and we go about our days.

          Double-check your email addresses folks!

          1. Mine Has One L*

            My personal e-mail is a common firstname/middlename combo, so I get piles of misdirected e-mails. Flight itineraries, reminders for breastfeeding conferences, requests to do alterations on wedding dresses. There are are least 4 people with similar names who I get mail for from time to time.

            The two most amazing ones:
            1. I got a multi-document attachment full of candidate profiles for a C-level position at a bank. Psychological profiles, salary history, videos of interviews.
            2. I got all of someone’s OK Cupid messages, and could click through them to have full access to her profile. I immediately notified OKC to shut down the account, but had some minor fun altering small details (making her 31 instead of 21) and seeing if she noticed. The most romantic message she received during my brief window of access? A guy who simply messaged “Hey, babenugget”.

  22. Bucket of Slop*

    One person had placed a bucket in the “kitchenette” (an area with microwaves, refrigerators, water cooler, but no sink), because she claimed people had dumped coffee/water/etc in the “tray” of the water cooler, or in the trashcans in the area, so she provided the bucket for them to dump their water.

    OK, fine, but the bucket didn’t get dumped or rinsed out every day so it began to smell like a bucket that didn’t get dumped or rinsed out every day that had days upon days of old water/coffee/etc., even though less than 1/4 of the bucket had been filled (it was a good sized mop bucket). No amount of rational conversation from any number of people would convince her that this bucket was unsanitary and smelly to those who had to work around the kitchenette (her office was down the hall, so she never had to smell it unless she came in for water) nor would she even think about dumping her precious bucket until it was 1/2 way full.

    Some anonymous person decided to take her at her word…and dumped old water in there. Old flower water. From flowers that had been delivered about a week before. Someone else dumped old coffee that had been sitting two or three days but had “non-dairy” creamer in it…and that stuff doesn’t look or smell pretty when it’s older.

    She was furious about her bucket, and went storming up and down the halls, but no one snitched.

    The bucket was removed that afternoon.

    2. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      Yesssss, I think I would fit in well with these people and their bucket sabotage tactics >:]

  23. Data Maven*

    Some of our ice cube trays went missing (not that anyone but I ever filled them). So I created a full blown Missing poster with a detailed description (including lengthy prose describing the fact that no one ever filled them) and posted them all around the office.

    2. AnnieK*

      My soap!

      There’s a shared washroom on our floor. The soap there is Foul, to the point where I honestly gag when I smell it. One other person in my office reacted as strongly to the soap, so I brought in a little bottle and the two of us carted it back and forth when needed. And then. I accidentally left it in the washroom and it disappeared. It was tragic.

      I made a wanted poster with a picture of the soap (text: HAVE YOU SEEN
      OUR SOAP? A small container of [brand soap] was left here last week. It is greatly missed. If found, please return to [office].) and posted it directly in the eyeline upon entering the room. It was well-designed and eye-catching and people enjoyed it.

      The soap was never recovered. The next week, the poster was gone as well. (I think the building cleaners may have taken both.)

      A couple weeks later, in payment for a non-work-favor, one of my colleagues surprised me with a new bottle.

      1. JustaTech*

        Let me guess, Dial Gold?

        The worst soap ever.

        I had a job once where I was expected to shower and *wash my hair* in Dial Gold. I did not.

    3. Leah*

      somewhat related: a couple of years ago my mom had an issue with her ankle that required she ice it three times a day. She took an ice tray from home and kept it in the freezer at her office so she could ice her ankle after lunch, and eventually she noticed that some of the ice cubes in it constantly went missing – not a big deal, she usually never used all the ice in the tray, but annoying because 1) she had to refill the tray more frequently, and 2)people shouldn’t take other people’s things without asking first.

      So one day, a few months later, she was taking the ice cube tray off the freezer when one of the office interns passed by and said something along the lines of “oh we’ve been taking some the ice from your tray to chill our drinks, no biggie right?” To which my mom responded, “you know this is TAP water ice, right?” (where I’m from tap water isn’t safe to drink) Needless to say the intern was SHOCKED. Word spread quickly and no one stole ice from her again after that :’) It wasn’t petty per say because she wasn’t using tap water just to be petty to the thieves – why waste drinking water if the ice was just to ice her ankle, not drink – but mom was sure happy to be rid of the ice thieves and was satisfied to finally let them know exactly how they were playing themselves.

  24. The Cardinal*

    Someone took my lunch – which were datgum LUNCHABLES – from the office fridge!!! And yes…I ranted to some of my colleagues like a madman.

  25. NicoleK*

    I tracked my two coworkers start time for about a week and a half. Coworker 1 came in 1-3 hours late everyday. And coworker 2 only worked 34-36 hours a week despite being a full time employee. I never did share the info with our boss because it wouldn’t have matter anyway. Boss is clueless, conflict avoidant, and passive.

    1. irene adler*

      I did this too!

      Discovered that one 8-5 employee was seriously over reporting her hours. One example: she arrived at 10 am and was gone by 3:15 pm. Yet her time card (ours are handwritten with # of hours worked -not start and end times) indicated 8 hours worked. There were many incidences of this sort.

      Yes, I went into the accounting files and copied her time cards to verify/document.

      She was a complete brown-noser to the managers so I knew that they wouldn’t do anything about this. But I kept the documents anyway. Just to remind myself that while managers may be in charge, they sure don’t have a very good bullsh!t detector.

      1. Marge*

        Oh yes, at same job as from my comment below, our manager started requiring people put in their time to the minute on their timecards because some people were fudging. Not as much as in your case, but it was a real problem because of the nature of our work and coverage/workload issues. 8:52 is not the same as 8:30 when the phones come on at 8:30 and are ringing off the hook. 12 – 1:12 lunch is not the same as 12 – 1 lunch when the person who is supposed to go at 1 is waiting to get to eat their freaking sandwich.

      2. Karo*

        Was she salaried? And is it possible that she was working longer hours other days? I’m salaried and have to do a time sheet, but my instructions are to report 8 hours every day, regardless of how much I’ve worked.

        1. irene adler*

          Hourly.

          I was doing extra hours (10 hour days or weekends). Never saw her around.

    2. Marge*

      I have done this, and also tracked phone calls answered. Though honestly I don’t think it was all that petty because there was someone who was straight up not doing her share of the work, and it was better to approach our manager with solid numbers. The numbers weren’t even close — it varied between 80/20 and 70/30 split, not the 50/50 it should have been.

    3. RobotWithHumanHair*

      Oh god, I did this with my annoying coworker in my last job too. Had a whole record of his tardiness, failure to execute tasks, rudeness to faculty members, etc. Never gave it to my boss either because my boss lovvvvved him. I either did it for my own satisfaction or to cover my own butt in case his various shortcomings at work ended up shifting blame to me.

      1. NicoleK*

        This! Everyone loves coworker #1 too. And our boss has been propping her up for the past 6 years.

    4. AB.*

      I have also done this! I was one of the few women in my team and one of the guys is an arrogant, entitled mansplainer (we are both in different areas now). He would snap at me if I wasn’t back answering the phones right after I returned from lunch. But he would leave HIS off for three hours or more – we had the exact same role and responsibilities. So I took screenshots of every time I had to take a phone call while he was being lazy and gave them to our boss when he was at his worst. I also reassigned the work I was assigned on top of that to compensate for my time lost for his laziness.

      Needless to say he had his tail between his legs for a while after he tried to confront me about it.

    5. Petty crap (literally)*

      Me too for this one. Customer service role, small team, literally no way to justify your job if you weren’t at your desk answering the phone and seeing in customers. Co-worker regularly spent up to 3 hours a day plus his hour lunch MIA. I tracked him on a spreadsheet. With comments. But never shared it with anyone else.

      Boss knew he was missing a lot as I was regularly asked where he was by boss and many other colleagues. Started answering have you checked his other office? He hides in there playing on his phone and managing his fantasy sports team for a few hours a day to them all. People started going into the gents, looking for his shoes under the door, and just asking him their work related questions while he was sat there on his phone. I took great joy from thinking of them bothering him while he was ‘on the throne’ and he used to complain about how people had started bugging him in the toilet all the time (eheheh), but if he was legit on there that many hours a day he needed help and another job. Covering for him for 3 hours a day was not really tenable so he’d have needed a job not so sensitive to actually being present at your desk during business hours to do it. Also, the customers were a great and loyal bunch but as I was senior and conciencious I used to get a lot of sad faces/voices going ‘slacker said he’d do x but I never heard back’ or ‘slacker said he’d send that out/book me in/get some info for me but he never called me back’ calls and I’d end up doing the thing because it was a 5 minute task which would make a customer happy at the end of five minutes. Manager’s answer to ‘i can’t continue to deliver my customers the level of service they deserve whilst also covering for slacker’s customers’ was ‘stop covering for slacker and just make him do the thing and tell his customers he’ll have to call them back’ and that was manager’s right to request we dealt with it that way, but it was my right to love my customers and being good at my job too much to accept giving half the customer base crap service so she didn’t have to manage a crap worker.

      I’ve moved on to a great new job in a great new industry. Our confrontation avoidant, unwilling to manage manager took a new job in another department where they don’t need to manage anyone and slacker got a new manager, I’m guessing more willing to manage him on his poor performance. He moved onto a new job in the same industry recently which would be a considerable step down but which would also give him a bigger team to share the workload and frustration of him never being present to do his job, IE more places to hide from the fact he’s a dead weight not an asset. So glad I left that field.

      1. AB.*

        Oh yeah that’s the worst. And using shame via their own customers is highly effective.

      2. whingedrinking*

        Over at Captain Awkward, there was a letter writer who wrote in once because after work or on the weekends, her partner would grab his iPad or a book and park himself on the toilet for hours and hours on end. Not only was it so egregious that they missed social engagements over it, but he wouldn’t even let the LW in to pee when she needed it and she found herself urinating in the kitchen sink. Twice. The partner simultaneously claimed there was nothing wrong and that he had to be in there because he needed the toilet that badly. (A doctor’s visit suggested that he had a bit of indigestion but nothing that would merit literal hours of toilet time.) Various people in the comments pointed out that if he actually physically required the commode for that much of the day, it’d make it pretty hard to hold down almost any kind of a job. But maybe it was just this guy.

        1. Róisín*

          Was this also the guy who left broken glass on the floor, or was that a different guy? Because I feel like it was the same guy

          1. whingedrinking*

            That was a different person, although as I recall Broken Glass Dude had a real cornucopia of issues and turning a shared bathroom into a private hermitage probably wouldn’t have been out of character. I seem to recall that both LWs declined to post public updates but were okay with letting CA know they’d vamoosed and were happier for it.

            1. Salymander*

              I think Broken Glass Dude and Neverending Bathroom Dude need to become pals, get a place together, and inflict their habits on each other instead of on unsuspecting romantic partners.

    6. JustaTech*

      I thought about doing this with a coworker’s sick time, but then I thought of what the AAM commentariate would say (it wasn’t impacting my work at all) and I didn’t. But some days I think about it.

      1. Kitryan*

        My coworker uses his PTO (one basket) up too fast and is then out of unallocated time by the last quarter of the year – and comes to work sick because of this.
        He is now entitled to X additional days, due to how long he’s been here. There isn’t always someone on staff who changes over to get those extra days every year so in my experience, you have to point it out to the PTB to get your extra days – that’s what I did a few years earlier and when I did, I pointed out that another person had also earned their extra days. Once it’s included on the PTO chart (which is generally circulated) then it’s an established thing and you don’t need to ask in subsequent years.
        I told coworker about a month before the new year that I thought he had enough time in to qualify, we had a whole discussion about it and then when the new PTO chart came out, he didn’t have the extra days. I considered bringing it up to him and I considered telling the PTB — then I thought about how much gosh darn hand holding he needs-about EVERYTHING.
        So, he can figure this one out on his own I think.
        And as far as I can tell, he hasn’t remembered the conversation and isn’t the kind of person who reviews the employee handbook ever, so who the heck knows if he’ll ever get those days. NOT MY PROBLEM.

    7. BeeBoo*

      I did this too at my first job– but for a 1.5 year period. Every day. Every time she came late, left early, took a long lunch, spent more than 15 minutes on a personal call (which all these things happened so often that it took a good amount of time each day to track this list). I also in the next column listed how many hours of overtime I worked each day. I have no idea why I did any of this as I never shared it with anyone and all it did was aggravate me….

      1. office life sucks*

        Maybe you wouldn’t have needed overtime if you had been MYOB. I can’t believe how many people on here think it is their job to track their coworkers. You are getting paid to do your job, do it and go home. Geesh.

        1. StaceyIzMe*

          Well, yes and no. In offices with a set amount of work shared among people with the same or similar roles, it’s not as simple as “do your job and leave them to do theirs”. A lot of managers don’t deal with “dead weight” if there is any other option and will not confront a slacker until they have NO other option. So, while I agree in general terms that MYOB is the way to go, I can also see where standing up for yourself (by pointing out how many calls you take or documenting obvious favoritism when your boss is on your case without reason) is one reasonable response.

    8. The Hamster's Revenge*

      My coworker would come in on Monday morning, fill out his timecard (handwritten) for the entire week…including weekend overtime…sign it and then just…………….go home. We were mechanics and it was 1996 so there was no such thing as WFH.

      He’d come back the next week and do it again. He had a pager and if it went off, he would come in to do whatever and then go home again. Sometimes he wouldn’t be on site for more than 2 hours a week and he got away with it for the whole of the 3 years I was there and may still be doing it to this day.

    9. BeachMum*

      When I worked for a very large company, we had flex-time. One employee claimed she arrived at 4 a.m. every day, so she could leave at 1 p.m. However, I often arrived around 7 a.m. (crazy job) and saw her in the parking lot. I casually mentioned it to someone who had a big mouth and the ear of senior management.

      Petty, yes. But it was challenging to work with her because she was never there and worked slowly. (Although, it you’re working 15 fewer hours each week than you’re supposed to, I guess not everything will get done.)

    10. Peridot*

      Yep, me too. I had a coworker who got busted for coming in late, based on when her machine was turned on. So she’d come in, turn on her computer, and then walk a few blocks to get a leisurely breakfast. I felt like saying “I can still see you, you know…”

    11. Vemasi*

      My friend tracks all her coworkers’ PTO. Technically this is her job, as the accountant/payroll clerk/default HR, but she definitely does it in a petty spirit, as everyone takes way too much PTO and it infuriates her (since the boss doesn’t care when his favored employees do it, even though they do the least work). She also tracks the one non-hourly employees’ non-paid time off, since she always complains that she doesn’t make enough money but takes long vacations all the time. All she does with it is fume to herself, though (since, as stated, the owner doesn’t care to pay attention).

        1. Arianrhod*

          And then I outed the name I was going to use to be anon! Luckily I decided not to post that one anyway.

  26. (Former) HR Expat*

    I see a lot of petty things in my line of work, but most are run-of-the-mill like -employees having PTO requests denied (for legit reasons), then calling off on that day. The best example I’ve seen of a petty response is an employee who trashed the break room because he heard a rumor (from a terminated employee) that other people thought he died. This was on a campus with several thousand employees. His rationale? I wanted them to know I was alive. My response? You could have also gone to the staff meeting before lunch. That would’ve done the trick.

      1. (Former) HR Expat*

        Same coworker sent us a demand in a letter from his lawyer that we pay him 6 million dollars because someone called him African American. He claimed it was discrimination because he’s originally from South Africa, became an American citizen, but was white. This guy was nuts.

        1. Femme d'Afrique*

          That is HILARIOUS! To mess with people, I occasionally refer to Charlize Theron as being African American because she technically is, in the absolutely most literal way. It usually takes people a minute, some get offended, others find it quite funny. But to sue? And for 6 million dollars? LOL!

    4. Chinookwind*

      As someone who had her parish priest announce from the podium that they were replacing me as volunteer choir manager because I had moved suddenly when really I was a) replaced so they could pay a friend of the council president to do it, b) gone for a week due to a family emergency, and c) learned about only after reading an email from a friend there asking why I never said goodbye, I can understand the anger and betrayal he feels.

      Trashing something would never feel as good, though, as walking up to the church congregation and responding to the questions of “where have you been posted” with “I was visiting a dying relative, we still live here, and he lied to you all,” turning on my heel and walking out.

      I heard through the grapevine that said priest was transferred out within 6 months (and put out to pasture due to dementia)

  27. Angwyshaunce*

    Once after an annoying management decision, I went into the break room and turned all of the (20 or so) chairs around so that they stuck out instead of fitting neatly under the tables. Not sure what I was trying to accomplish – probably to just blow off steam by causing a minor disruption.

    1. Tenley Bnak*

      I don’t know why but this made me laaaaaaaauuugghhhhhh — so perfectly petty! Completely pointless and unnecessary and I love it!

    4. Old Admin*

      That still was OK in my book.
      I once was in a terrific argument with the PC admin “moderated” by the technical director. Said admin was trying to take away my keys in a power grab, thus crippling my work there.
      I did win after a very long fight, but was so worked up I went to toh company BBQ area on the roof, yelled, and smashed a lounge chair to smithereens. (And I’m a woman.)
      Nobody ever said a word about that afterwards, even though the entire office heard the ruckus.

    5. Legal Rugby*

      This reminds me of he description of stitch’s programming in Lilo and Stitc, “His destructive programming is taking effect. He will be irresistibly drawn to large cities, where he will back up sewers, reverse street signs, and steal everyone’s left shoe.”

      1. The Hamster's Revenge*

        My D&D group, circa 1991, would (all 13 of us) would put on our black trench coats and head down to the parking lot where all the ricers would hang out on Saturday nights for their impromptu car shows. At midnight we would gather around a parking lot light, hold hands and sing “Kumbaya (my dark lord)”, mutter nonsense incantations and generally pretend to be holding Satanic rites. It was tough to tell who the cops hated worse, us or the hooligans.

        1. YouSuck*

          WTF…did you seriously just call people RICERS?! Gross, dude. Alison’s, please delete this comment!

          1. Qosanchia*

            I’m not going to dispute the outrage, since the term is a bit out of line, but as far as I can tell, it’s approximately on par with “hooligan,” with the exception of time.
            For what it’s worth, I think it’s been self-adopted as a descriptor by the street racing community that it describes, I’m not sure how they feel about it being used by non-members of the culture.

          2. JJ Bittenbinder*

            I thought a ricer was someone who did outlandish, overdone mods to their car?? What do you think it means?

          3. Ask a Manager* Post author

            I just looked it up and apparently it stands for Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements; it’s people who are really into race cars. It doesn’t appear to be a racial slur.

            1. SWench*

              Alison, I think it is. The RICER acronym is sort of after-the-fact construction for a slur that already existed. Some references:
              1. “Rice Burner/Rice Rocket — Asians — Person who drives an Asian car that has modifications which are supposed to make the car look faster. No gain in performance is achieved. Shortens to Ricer” from the The Racial Slur Database at http://www.rsdb.org/races
              2. “Rice burner is a pejorative, used as early as the 1960s, originally describing Japanese motorcycles,[1][2][3] then later applied to Japanese cars, and eventually to Asian-made motorcycles and automobiles in general.[4] The term most often refers to vehicles manufactured in East Asia, where rice is a staple food.[5][6] Variations include rice rocket, referring most often to Japanese superbikes, rice machine, rice grinder or simply ricer.[4][7][8] The adjectival variation riced out describes the result of “overmodifying a sports compact, usually with oversized or ill-matched exterior appointments”.[9] ” from Wikipedia on Rice burner at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

          5. The Hamster's Revenge*

            Everyone involved was just as backwoods white as white can be…often referred to as rednecks. Ricer refers to one whose vehicular fashion choices run to “basket handle spoiler on the trunk lid of a FWD car”, “decibels equate to horsepower” and “stickers make it go faster”. They want a tuner, but stop at a cheap bodykit.

            I’m sorry I offended you, but it is an established term in car culture and although it is often a pejorative it is basically divorced from anything actually Asian.

            1. Pizza Boi*

              Except it isn’t divorced from anything Asian. They are called “ricers” as a shortened form of “rice burner.”

              I also grew up in a shitty conservative white state, but we have to acknowledge where our language comes from. This phrase is negative, and it is totally about the origin of this style of car mods. It is similar to using the phrase “gypped.” Lots of folks don’t realize it but it is insensitive.

              You don’t have to stop using it but you should know that when you do, folks are going to think certain things about you as a consequence.

  28. Ging.*

    Company President got fed up with the amount of reminders our admin had to send about the cleanliness of the men’s room and penned this email himself to send to all employees:

    “To further clarify in layman’s terms – If you can’t piss in the bowl without leaving half of it on the floor – stand a little closer or take a seat if it’s too short!

    When you’re done flush and put the seat down! Oh and by the way you probably have to be reminded to wash your hands as well!!

    If this problem persists we will find out who you are and make you wear Depends around the office.”

      1. Anon82*

        OMG TIGER MIKE!! The ones that start with “By God you will not…”/“You sons of b…” are a Forever Mood.

    4. Fortitude Jones*

      I completely understand your president’s frustration. You should not have to tell grown adults this.

    5. Treecat*

      My husband works at a Large American Aerospace Manufacturer That Has Been In the News A Lot Lately For Bad Things (ahem) and the bathroom stories he comes home with are jaw-droppingly horrific. From the dude who pissed on another guy’s shoes at the urinal to the guy who shat all over himself in the stall then washed his clothes in the toilet, to constantly clogged toilets, to a toilet flood that was so bad it damaged the building and workers had to be moved somewhere else… let’s just say that engineers apparently have intestines full of exploding sludge.

      One day my husband was using the urinal and a custodian came in to look at a clogged toilet and just exclaimed aloud “What the f*ck are you guys EATING?!”

        1. Treecat*

          IN THE TOILET INTO WHICH HE HAD JUST EXPLOSIVELY POOPED (and all over himself. I mean, I wasn’t there, but it was apparently… bad.)

      3. The Hamster's Revenge*

        Oh, hey! I worked at LAAMTHBINALLFBT recently for a few years. There was an enormous flood from the men’s room that sent hundreds of gallons of water cascading across the shop floor about a year before I left.

        Someone had jammed coveralls into the each of the commodes.

        1. Treecat*

          Honestly, as a woman, you’d be fine with regard to the bathrooms. It’s a heavily male-dominated workplace, and our female friends who work there say the ladies’ restrooms are perfectly clean. Now, are there other issues you’d likely face as a woman in a heavily dominated male workplace? Absolutely. But not the bathrooms.

    6. R2D2*

      As an admin who has to carefully pen these “reminder” emails, it’s so refreshing to read such a blunt, angry one! :)

    7. anon for this*

      At one of our sites the gal who cleaned was incredibly fed up with the condition of the main mens room. The manager responded by taking that off her list, assigning a cleaning rotation of all the guys since they couldn’t be trusted to not make it disgusting (including himself even though he didn’t use that bathroom), and bought her a gift certificate for a massage.

    8. Tin Cormorant*

      I saw such an email myself at one of my first jobs. I’m female, working in a field that’s something like 95% male, so the restroom I saw was rarely used and immaculate at all times. I can only imagine the kind of filth the men had to deal with from all the stories I heard.

      1. 2horseygirls*

        I work in a small office (6 employees) – I am the only female.

        One week, our cleaning person (who comes on Wednesday mornings) couldn’t make it {I forget if it had just snowed 18 inches or she had had her root canal, but it was a serious and legitimate reason}.

        The owner looked at me and said, “What are you going to do about the bathroom? It is getting disgusting* in there.” [Worth noting: there are male and female bathrooms.]

        * Disgusting = nothing even in the same universe as described above; there were probably water spots on the mirror or something.

        I replied, “The one room I have no reason to go into, ever?” **

        He blinked at me, and walked away.

        I am assuming it was handled by the menfolk amongst themselves until the cleaning person made it in later in the week.

        ** Worth noting: I cleaned the entire office for a year and a half as a continued cost saving measure from the office manager I replaced. Once we had the cash flow, that was the first thing I hired out.

        1. SeluciaMD*

          **Way to manage like a boss! (Sorry if that’s weirdly redundant LOL)

          I also salute your response to the owner. That is some master level misogyny there dude!

    9. lnelson in Tysons*

      I remember working retail (FYI I am female) yelling at the guys that one of them should be the ones cleaning the men’s toilet at the end of the evening. I guess that are too well aware of how gross their gender can be (not that all females can claim this, I have seen some than pleasant things in the ladies’ lou. Come on how hard it is really to flush?)

  29. PineappleAirfreshener*

    A former job had an extremely strict no scent policy. At the time we had an employee Cersei who was very sensitive to scents (And who the policy was essentially created for). Cersei was also a germ freak and made it well known. She had an air purifier on her desk and made comments about catching colds all the time. We had another employee Sansa who had terrible allergies. She would blow her nose (loudly) several times a day and also sneeze loudly.
    One day Cersei’s desk got moved next to Sansa’s. Every time Sansa would sneeze or blow her nose, Cersei would spritz a homemade essential oil (don’t ask me how EOs were ok but other scents were not) concoction in her direction “to kill germs”. One day Sansa had enough and confronted Cersei and they got in a screaming match.

    Several days later all employees were given company branded air fresheners for our cars (again please don’t ask me why they did that with all the “scent drama”.) It was pineapple scented. Were instructed to not open them at work. A day or 2 later Cersei swore she smelled something in cabinet above her cube. She cleaned it out. Got management to wipe it down with bleach. Had fans going in cube… the whole 9. Later it was found that someone had shoved an air freshener in corner of her cabinet. That day Cersei turned in her 2 weeks. We never heard from her again. Pretty sure Sansa did it, but it was never known who actually did.

    2. Jaid*

      Oh, man. I remember finding something methanol scented under my desk drawers when hunting a ruler that fell behind (a bottle of tea tree oil?)…and the night shift lady who shared the desk with me had been complaining about odors… Forget her, she kept stealing my coat hooks because my sweatshirt hung over on her side of the cubicle. By about two inches.
      She resigned and I have a much nicer desk partner.

    3. Amphian*

      I’m someone who is allergic to many manufactured scents but not natural ones like essential oils, so that isn’t actually uncommon. That said, when I had to ask one of my coworkers to stop wearing perfume (because she was in the cube next to me, I was supposed to be training her, and it was making me sick), I stopped wearing my essential oil perfume, because that seemed only fair.

      1. Curmudgeon in California*

        I have the same issue, artificial scents set me off, most essential oils are fine (except lavender and musk.)

        I still don’t wear my expensive BPAL into a fragrance ban area.

    4. Kettles*

      Can’t really blame Sansa. Cersei was deliberately triggering her allergies with plant extracts that have zero germ repelling properties (with the possible exception of tea tree). Sansa wouldn’t have had to be petty if Cersei had been disciplined appropriately.

  30. Lakshata*

    This was on the way out of one of my previous jobs. A manager had a talking to with me saying I didnt look like I was working enough. We had a ticket based system that tracked how many tickets were closed and on my last day I printed those out and taped it to his monitor. I had done the most tickets over the last year by a decent margin.

      1. Fortitude Jones*

        Seconded. The more frustrating issue here is that if Lakshata could print these tickets out and see that, the manager should have been able to as well.

    2. The Tin Man*

      No, see he didn’t say you didn’t do enough work – he said it didn’t LOOK like you were working enough. Clearly looking busy is more important than actually getting things done.

      /sarcasm

    3. RobotWithHumanHair*

      Oof, same thing at my last job. I was taking care of probably 95% of the tickets and would get chewed out when a single ticket wasn’t handled…that came in after I was gone for the day…when my coworker SHOULD have been handling it.

      1. Phx Acct, now with dragons*

        Same. At my “fun” job was doing accounting in addition to my normal CSR/chat tasks. Jerk boss wanted me to “track my time”. So I pulled a report that showed I had done 36,000 incoming emails and chats the year previous- but that didn’t include internal emails or chain emails.

        I sent her the report… She never asked again.

      2. Orange You Glad*

        This is why I’m pushing for a ticketing system for the requests that come into my department. It’s important to have quick turnaround time on them but I’ve also been promoted above a level where I should be fielding all the requests (esp the lowest level ones). I push for those below me to work these items but they ignore them and leave them all for me to do at the end of the day. As soon as something isn’t responded to within 1 day, my boss chews me out even though I shouldn’t be doing them anyway.

  31. Jennifer*

    I once worked for an attorney that was a sole practitioner. Just the two of us in the office. She did personal injury cases, among other things. A chiropractor opened in the same office park a few doors down. We thought it would be the perfect partnership. We’d send clients her way and vice versa. On personal injury cases we didn’t get paid until the insurance settlement came in.

    Not longer after she moved in, the lawyer and the chiropractor had a disagreement. I don’t know about what but knowing them it was over something super petty.

    So when an insurance check came in, we cut the chiropractor a check for her services and I offered to walk it over to her office. It was literally a few steps away. No. The lawyer PUT IT IN THE MAIL! I felt so bad because the chiropractor was just starting out, didn’t have many clients and really needed the money. She’d been calling about it. She had to wait an extra day or two because of pure pettiness. And when she called, I had to tell her the check was in the mail. Still one of the pettiest things I’ve ever witnessed.

    1. Middle Manager*

      I could kind of see it if it was certified mail that needed a signature to CYA, but if it was regular mail…

      1. Jennifer*

        Yep, just plain old regular mail. Super petty. We had a copy of the check for CYA purposes.

    2. NYCRedhead*

      After working for two, I think solo practitioners are solo because they can’t work with other people.

    3. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      I could never sink this low because I’m too cheap, even when stamps weren’t 55c, I didn’t want to waste them *sobs*

  32. Never letting it go*

    I don’t notify specific staff when certain office supplies run out (even though I absolutely could) and wait for other people to freak out about it- particularly coffee.

    This is only because said staff is supposed to do inventory as part of their job and they outsource it so student workers because they are “so busy” yet said staff person has plenty of time to read books at their desk constantly.

  33. Precious Wentletrap*

    Took all the expensive beer out of the happy hour fridge as a “severance payment” upon layoff. I don’t drink beer. It went to friends and family who surely enjoyed it.

    1. WellRed*

      I did this once. We had a bunch of beers in the fridge left over from an in-office event at which they served basically nothing I could eat. Took ’em all home! Even the ones I didn’t like

    2. MsPantaloons*

      Oh! I didn’t think I’d have anything to share but this reminded me of the executive who, on his termination, marched into his office, rolled the chair out from behind his desk, rolled it to the parking lot, loaded into his car, and drove away.

    3. I Prefer Chardonnay*

      Also not a beer-drinker, and I did something similar! I worked a temporary freelance gig at a fancy ad agency that maintained a fully stocked beer fridge. Every day that I worked on-site, I would take home one beer. Over several weeks, I had an amazing collection at home. My guests were always so impressed with the breadth and variety of my selection. Not even sure why I did it. Something petty about there being no special treats for non-beer-drinkers.

  34. CatCat*

    I was voluntold I had to be on a party planning committee by my boss. I had ZERO interest. I attended the committee meetings because I had to and in those meetings I just (1) agreed with whatever the people who wanted to be there wanted to do, and (2) agreed that people who were not me would be the best ones to take on relevant tasks. So I did absolutely nothing for the committee.

    1. Ammonite*

      A friend at my old job was similarly voluntold to be on the “social committee” i.e. “women in the office come up with things to improve morale.”
      The directors were convinced that if we all became friends we’d be happier employees (and just…forget? about our terrible pay and no vacation time?). My friend convinced the committee to show movies for the last few hours of the day instead of having parties. Then, as the movie played, people would slip out the back. By the time the movie ended, basically no one was left in the office.
      It worked because the directors never came to the movies (they had no interest in taking part in their own socializing idea). They would see the dark room, hear the movie from the outside and assume anyone not at their desk was in there.
      So my friend basically worked out a way to give us all free afternoons a few times a month.

      4. JustaTech*

        As someone who has been stuck on the “social committee” for several years now, I am totally stealing this idea!

        We kind of did it a few years ago for Star Wars day (May 4th); someone rented Rouge One and brought in popcorn and candy and set it up in the biggest conference room. I think I was the only one who actually watched the whole movie.

  35. Potato*

    When I was in college, I interned for several years at the corporate office of a large retail chain store. When my team was moved to a new floor, we began to share space with another team (the “bargain” goods team) that had previously had the space to themselves.

    At some point, I was assigned a cube that was technically empty, but was used by the bargain team to store a large number of sample inventory items they (unnecessarily) kept on hand. The bargain team was pretty unhappy about it—especially my cube neighbor—and made a big show of emptying out the inventory and stacking it against the wall outside my cube.

    From that point on, any time I was out of the office for more than a day (which was often, since I was an intern and in school at the time), I’d come back to find my cube filled with the bargain team’s inventory again, plus inventory stacked in front of the entrance to my cube so I couldn’t get in. Getting my cube neighbor to help move the clutter became a dramatic weekly affair, punctuated by my cube neighbor’s frequent eye rolls, grumbles, and calls to her mom (!!) to complain.

    1. Phoenix*

      I currently am experiencing a similar situation! I’m a student assistant who works on a different floor from the team I support. The people on my floor ignore me completely. No hi, no small talk, i doubt they know my name. However, they’ve stored a bunch of stuff in my cubicle. So when they need something they’ll just… come into my cube silently and stand behind me rummaging around for things… never saying a word to me. This is not a large cube. They’re standing directly behind me. Once I didn’t notice anyone coming in, then heard a cough behind me and nearly screamed!

      1. Troutwaxer*

        My response would be to come in really, really early one day and move all their stuff to their own cubicles, or to some available shelving.

        2. Curmudgeon in California*

          First I would move it to the farthest closet or cabinet from my cube.

          If they found it and put it back, I’d move it to a different floor.

          Third time it would hit the dumpster.

          I am VERY picky about my space.

      2. Fortitude Jones*

        That is beyond disrespectful. Are you able to escalate this situation to management if you don’t feel comfortable saying something to them yourself? The least they can do is ask and say hello to you when they’re trying to get something out of your space.

        1. StaceyIzMe*

          Yeah, I don’t get how this is “okay”. Get the stuff out of your cube and don’t allow anyone to crowd your space like that, it’s a form of bullying. Not your stuff? Not your problem.

      4. LCH*

        or strike up a friendly, chatty convo every time someone comes into your cube. i dunno, becoming a real live person in their view might help them quit being such jerks. make them feel bad about using your cube cuz you are just so nice and don’t deserve it.

        1. Vemasi*

          Or, alternately, if they continue to ignore, it will be in the most awkward atmosphere ever, in which you are having a cheerful conversation with dead air and they have to acknowledge internally that they are being an ass.

      5. not really a lurker anymore*

        Roll your chair backwards into them. “Oh, I didn’t realize anyone was there.”

      6. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Tell your boss the next time you’re there. If you lose time moving boxes every time you come in to the office, that’s a loss to your department’s budget. It’s not even a politeness thing — it’s wasteful. It’s also possibly political — in some offices, desk space is argued over at great length. Your boss will probably want to tell their boss to keep their stuff out of your department’s assigned space!

      7. Real_Ale*

        Perhaps try changing your diet to increase your, uh, gaseous output? Then you can take joy in the certainty that just when you have quietly cut one, someone will step into your cubicle to retrieve something.

    2. 2nd time commenting, yo*

      That is SO RUDE! If I were you I would start coughing, fake sneezing and whatever else grossness you can muster when they come into your cubicle.

    3. Less Bread More Taxes*

      Very unrelated, but how were you an intern for several years? Surely at that point it’s just a part time job?

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        In some places “intern” is used interchangeably with “student worker”. (Not that I agree with this, just observing a usage.)

  36. softcastle mccormick*

    I have a very competitive, nosy coworker, Susan, who likes to be the source of all good ideas in the office. When a different coworker, Jen, was complaining about the difficulty of a newly added workload and convoluted, unclear duties with no SOP, I took some time out to sit down with her and make concrete suggestions, map out all the new duties, suggest a workflow to her, and scheduled an Outlook meeting with our manager the next day. Susan sat quietly at her cubicle while I did this, seemingly working on a project.

    Instead, she had typed out everything I suggested, created her own version of the SOP and wrote her name at the top. She came into work an hour early and scheduled an Outlook meeting /one hour earlier than mine/ so that she could pitch all the ideas and workflows to the boss under her name. By the time I realized what happened (when she came out of the meeting), our boss was like, “Oh yes, Susan planned everything out and it’s all going forward as she suggested! What did you have to talk to me about?”

    I learned an important lesson that day.

      1. softcastle mccormick*

        No, she’s afraid of our boss, Susan, and of confrontation in general (kind of why I offered to help her out and get things sorted in the first place), so she just gladly accepted the changes and went on.

    2. Yvette*

      That is beyond petty. That is mean and conniving and self serving. I hope somehow, somewhere she got what was coming to her.

    3. Myrin*

      OMG I need to know if you were able to rectify this with your boss? Surely Susan must’ve been aware that Jen would be able to corroborate that it was indeed you who’d helped her?

      1. softcastle mccormick*

        Unfortunately, Jen and our boss do not get on well, and she generally mistrusts information Jen gives her. Because of this, Jen goes out of her way to avoid bringing things to our boss unless absolutely necessary, so no, I was not advocated for. This is my first job outside of college and I’m starting to realize what a frustratingly toxic place it can be at times, even if it’s not the type of “fast-paced, hours upon hours of extra work, verbally abusive boss” environment I often associate with the term “toxic”

        1. Mockingjay*

          “Toxic” can also be stultifying levels of inertia: endless excuses for work not completed, passive-aggressive emails (CC’ing the boss on everything), teams of Me, Myself, and I…

    4. AppleStan*

      Please…please…please tell us that the boss eventually realized that Susan had stolen your ideas, or that Susan was most assuredly not a team player?

      1. softcastle mccormick*

        Nope! The perfect storm of our boss being super absent and Susan being such an incredible brown-noser keeps our boss from seeing her true nature. It’s to the point where an anonymous complaint was made about her to HR for sexual harrassment (she shows us joke-y porn videos on her phone, talks about sex all the time graphically, etc), and our boss isn’t even taking it seriously because Susan has her so wrapped around her finger :(

          1. softcastle mccormick*

            They’re trying as best they can, but our boss (entire department manager who answers to the CEO) fights tooth and nail for this coworker. In fact, she was upset that someone “went behind her back to HR” instead of bringing the complaint directly to her. It’s a mess.

            1. Seeking Second Childhood*

              If /when you & Jen land new jobs, please for the love of bacon pants* tell HR this is one of the reasons you are leaving so that the next hires don’t suffer the same way.
              (*Why yes I read Carolyn Hax too.)

        2. AKchic*

          Oh my… just…

          I have no words. Other than the names I’d like to call Susan. She will have no friends in her twilight years, and will age alone and be left to wonder why.

          1. Drew*

            My mom is a very sweet Southern lady with an absolutely sadistic streak that she almost never indulges.

            However.

            She was on a school committee with some woman who was trying to force the committee to do things her way (they did not) and was openly mocking people who disagreed with her. My mother didn’t see any reason to force a confrontation, so mostly just stayed quiet…until the time the other woman took a call from her child during a meeting and was just as disrespectful and mocking to her own child as she was to the other people on the committee.

            When the woman hung up, Mom said, quietly but not THAT quietly, “And that’s why some people never get visitors in the nursing home.” Apparently the other woman sat there, shocked, for most of a minute before bursting into tears and resigning from the committee on the spot. Mom said, “I’m not proud of what I did, but if those tears now spared her children tears later, I’ll take it.”

            1. JustaTech*

              My high school ceramics teacher said something similar to a classmate who was in hysterics because her parents decided (April her senior year!) that they weren’t going to pay for college. Not couldn’t, wouldn’t.
              As my classmate sobs and hyperventilates the teacher says “Just remember, *you* will choose their nursing home.” As the implications of this dawn on all of us, my classmate stopped crying.

              (My classmate did manage to find a way to pay for college, and I don’t know if she’s ever forgiven her parents.)

              1. Not-so-little-anymore sis*

                …you know, when the day comes, I think I’ll let my big sister have the final call. (She’s autistic and our parents are overprotective to the point of being controlling, so she still lives at home. One day I will be financially stable enough to say to her, “if you ever want out, call me and I’ll buy you the freaking ticket.”)

          2. softcastle mccormick*

            It’s funny that you say that, because a lot of her problems stem from the fact that she has very few friends outside of work (they’re all romantic interests), so she treats us like “girlfriends” and shares very personal information with us that would be more appropriate with non-work friends over margaritas. Truly she is unable to connect with other people and retain these friendships because of her personality/social cues issues and we are just a captive audience.

            1. Chinookwind*

              And experience has taught me that the worker who has the boss wrapped around her finger will eventually mess up so vividly that even that boss can’t deny her manipulation. And he will resent being manipulated so much that he will move up her retirement date by a few years and have her disappear quietly without a retirement bonus or any supporting words from him.

              Only the lucky, patient and thick-skinned types will live to see it, but there will be a minor going away party that Susan won’t want to attend “because she is shy” where the boss will buy everyone else cupcakes. For the record, the cupcakes tasted delicious. :)

            2. Anon M*

              If Susan showed me porn videos or graphically talked about sex, I would fake gag and tell her I couldn’t watch/hear anymore. If she didn’t stop, I would fake gag some more and jump up and run out of the room for 10 minutes. Every single time.

            3. 2horseygirls*

              Love your user name! Now I have to go home and binge watch the DVDs I got from my family for Christmas a few years ago :0

              1. 2horseygirls*

                My comment was directed to softcastle mccormick . . . .

                You’d think after years of following AAM, I would know how to comment correctly ( lol )

        3. Jules the 3rd*

          holeeeee

          Document document document. Capture some of the video names if you can, write down date / time / exact quotes / any identifying details (eg, ‘he liked that my curtains matched the rug) . That stuff needs to be Shut Down.

        4. Jennifer Juniper*

          Ewww. I’m wondering if Susan is sleeping with the boss? Given her behavior at work, that wouldn’t be surprising in the least.

    5. The Hamster's Revenge*

      My supervisor had assigned me this huuuuge project in December one year. I had to figure out what needed to be done, how to do it and then do it and I had no help because no one had ever done something like that before. I was 25, I was gung-ho and I did it, by George. In the end I had a spreadsheet that was 3 pages wide and 10 pages long, if I’d needed to print it out. The ‘i’s’ were dotted, the ‘t’s’ were crossed and I finished up the extensive documentation in October the next year, just in time for my performance review.

      I found out in my review that my supervisor had taken my project, reassigned it to his golden child, had him take my name off everything and submit it as his own. I got a “did not meet expectations” that year because I hadn’t accomplished anything. :(

      1. Michelle*

        Oh, hell naw. I would have thrown a “conniption” fit. Please say you have new job.

      2. SeluciaMD*

        WHAT. THE. EFF.

        I am so sorry this happened to you! That is just despicable. There’s no other word for it.

        No, wait, I’m wrong.

        It’s contemptible. Disgraceful. Reprehensible. Downright shameful! That guy is a total dick. I don’t know how much time has passed, but if you wanted to push back in some fashion – even if just to rectify your boss’ (grand boss? whoever did your review but isn’t the asshat who stole your work for his schmoopie) opinion of you and to show that you actually worked your butt off – you are well within your rights. And something tells me that if you offered to walk that person through your process for building that epic spreadsheet and get IT to pull up the work log time stamps on your original document, I bet you could very clearly demonstrate who really did that work.

        I’m so steamed on your behalf!!!! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

        1. The Hamster's Revenge*

          Thank you for the outrage on my behalf! It was nearly 20 years ago and it taught me a number of valuable lessons. This supervisor was also responsible for the infamous, “You’re taking up a job a man needs” and “Teamwork only counts when you’re doing it with people you hate” speeches. He was a numpty (informal British: ineffectual person) Sorry, I got scorched above because I referred to a group by a bit of innocent slang that someone took very badly and I don’t want to upset anyone again.

    6. Curmudgeon in California*

      That’s straight up bullying conniving gaslighting b*tch territory.

      I strongly recommend looking for a better job, just for the sake of your sanity.

  37. Fortitude Jones*

    When I was an in-house claims adjuster, we used to have to hire third party adjusters to go out and inspect properties for us because our workload was too high to do field adjustments ourselves. My division had relationships with various field adjusting vendors and so everyone we worked with knew that once we assigned a claim to them, they needed to have a field adjuster assigned to the claim within 24 hours per our clients’ expectations, and they needed to make first contact with our clients’ customers within 48 hours. All home inspections needed to be completed within 3 days of assignment and then returned to us immediately so the in-house adjusters could review coverage and make a decision within 15 days of the claim being opened (again, all of this was driven by our clients’ expectations and scorecards where we were graded on timeliness).

    I assigned a claim to one company, who handed the claim off to one of their alleged senior field adjusters – it was a water damage claim, so anyone who has had water damage to their home understands how imperative it is to get water remediation performed and an inspection completed as soon as possible so repairs can be made. Well, this adjuster ghosted on us. I tried calling and email him several times, as did the poor customer who had the water damage, but this guy was nowhere to be found. So I hired another adjusting company and told his company to cancel the assignment since he wasn’t responding to anyone. Don’t you know it, on day 70 of this claim being open, the MIA adjuster sends me this snarky email with all caps talking about it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t get out to the property to inspect in time – Hurricane Harvey happened, so he didn’t have time to get to all of the houses he needed to inspect.

    First of all, this claim was assigned to him three weeks before Harvey. Had he done his job the way I outlined above, that property would have been inspected long before then. Anyway, this douchenozzle also had the nerve to send over an invoice (turns out he went to the property to inspect after we fired him) for over $500 (!) for us to pay him. I laughed and told him the only thing I’d be paying him is no mind. Unfortunately, because he did go out and do the work, my division’s AVP said we had to pay him something (not $500). Obviously, I was livid. So I told my AVP that I’d pay the flat fee we negotiated with his company (which didn’t amount to $100), but that I’d pay him after 70 days. I mean, that’s only right since he made our clients’ customer and us wait that long. My AVP laughed and said he liked the way I think, and he gave me his blessing to do just that.

    We ended up paying the company (not the field adjuster) a small claim processing fee for them having to open the file in their office, and we paid it 70 days later. That one made me smile.

    1. Sunny*

      “I laughed and told him the only thing I’d be paying him is no mind.”

      BRILLIANT.

    2. Seeking Second Childhood*

      >he went to the property to inspect after we fired him
      What a turd.

  38. Jennifer*

    Let’s see…
    When I worked retail as a teen, a 60-something lady started screaming at me that, “God don’t like ugly!” because she thought I’d stolen a commission from her. I hadn’t. Still waiting on that apology.

    When we moved, the company pretty much gave everything left over away. We’re talking fixtures, broken computer monitors, hideous motel art, I saw a coworker walk out with two boxes full and got mad if it seemed someone was coming close to it when the boxes were sitting at her desk. She was normally very sweet but turned crazy whenever anything free was involved.

    1. AKchic*

      Oooh, that phrase “god don’t like ugly” is always a fun one for me. I always reply “then he really doesn’t like you at all, now does he?”
      I’m not a nice person. I don’t let people weaponize their brand of religion around me.

      1. Jennifer*

        I really wanted to say that so, so badly. I was raised not to disrespect my elders and she was so much older than me I felt intimidated.

        1. Mimi Me*

          My daughter is about to start her first job and I’ve made it clear that nobody gets to talk to her like she’s garbage no matter who they are, how old they are, or where they’re from. I remember my first job and having a mother of a toddler scream at me because the book she wanted to take out from the library was already checked out. She made me cry.

    2. Lynn Whitehat*

      I will preface this by saying I am not proud of my behavior. But I was pushed past my limit.

      In high school, I worked as a supermarket cashier. We had a special on soda, but you could only buy 4 cases. We still sold out. Many people were angry about this, and I issued them rainchecks. One lady in particular was irate about how we ran out of soda. I apologized and said I could issue her a raincheck, and she could purchase 4 cases at the sale price when we got another delivery. She shouted “RAIN CHECKS WON’T NOURISH MY CHILDREN!!!” I said, “neither will Pepsi, do you want the rain check or not?”

      I got written up. Worth it.

      1. SeluciaMD*

        If I’d have been there, that would have earned a magnificent slow clap. KUDOS.

  39. Sunflower*

    At OldJob, we had a document management system that allowed you to see when and who had viewed each document. I was working on a project with someone who refused to look at the project timeline and would keep emailing me about items in it after I told her repeatedly to check the timeline. We were of equal levels but her team was always treated better than ours and she was constantly complaining my team wasn’t on top of things. I wanted to relish in my opportunity to call her out, however, I could see an anon admin account was frequently viewing it. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a glitch so I called IT to see who the admin account was. Turns out, it wasn’t so easy to find out and they spent almost 4 hours trying to figure out what the account was. The IT person asked why it was so important and I ended up ranting about this person and how I was desperate to get them!

    I’m sure the IT person did not appreciate their time being spent that way but I hope I gave him a good laugh….

    1. Rebecca1*

      So then what happened? Did you call her out? Did the anon admin account get tracked down?

  40. Emi.*

    One of my coworkers, a grown-ass man and not a young child, asked to be taken off a project because his feelings were hurt by one of the clients telling him that he was wrong about something. (He was.) Also, he admitted this in an all-staff meeting and he wasn’t even embarrassed.

  41. YMMV*

    An old boss made my life there hell. As in, crying on way to work, popping Tums before going into her offices and anxiety through the roof. She was a total Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde bitch, where you didn’t know what you’d get. She was also a very high up VP. She was hell on wheels for not only me, but the whole team (had 9 people quit under her in one year – I counted).

    Finally was able to quit under her as I got a new job. Her syrupy sweet side came out and wanted to hear ALL the details on where I was going and why I was quitting. I gave the syrup-y sweet talk right back to her, but to be petty, I didn’t tell her I had a new job, I just told her I was quitting to take a break from the workforce and do some stuff around the house. Being that I’m mid-management myself with a teenager and no baby, that would have been sorta odd, so she totally got the hint it was about her.

    Oh, and she sent me a really nice email on the morning of my last day, thanking me for all my contributions. Please. You spent months telling me how awful I was, what’s with this nice thank you all of a sudden?

    I waited till about noon to reply, and literally only wrote the letters “Thx” (didn’t even spell it out), grabbed my stuff, and left the building.

    1. YNNY*

      I had the world’s most toxic boss do something similar; she had refused to speak to me for NINE months before I gave my two weeks, and on the day I left, she sent me a bouquet of flowers. WTF.

      1. Blank*

        lol I had a boss mime pulling a punch on me when I quit, and then made a big presentation out of giving me flowers on my last day

      1. YMMV*

        Me too. I HAAAAAAATE it when people abbreviate “thanks”. I mean, come on, it’s a gesture of gratitude, type out all 5 letters!!! (Hence why I did it to her, haha)

    3. anon for this*

      Oh, my former evil boss did this too. As a matter of fact, kept me 1.5 hours beyond my quitting time to finish “transition” duties. I was so happy to get out of there that I didn’t even care. My husband even called to make sure I hadn’t been in an accident on the way home from work…it was THAT late.

      1. merp*

        Why not just leave if it’s your last day? What are they going to do if you say, sorry can’t stay late, BYE! Fire you?

    4. Allornone*

      That reminds me of one of my old managers. She and I frequently butted heads. I didn’t dislike her really, but she really didn’t seem to like me. It didn’t help she had an obvious crush on my boyfriend who worked with us (that didn’t bother me; I trusted him, still do). But after five years of fighting with me, the day after I resigned for greener, non-retail pastures, she brought me a Congrats cake. The other managers, including the boss of the store, found it hilarious. Like, girl, now you pretend you like me? Okay.

      1. Anon M*

        “Congratulations for resigning. I’m going to flirt with your boyfriend now” (haha).

  42. Peppermint Petty*

    Julie retires. Julie bequeaths her cubicle mini-fridge to Jane. Jane has no room for the mini-fridge so Julie’s replacement, Janice, continues to keep it in her cubicle, though Jane occasionally stores items in it.

    Janice, and her two coworkers, Jenny and Jillian, share a coffee pot. They rotate who buys the creamer, which is stored in the fridge in Janice’s cubicle. Jane does not like Jenny. When Jillian and Janice buy the creamer, it stays in the mini-fridge. When Jenny buys the creamer, Jane removes it from the fridge and stores it in the communal office fridge.

    2. CoveredInBees*

      That one is a winner in my mind for some high levels of pettiness. It must take a significant level of attention to find out who bought the creamer and then move it for such a low payoff of temporary, minor inconvenience. Some of the other stories feel like well-earned revenge, this is so clearly petty.

      1. Just Employed Here*

        Yeah, it’s like it should end with “If Janice is 43 and Jane is 27, how old is Jenny?”

      1. Peppermint Petty*

        Each person who buys puts their name on it so they can keep track of who bought last/the rotation.

  43. PaperTowelBattle*

    Am in a months long battle with the custodian over paper towels. Per my bosses they should stock paper towels in our lab, per the custodians’ bosses, they shouldn’t, and for some funny reason no one can figure out where the breakdown in communication is. We’ve stolen so many packs of paper towels from the men’s room, that the custodians no longer put paper towels in the bathroom… so now we’re draining the women’s restroom.

    1. Bostonian*

      Aaaaah I almost miss the days of stealing paper towels and soap from the bathrooms to put by the sinks in the lab.

  44. YouCanBrewIt!*

    When I gave notice, my direct boss stopped speaking or even looking at me. She walked right by me and would turn her head away. Originally I gave 4 weeks notice – I had to amend that to two because things were so toxic (I had to tell her boss I was changing it to 2 because my boss refused to talk to me lol )

    1. rocklobsterbot*

      I got that too. I gave two plus weeks notice and she never said another word to me. would talk to other people to talk to me until I left.

    2. Corvidae*

      When I gave my two-weeks notice at my job, my immediate supervisor made a point of not letting me finish any of my sentences. From that point forward, he would cut me off literally any time I spoke.

      Including when I was directed by HR to talk to him regarding the changeover of my duties, emails, etc. He just kept cutting me off, cutting me off, cutting me off, with this condescending little smile on his face the whole time.

      I went back to HR and said unfortunately, he won’t let me talk to him without interrupting, so I’m…not going to be giving him this information!

      She said he was “experiencing a lot of stress” and she was “sure you’re misinterpreting”. So, okay, that’s fine, I guess nobody will be getting the customer information that only my email address receives once that address gets wiped from the system! Nothing I can do about it.

      Suffice it to say, I’m well shot of that place.

    3. Accounting Otaku*

      Similar happened to me. I gave my notice while my boss was on vacation. When she came back she would only talk to me if it was work related. All friendly chit chat stopped. She took my resignation so personally.

    4. nomnomnom*

      Yeah, I just left a job and when I turned in my two week’s notice the department head gave me the silent treatment – apparently they thought it wasn’t enough time. Mind you, this was in a coordinator-level position at a nonprofit, so two weeks is standard. I had started there on exactly two weeks notice to my job before that… Additionally, they had promised me a raise and promotion in recognition of increased responsibilities a year and a half before and never came through with it and I had flagged that several times, along with issues of burnout.

    5. AnonymousArts*

      When I gave three weeks notice at my last job, I then started pointedly leaving every day at 5 pm on the dot and it pissed my old boss off to no end (I would stay late every single day, one of the reasons I wanted to leave). Even on my last day she tried to give me stuff to do and I said “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish that as I’m leaving at 2 pm today,” since I was moving cities the next day for my new job. Old boss bitched about it to our colleague and I did not care one bit. That’s what happens when you treat people like crap at work.

  45. Amber Rose*

    A story of petty revenge and petty responses:

    A few years ago I worked doing land division, which requires a preposterous number of signatures on legal documents. It’s a lot of work, and we were trying to finish stage 1 of a 10 stage, 30 year project in a small town. I got all the signatures and then the last one was from a dude who worked for that small town’s government. Dude took all the signatures off, changed my legal document, made it extremely wrong, and then put all the signatures on that one. I said, dude, you actually can’t do this thing you have written that you are doing. This isn’t going to be registered by the province.

    And he said (I swear to god) “Do you know who I am?! I’m the director of planning for Small Town! I know what I’m doing! And if the province says no, tell them to shove it up their ass!”

    So I sent in the document, which was rejected, and the rejection notice comes with the name and email of the person who did the rejecting who it turned out I’d previously worked with. And I emailed him saying, “hey I know this is wrong but Mister Director of Planning who changed it said you should shove it up your ass, here’s his contact info.”

    That dude sent me my original document three days later, without a word. Just an empty email with an attachment. And for the rest of that project (I mean, for as long as I was there), he never again took a call from me or said a word to me or wrote anything to me in any email. What a baby.

    4. Tea Earl Grey. Hot.*

      As a fellow legal professional, I tip my cap to you. That is BEAUTIFUL.

        1. Seeking Second Childhood*

          And he went WAY beyond changing your document with this one — he changed something that was ALREADY APPROVED BY OTHERS. Just as a layman I can see that that invalidates the signatures.

          1. Just Employed Here*

            Not just invalidates them, but sounds like an attempt at forgery, if he was trying to pull off making it seem like they had signed his version rather than the real one.

            In my non-lawery mind, at least.

  46. Rebecca*

    This was in the 1990’s. We had a shared printer terminal for our IBM “green bar” sheet printer, and to release reports, you had to go to the room, sign into the dummy terminal, print your report from your queue, then sign out. One of my coworkers NEVER signed out, and left her menu up every. single. time. She had been told about it repeatedly by our IT department, our manager, etc. Back then, having the menu up meant anyone could make any changes to things like customer purchase orders, manufacturing amounts, big things that if someone wanted to, they could really cause problems. So I went to print reports, and once again, there it was, her menu was up and sitting there. So, I brought up a system message option, picked the VP over our department, and sent him a rather suggestive message, nothing too suggestive, but he got the hint. I printed my reports, walked away, and a few minutes later he was yelling for her to come to his office immediately. She was so embarrassed, and she demanded to know who did it, no one confessed. To this day I doubt she knows it was me. But she never left her menu signed in on the shared terminal again.

    1. Magenta*

      Our company has a long and complicated history involving many mergers, take overs and different bits of the business being sold off, at one point we were left sharing an office with a company we used to own but that our new parent company had decided to sell off separately. This meant that we needed to be even more careful than normal about data security.
      A couple of people in my team kept leaving their computers unlocked when they left to go to the loo, or even for lunch so every time they did it I would change their desktop background to tiled photos of “Sweet Sue” whole chicken in jelly sliding out of a can. We are in the UK and so had no idea that canned chicken was even a thing, it looks utterly vile and wrong. It made quite a few people gag and very much reduced the instances of unlocked PCs!

      1. Alienor*

        Agh! I’m in the U.S. and didn’t know whole canned chicken existed either. Horrifying.

        1. Jaid*

          There’s a video on YouTube by emmymade in japan where she opens one of those cans. Haven’t watched it yet, but it keeps getting rec’d to me…

      2. Lynn Whitehat*

        We “donut” people at my company. Send out an email offering to bring in donuts for the whole office. You can be sure people are diligent about locking their computers.

      4. Lucy*

        I heard of a case where someone was terrible at leaving his computer unlocked.

        I am hazy on the details of precisely how, but one day when he had left it abandoned, someone else went in and changed something on the registry so that “.exe” files would be opened by … Minesweeper. This meant that when he tried to open his email client, Minesweeper. Browser window: Minesweeper. Task Manager: Minesweeper.

        It was fixable, and shortly fixed. But it was one heck of a way to learn to lock down.

        (In case anyone doesn’t know, the keyboard shortcut to lock your computer in Windows is Win-L.)

      5. saanebar*

        We had a competition at some point between a couple of colleagues to come up with the worst desktop background possible. Think (but do not google) blue waffle disease. (If you googled: It’s fictional.)

        It stopped when I was gone for 2 minutes to greet a client and then took my laptop into the meeting. In the meantime somebody had changed my desktop to a shirtless Putin picture. Which was displayed in full glory when I hooked my laptop onto the monitor to share data with the client.

        Luckily the client was nice, but the person who did it died a thousand deaths while I was in that meeting.

    2. a good mouse*

      When I was in college, if you left a computer lab computer logged in, you could expect someone to post something like “Wanted: one goat. I can’t say why. It must be attractive.” to the university’s miscellaneous board as you. It was an effective teaching tool.

      (some people went the direction of emailing the dean or president of the university. I think the misc board was more effective – more public and less likely to get you in real trouble.)

      1. irene adler*

        We’ve got an employee who, if he comes across your unattended email, will draft -and send, if there’s enough time- an email to the company president. Contained in the emails are complaints about specific employees and their (supposed) lax work habits or some other unkind comment. A number of co-workers have returned to their desks only to find an email with something written about another co-worker that they know they didn’t type. Some have been approached by the president; he’s aware someone is doing this so it’s generally to let the person know what happened. Not to castigate them.

        Petty and so mean. We are a small company (less than 20) and don’t ask that folks log out of their emails when they leave their desks. Instead, we respect each other and leave the email alone. Except for one guy.

        1. Gumby*

          I mean, I have on occasion turned people’s displays upside down. But that is easily fixable and inconveniences no one other than the people who left their computers unlocked.

          1. Avatre*

            Yep, when I briefly worked at a call center my trainer used to do that to get us in the habit of always locking our computers *before* we got assigned to real workstations with real customers and their confidential data.

            …One time he forgot to lock *his* computer so of course we seized the opportunity to flip his screen. He just changed it back without comment though.

        2. It's Business Time*

          Sometimes if I see a computer unlocked, I leave meeting requests, a few months in the future with notes to buy me gifts

          2. Seeking Second Childhood*

            Oh I like this idea. Only I’m thinking requesting a same-day meeting with someone in IT …after the person who left a PC unlocked is scheduled to go home… subject line “corporate security protocols”

  47. Jamie*

    At old job we had a rule no one could accept vendor gifts. They were all to be turned in and then raffled off at the holiday party, no exceptions.

    The receptionist applied this rule of law with staggering force.

    I had a vendor who brought me a travel mug with her company logo on it. I set it aside on my desk during the meeting and was going to give it to the receptionist once my vendor was gone. I walked the vendor to the door and when I returned to my office the receptionist was standing there, mug in hand, reminding me in a very accusatory tone of not turning in my ill gotten gain. I explained that I was just about to do that but she reported me anyway, because had she not intervened I’d have gotten away with it.

    In the course of being reported I found out she’d done the same to the director of HR for not turning over an emery board with a staffing agency’s logo on it.

    Not even a good emery board – a cheap cardboard one that usually come in packs of 10 for $0.99.

    She was praised by the crazy owner for being so diligent, but was told we were allowed to wait for our visitors to leave before handing over our loot.

  48. Lupe*

    Someone who repeatedly would go up to any conversation being held in our office, and “shhhh” at people.

    Even fully work related, low volume discussions. No one else in the office wanted enforced silence, and in fact had a really healthy balance of reasonable friendliness and work.

    However, it turns out it really throws people when you respond to this kind of thing with a flat “No” and go back to the discussion you were having.

    1. Lupe*

      They’d also time people’s breaks, and try and get people who took long ones in trouble at staff meetings.

      It turns out that they were acting up after being moved during a restructure, and had been bullying the rest of the team they worked with.

  49. Petty Petty Princess*

    I got fired from a position, in a pretty awful way. I was mad and then spent the next few months randomly writing “missed connections” ads on Craigslist, posting various manager’s office phone numbers as a call back.

    5. Hallowflame*

      Oh goodness, I wish I had though of something like that when I got fired two weeks before Christmas a couple of years ago!

    6. softcastle mccormick*

      Amazing! If it had been a truly evil means of firing, you could have posted Casual Encounters instead!

    7. Been There*

      Oh I SO wish I had thought of that when I got fired two years ago (also in a terrible way).

    8. Fortitude Jones*

      LMAO! That almost brought tears to my eyes from laughing so hard. I love it.

    9. fiverx313*

      i had a coworker in a position above me (but not really in charge of me)(who apparently found me really threatening when i covered her full time position during her two month sabbatical AND my own part-time position at the same time), go out of her way to make up things to get me in trouble with a new boss, who believed her and ended up offering me a probationary half-term contract renewal contingent on improving in these mystery areas that were totally made up…

      so i refused to renew, and over the next year sent the coworker several anonymous glitter cards, a bag of gummi dicks, and signed her up for many many notifications and updates from online manga translation sites.

    10. Curmudgeon in California*

      Oh, I wish I had done that with one kook who gaslighted me then canned me. But I was young and trying to be a good employee, for all the good it did me.

  50. A Simple Narwhal*

    I had a coworker who would turn into a complete monster whenever she lead projects. She also loved stationary and had a prized collection of fancy pens in every color of the rainbow. So whenever she inevitably ambushed me walking past her desk and demanded that I make further complicated and time-consuming changes (that tended to contradict her last set of changes), I would always sweetly ask to borrow one of her pens to write down her edits, since “I wanted to make sure I got them just how she wants”. I know she hated people using her pens, but her southern-hospitality roots wouldn’t let her refuse, plus it was done under the guise of getting someone to do what she wanted.

    Petty of me? Yes, but it was a tiny way to make working with her slightly less miserable.

    1. LibbyG*

      I love this one! I am picturing the barely perceptible twitch of her upper lip as you cheerfully ask to borrow a pen.

    2. Rebecca in Dallas*

      Hahaha, does anyone else remember that Kids in the Hall sketch? “My paaaeeeeennnn!!!”

  51. Former Teacher*

    I once worked at an international school with a TERRIBLE director. She believed our students were clients, for example.

    Near the end of the school year someone printed about 50 copies of an article titled “Top Ten Signs of Poor Leadership” and left them on the table by our mailboxes—right outside her office.

    3. M*

      See, I’d just assume *she* had read the article, thought “what useful guidance for my staff!” and printed 50 copies to distribute.

      …but that’s mostly because the horrific CEO of my former ToxicJob once mass-emailed an article about “10 Warning Signs of a Dysfunctional Charity” to the entire staff, with gushing praise for the piece. We met 7/10 signs.

    4. Desk Luncher*

      I worked in an office that did something similar to this effect. We were all laid off from a big office right after a terrible new director started. He was so hated that on the very last day of us occupying the building, a coworker who was known to be a fantastic caricature artist drew a really inappropriate rendition of the director. Instead of just giving it to him, he put it on the copier, hit 1,000, and promptly exited the building.

  52. Orange Peels*

    I had a coworker who bullied and tried to embarrass me in a team meeting and is just an odious person in general. After the meeting I couldn’t take it anymore. She hates the smell of clementines, seriously HATES. So I made sure to eat one in our shared office space when she stepped out. Then I put the peels in my desk drawer for the day, so the smell would linger. The entire afternoon she kept asking “where is that smell coming from?”

    2. CoveredInBees*

      I have a strong aversion to the smell of tequila. However, if a colleague was so committed to their own pettiness that they’d douse themselves or belongings in it just to bother me, I think I’d be a bit impressed.

  53. I’m not proud of this!*

    My rude, unpleasant, passive aggressive colleague Jane was moving to another department on another floor and I was moving to what had been her desk.

    Jane packed up her stuff into crates to be moved but left some rubbish in her desk, like empty food packets and such. It was not anyone else’s job to clear that out.

    So I took the rubbish out of her desk – and put it in the crates.

    Like I say, I’m not proud!

  54. Sleepy*

    I was working at a fundraiser and as we were cleaning up, they started handing out leftover bottles of wine to employees as a thank you for working late. Some of the fundraiser guests who were lingering care over and grabbed bottles of wine. Who comes to a nonprofit fundraiser and then steals wine from the nonprofit?!

    1. wafflesfriendswork*

      Honestly it’s possible they didn’t think they were stealing–I’ve been one of the last at an event and been offered leftover stuff like that! They probably saw it being offered to the employees and just thought it was up for grabs and didn’t think.

      1. StaceyIzMe*

        “Up for grabs” is context dependent. If it wasn’t offered to guests, then “no, that’s not for me” isn’t a big ask. But people do sometimes lose all sense of restraint around any possibility of free stuff.

        1. wafflesfriendswork*

          Oh totally! I’m just saying they probably didn’t even think about it–especially if they had been imbibing the product they thought was on offer. Makes you bolder!

    2. CoveredInBees*

      Someone who got a free ticket from someone trying to fill a table their boss bought. Seen it happen.

  55. Rose*

    I live in a state with a very comprehensive and publicly available court record system, and I also work with a woman who freely looks up co-workers on it. We have a co-worker who isn’t well liked in the department, and she discovered on the court lookup system that he was going through a divorce. She not only spread that information around the office but also her speculation that he was probably having an affair with the young woman that he was responsible for training in our office. I found it so incredibly nasty of her, not only on behalf of this person who was clearly going through something painful and private at the time, but also spreading that toxicity to the young woman with zero evidence.

      1. Rose*

        Our boss found out about the rumors and got really angry about it, but ultimately did nothing, which unfortunately is par for the course in my office.

        1. Observer*

          If this is still going on, maybe someone should point out to your boss that there is a real possibility of liability here.

    2. AlexandrinaVictoria*

      I have a colleague like that. So I looked her up and found out she had had a restraining order taken out against her by an ex-boyfriend. The next time she was talking about someone’s record, I simply said “People can look you up too, you know.” Nothing more. She stopped. But I still have my secret weapon….

      1. WellRed*

        You could have started referring to her as TRO in front of other people. “Hey, TRO, do you have the TPS report?”

    3. WellRed*

      Couldn’t that fall under sexual harassment or something of the young woman? That’s not cool at all.

      1. Jules the 3rd*

        I think it might fall under sexual harassment of both employees. Also slander / defamation.

    4. Curmudgeon in California*

      Eeegad, what she did could actually be illegal, depending on the law in your state.

  56. Anon for this*

    Oh, the office kitchen! At one job, we had a rotating calendar in which each staff person had a week during which they were responsible for starting the dishwasher at the end of the day, emptying it in the morning, and general kitchen cleanliness.

    Much pettiness ensued. My contribution occurred when I found a mug in the sink with mold growing in it. I took a photo, sent it to the office-wide email address, and said that cleaning someone’s moldy cup seemed far beyond what the kitchen person should have to do, so whoever’s this is, come get it. It was gone later that day.

    2. Rebecca in Dallas*

      Haha we had a similar rotation schedule when I first started at my current office. Each week had a different department assigned to keep the communal kitchen clean (I think it worked out to about once a quarter your team would be in charge of the kitchen). At the time, there were shared dishes/mugs/flatware and a dishwasher. Generally people were good about putting their dirty dishes in the dishwasher and running it if it was full, then the team in charge would make sure it was unloaded before and after lunchtime. But you know how it is, some people would just leave their dishes in the sink without even rinsing them.

      When it was my team’s turn, we would assign one or two shifts per person. So like, if I was assigned to Wednesday afternoon, I would be the person to make sure that the dishwasher was unloaded after lunch and any messes from lunchtime were cleaned up. (I’m not sure if other departments did it that way, but it was an easy way for us to make sure that everyone did their fair share that week.) One of my coworkers would get so mad about people leaving dirty dishes in the sink that if the dish had dried food on it, she would just throw the entire dish away! She was like, “I don’t get paid to scrub someone else’s mess!”

      Eventually, the company got rid of all of the dishes and even the dishwasher. The kitchen stays much cleaner now!

  57. Nope, not today*

    Our receptionist can be extraordinarily petty. One of her jobs is to stock the pantry – the company supplies snacks and sodas and bottled waters (we pay a nominal fee for these items, via an honor box). Well, one day one of the higher ups took an entire 12-pack case of Diet Dr. Pepper to his office, so he wouldn’t have to come back down for them. It also happened to be the last of that particular soda, depriving anyone else of their Diet Dr. Pepper fix who might want any. She mentioned to him that it was the last case when he took it, he said he knew and on he went. So in return she refused to order more for months and months. We had every single soda possible except Diet Dr. Pepper, all just to get back at this one person.

    1. Zephy*

      For a hot second at OldJob, I somehow inherited the responsibility of restocking the vending machines in the lobby. My grandboss was basically the only person that bought any Diet Pepsi, and because I got the stock for the machines at Sam’s, I had to buy it 36 cans at a time. At one point, I had to write off almost an entire case for being past the sell-by date (truly don’t think anyone cared, but I do what I’m told, whatever), so I filled a box with cans and stopped by Grandboss’s office on my way to the break room, where I would customarily put out-of-date snacks and drinks for staff. I was trying to be petty and make fun of him, because he really was the only Diet Pepsi drinker for miles around, and he called the hell out of my bluff, taking probably 15 cans and putting them in his desk.

      1. Parcae*

        If I were your grandboss in that scenario, I would have assumed you were being thoughtful and kind by bringing me my favorite drink!

      2. President Porpoise*

        Have you ever drunk soda beyond its expiration date? It is so grotesquely nasty. I’m shocked he took 15 if he wasn’t drinking them that regularly.

    2. JustaTech*

      Somehow one of my coworkers inclined to jokes managed to get the “to stock” list for the soda machine at work. This is basically our one perk, 25-cent sodas.
      So Mr Funny decides that we need to stock more Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper. To the point that it is half the buttons on the machine. No one else drinks this soda. And then Mr Funny quit.

      Two months later I managed to catch the guy filling the machine and *beg* him to stop with the Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper.

    3. Nep*

      I know that was a inconvenience to everyone else, but I honestly must applaud her stubbornness.

    4. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      I giggled because Diet Dr Pepper is the one that stays around forever in our office, I’ve stopped buying the THREE CASES the last person used to purchase, it was so OTT. It wasn’t pettiness for that person though, they just stunk at ordering.

  58. intensivecarebear79*

    This one’s me, actually. Once upon a time, I worked as (what was essentially) a copy editor for a healthcare company, in an environment that I would definitely label “toxic.” Most of my job consisted in making comments in PDF documents – remove this comma, we can’t legally use that word, etc., etc. and people would invariably try to avoid making any edits (even stuff that was an obvious typo or a legal liability) and complain the whole way through. Couple this with a boss who was a people-pleaser, and it was eventually decided that, even though PDF comments are already the easiest thing in the world to read, we needed to write out a separate description of every single comment whenever we submitted any edits: where the comment was in the doc, what the comment was about, and the rationale for making the comment.

    My colleague and I did so, with some grumbling. “On page two, second paragraph, there is an comma that needs to be removed. We adhere to AP style, which doesn’t use the “Oxford” or “Serial” comma.” Then, our boss told us that people were complaining we weren’t “detailed enough” in our descriptions.

    Fine. You want to play that way? My colleague and I would turn five small comments into 500 word essays. “On page two of the attache brochure, inside the green box in the second paragraph, three lines down, in between the fifth and sixth word, the comma should be removed. This comma is an Oxford comma. An Oxford comma is also known as a serial comma…” [insert explanation of what an Oxford comma is, along with examples, then conclude by stating that as we adhere to AP style, we do not use said comma. However, the AP itself has some exceptions…you get the picture]

    We did this for a couple of weeks before they finally said: “Okay, maybe you don’t have to be *so* detailed.”

    4. No Green No Haze*

      I’m in awe of that level of tenacity in service of malicious compliance. That’s hardcore and I applaud you.

      But man, I hope had a macro for inserting all that.

        1. intensivecarebear79*

          Nope – we typed it out every time. It took forever, wasting our time, yes, but more importantly wasting their time and holding projects up. They weren’t smart enough to suggest we make some kind of template, and of course, we didn’t suggest it ourselves.

    5. Sneaky Ninja for this one*

      Noooooooooooooo………….. you can pry my Oxford comma out of my cold, dead, and clammy hands.

      1. Bee's Knees*

        Amen! And if you don’t think that when I was working as a copyeditor at the newspaper, I used an oxford comma whenever I pleased, you would be wrong, wrong, and wrong. :-)

      4. Ms. Taylor Sailor*

        I also love this and hate it when I have to write without it.

        When I was 20, a friend of mine had my phone and made a post as me on my Facebook that read “My name is Ms. Taylor Sailor and I hate the Oxford comma!” My other friends died.

      6. intensivecarebear79*

        Oh, in my personal life I scatter Oxford commas around with wild and reckless abandon. But, in my professional life, well…I tell myself I’m just doing my job, but it is slowly gnawing away at me…

    7. LawBee*

      I still frequently double-space after periods. It is HARD to change decades of typing habits!

      1. Gumby*

        I always do. On purpose. And science has backed me up. (Or at least the articles I read say science backs me up – I did not read the whole study that came out in 2018.)

      2. Elizabeth West*

        I finally, FINALLY got the hang of it and now I’m a one-spacer and everything I left two spaces in looks weird.

        I love my Oxford comma, but if I have to leave it off for work, I will; I’ll just grind my teeth the entire time.

      3. Curmudgeon in California*

        I still double space after a period, question mark or exclamation point. I find it easier to read, especially in documents with that damned sans-serif Arial font.

    8. Iron Chef Boyardee*

      Sidetrack question from a college dropout: what is an Oxford comma and why does it inspire such pro/con passion?

      1. Garland not Andrews*

        It is the comma closest to the “and” in a list of items. Example: He picked up the milk, eggs, peanut butter, and bread. The “Oxford” comma is the one after peanut butter. I used to be standard and was taught that way in school, but has become optional or not used in current grammar.

          1. Construction Safety*

            Aw crap, I actually laughed out loud at that. (Spent 4 years in RSA during the embargo era)

        2. TootsNYC*

          I became a professional copyeditor in 1982. The serial comma was on its way out and was considered old-fashioned. Every publication (including mine) was dropping it except in instances in which the construction of the sentence required it (or, they would recast the sentence to avoid misreading).

          So “has become” implies a recent development, which is not accurate.

          In fact, the recent development is for people to insist it’s required in phrases like “red, white, and blue”–but I have been noticing that on Twitter, Facebook, etc., ordinary people are NOT using it in simple series.

      2. Lucy*

        It inspires passion because it is often unnecessary: “Carol likes carrot cake, fruitcake(,) and chocolate cake” but often useful: “Carol likes fish and chips, chicken and waffles, and Ben & Jerry’s”.

        What people are actually arguing about, usually, is where the line falls between useful and unnecessary.

      3. Seeking Second Childhood*

        It’s the comma that is missing from this possibly apocryphal book dedication : “I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”

        1. TootsNYC*

          you know, just recast the sentence. Reorder the terms, or add “as well as.”

      4. TootsNYC*

        if you are older than 40, you might call it a serial comma.

        Or a series comma, though I’ve never heard that in the wild.

        I hate the term “Oxford comma.”

  59. Paralegal*

    Toxic Coworker (associate attorney) decided he was going to chew me out for using the phrase “I know” when he was telling me about the Thing. He sent me an email about how he was going to chew me out when I got to work the next day, and I didn’t actually work for the associate. I work for the firm president. I cc’d my boss on the email and let him handle it. There were several “meetings” between the associate and the partners. I never had a problem after that.

    Same firm but different toxic coworker. She was on a personal phone call (which is a no-no up here), and I was in the floor going through paperwork/old files with the pregnant receptionist. When the phone rang, toxic coworker wouldn’t answer the phone (even though she’s supposed to), and she was headed for her boss’s office about it. I stuck my head in, told him what she did, and she got in trouble for that.

    I’m not really proud of it, and it seems petty after all these years. Both toxic coworkers were each other’s work BFF and enjoyed causing problems (like snooping through the firm administrator’s desk to see who made what) and not getting caught.

  60. HR Lady*

    In my first Grown Up Job after uni (before I moved into HR and just did admin) I had a co-worker, Sharon, who was very much not keen on me. So she wrote a list of all the reasons that she didn’t like me, and took it to the owner, Nick, as a reason to fire me. He did not fire me because the list was in many places not true or took very small things out of context. I was much better at the work than she was so I don’t know if she felt weirdly threatened? I had no issue with her, I always thought we got on okay.

    So she resigned, apparently to go to a new job. She then put in a Constructive Dismissal claim (this is a UK thing, it basically means you’ve been unfairly forced out of a job and not in line with due process) against the firm saying that she was forced out due to favouritism towards me and this was implicitly discrimination based on gender, as I only got to stay in my job because she accused me of sleeping with Nick.

    Even as I wrote out my witness statement to our solicitor stating that no, I definitely wasn’t sleeping with Bob, no, I didn’t realise she didn’t like me and no, actually, her weird list of Terrible Mistakes I Had Made was basically untrue or out of context, I was quietly impressed at the level of sheer petty-mindedness that means dragging your old co-worker and firm through the most tawdry meeting ever. I was properly MORTIFIED at the time. Nick and I didn’t even have that kind of vibe, I personally found Nick a dreadful person and was only working there because it was a recession and I needed the money, it was quite the challenge to work out how to phrase that. Her solicitor advised her to drop the case after getting the witness statements.

    It was a small town and I found out through a friend-of-an-acquaintance that she’d deliberately only put in that bit about me sleeping with the owner because she thought it would make things awkward for me and force me to leave the firm too, which she would take as a ‘victory’. A couple of years later I was on a night out in our local town and she walked in to a room, saw me, went pale and walked out again.

    Anyway, jokes on her, I ended up having to stay there for another 18 months but it triggered my interest in HR and now here I am!

  61. No longer in customer service, thank God*

    I was a manager in a grocery store. There was a candy on sale at 3 for a dollar. The cash register couldn’t display fractions of a penny, so they would ring up as 34 cents plus 33 cents plus 33 cents. Predictably a customer bought one and began screaming about how we were “robbing” her because “it should be 33 and 1/3 cents!”

    1. Petty Petty Princess*

      I did my share of retail hell jobs, and when these sales were going on, I’d keep pennies in my pockets, so I could “refund” the customers. “Sorry, my bad, here’s your change. Have a nice day!”

      Because handing someone a penny with a shit-eating grin on your face is the epitome of petty. And, the customer can’t complain, because they just “won.”

      1. Magenta*

        I did this when I worked in a bank, a customer had dropped a cheque in the quick deposit box after the time that it was emptied so it was paid in the next day. She came In screaming that we must have emptied it early (we didn’t, we were usually late) and she had lost out on interest because of it. We couldn’t back date the deposit because that would make the funds available before the cheque had actually cleared and she was going ballistic and had quite a crowd, the amount we are talking about was less than 10p. I very deliberately went and got my bag, put it up on the counter so she could see it, opened it, took out my purse, opened the purse and took out a ten pence piece, held it out and loudly told the cashier to pay that into the account as it would more than cover the lost interest.

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Makes me think of ‘pieces of eight’ …even if they let us do it anymore, could you imagine those & a vending machine?

    3. Rebecca in Dallas*

      Ugh, I’ve also been the cashier in that situation. And then the manager called over to listen to the customer’s complaint. I have given out many a penny.

      One of my favorites was a (male) co-manager who was working at the service desk one day. A customer came up, absolutely FURIOUS because she needed a tampon out of the machine in the restroom and not only were there no tampons in the machine but the machine had EATEN her quarter! One of those customer rants where they don’t even pause to take a breath or let you apologize. Co-manager just stood there stone-faced and listened to her patiently, then about 20 seconds into her rant just opened the till, took out a quarter and handed it to her. He didn’t say a single word or break eye contact except to look down to take out the quarter.

  62. 875653890298*

    I used to manage a group of guys, and each one constantly thought that he did more work than the others. No one really did that much work, and had been so badly (non)managed for so long that by the time I came around just trying to understand what they were supposed to be doing took me ages. It didn’t help that I was the same age as their children, and the only woman on the team. I had been told repeatedly by my own manager (and his manager, and HR) that there would be no support for mediation, PIPs, less-than-average performance reviews, and certainly not letting people go – and my guys knew it.

    One of my report’s duties was to pull out and return boxes of teapot samples for clients. Not the most exciting, but a daily task nonetheless. One afternoon, John didn’t put his boxes away, claiming some convoluted reasoning about how Mike was really supposed to put them away, and had stuck John with the task. Mike refused, saying that John always slacked off. I spoke with them both, separately and together, and it devolved into a he said/he said type conversation – no one would budge even an inch. I said that barring any solution they wanted to offer, they would need to work together to put everything away. They both point blank refused, knowing that there was nothing I could do beyond frog-marching them into the back and physically forcing them to do their job (believe me, I thought about it).

    This standoff went on for weeks, until I asked my manager to step in. He had a (literal, no exaggeration) 3 hour conversation with the guys about why they needed to do their jobs, and at the end, put the boxes away himself to smooth things over. John and Mike ignored each other from across the cubicle wall for months. And that’s the story of how I learned that managing people who don’t give a s— is the worst.

    1. Combinatorialist*

      Well, who don’t care and when you are given literally zero tools of authority.

  63. That Girl From Quinn's House*

    This happened when I was working in fitness, and I had this coworker, Karen, who was very catty and juvenile. One day, I changed out of my workout clothes and shortly after they went missing. I looked all over for them, then put up a note on the lost and found and in our staff office, “Hey I lost [description of clothes including brand/color/size] if you find them set them aside for me.” I asked around for a few days, the clothes never turned up, so I forgot about it and moved on.

    *Two years later*, one of my coworkers is cleaning out her locker and says, “Hey I think this bra is yours, Karen thought it was mine but it’s the wrong size.” It’s my missing bra! And then I notice that same coworker is wearing my leggings!

    I had verbally told Karen I’d lost the clothes and asked her to let me know it she’d seen them. There was no way she did not know they were mine. But Karen openly didn’t like me, so when she found my clothes, she gave them to someone she liked better.

    1. Kat in VA*

      Given what I spend on bras, that would make me *furious*. And whether Target or Lululemon, a well-fitted pair of leggings is a godsend and I would go nuts if I lost any of my favorite pairs!

  64. Not Me*

    At a previous job I was responsible for space and compliance for the entire HR group in my market for a fortune 100 company. It was about 45 people in one suite, I was in a completely different building. Every other month or so I would walk thru their suite before or after normal hours to audit security and confidentiality compliance. The rules were pretty simple; don’t leave anything out on your desk with information on it, confidential documents need to go into the shred bin not just an open can, laptops cable locked, etc. They were horrible about it. One time I was so annoyed by how bad it was I took all the laptops that weren’t locked up. They were in full on panic mode when I came by to return them. A lost or stolen laptop was a terminable offense.

    They were much better about security after that.

    1. Akcipitrokulo*

      That doesn’t sound petty :) that’s a reasonable lesson on why we don’t breach security regs!

    2. Hooray College Football*

      We use CAC cards for security on our computers. You need it to log in to your computer. Whenever we leave our computer unattended, we are supposed to remove the CAC card (ID badge). One co-worker was retiring, and on his last day right before his going away lunch, he went around and took everyone’s CAC card that had been left unattended. He proceeded to hand them out at the lunch.

      1. Kat in VA*

        Oh man, in some places (particular contractors), leaving a CAC card unattended is a firing offense. It’s a hassle pulling them for things like grabbing a water or hitting the restroom, but leaving them out is a huge no-no (especially in some of the more sensitive arms of the government).

      2. Tbone 91*

        At my old office on Base anytime anybody left their CAC in their computer we’d send out ‘love’ emails to co-workers. LMAO, Entire staff were dudes so there was a lot of ‘bro-mances’ going on, lol.

    3. TootsNYC*

      We were left notes on our desk that someone would take iPads and laptops that were left out. As policy, that security would do a check each night as they went through the floor. It happened, too!

  65. Alexander Graham Yell*

    I had a coworker who was supposed to train me for a new process refuse to speak to me for 6 weeks. Just completely left me on my own. So I would make a point of saying hi to her (very cheerfully), asking about her weekend (very cheerfully), and generally seeming like all I wanted was to have a good working relationship with her.
    Really what I wanted to do was highlight just how incredibly rude she was being, but complaining about it didn’t seem like the best approach and I’d learned with my ex’s sister that the more calm, reasonable, and friendly you appear the more it highlights the other person’s bad behaviour. So while it may not have looked petty from the outside, the spirit behind it was deeply petty. (The best petty is hidden petty and I will go to my grave defending that.)

    1. Tea Earl Grey. Hot.*

      “The best petty is hidden petty”
      Agree 100%

      (also, you have my favorite screen name.)

      1. Alexander Graham Yell*

        Thanks! I stole it completely shamelessly from a comment on a post a month or two back

    3. Diatryma*

      Ah yes, the So Professional They Choke strategy. I am doing my best to stick with this rather than becoming openly petty.

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        There used to be someone here who was buddies with the person in the cubicle adjoining mine. But he hated me. One day he chose to hang out at the cubicle door chatting with Co-Worker — which blocked MY door.
        Increasing levels of “excuse me” were ignored and I finally used my RefereeVoice…24 inches from his ear: “You are blocking my doorway!”
        Then there was a day I had a valid tech support request for that person and he simply insulted me to my face. I took a deep breath and started in on the question again. His reply? “Oh you’re just going to ignore that. I totally love you now.”
        Oddly, he was actually not antisocial around me for about 3 months after that. (He was just mean to random people and I still can’t figure out why I got on the S*** list. Beyond that he was darned good at his job and I freely said that when people asked who to go to with his specialty kind of problem. Just had to warn newcomers to butter him up their first day or they’d be stuck being ignored for however long they worked together.)

  66. Casual Librarian*

    We have a stack of magazines in our break room that are super old. The newest ones are from at least 5 years ago. I asked if I could throw them away, and was told no. So…I’ve thrown one a way every day for the past two months, and as far as I know, nobody has noticed or complained.

    2. WellRed*

      Oh, we had a box of coffee (bag per pot) no one liked (dishwater flavor), but the office manager wouldn’t order more until we used it up. A few of us took to throughing out one bag for every pot brewed.

  67. Game of Drones*

    Office computer systems were new to our office in 1982. An older colleague used one to call out my boss, who was super, on an inter-office network. An intern, I figured out how to use it and got back at hm. I was in big trouble. He wasn’t.

  68. Irish*

    I’m a graphic designer for a company that has a lot of athlete ambassadors, and thus a lot of my coworkers fancy themselves elite athletes as well (they’re not). For a New Years post on social media, we had a “meet the team” post where everyone on the team had a picture and a bio of them using their favorite athletic product we manufacture. I have one coworker that particularly thinks he’s god’s gift to the world and has a huge ego about his supposed athletic ability, and it drives me INSANE. So as the graphic designer, I built out all of the posts before posting on the brand’s social media. This coworker put one of his PRs in his bio, so I decided to take his bloated ego down a couple pegs and added a zero to the end of his PR time. After it was posted, he noticed immediately and had a total temper tantrum, crying about how people are now going to think he’s super slow! It was so *chef’s kiss* satisfying.

    1. bookartist*

      Sorry but what is PR? All my google searches are not telling me what this stands for.

      3. CatCat*

        Not the poster, but I expect it’s “personal record.” That’s your personal best in various sports.

        1. Combinatorialist*

          Basically Irish is saying the insufferable guy put in his bio something like “my PR for 100 pushups is 50 seconds” and Irish “accidentally” changed it to “my PR for 100 pushups is 500 seconds”

    2. fiverx313*

      i work at a similar company and i’m dying laughing thinking that might have been here… lol

  69. Celine*

    We have a garden infront of our building. One coworker (Fergus) was normally the one to plant things in it. One summer, it was mid-June and Fergus still hadn’t gotten around to planting things, so a more senior coworker (Tina) decided she would take the initiative to plant the garden. Fergus was so upset at Tina that he dumped a bunch of grass seed in the garden in order to ruin it.

  70. Sabrina*

    At my old job my title was something like Teapot Maker. After 5 years there I got a new boss that had advanced degrees and clearly had a lot of his self worth wrapped up in being the smartest person in the room. However he made some mistakes right off the bat and since I was familiar with the projects I’d correct him, something I did in private and with a “hey easy mistake to make, no big deal”.

    After a month he came by my desk and told me that since I didn’t have any advance degrees it really wasn’t fair that I had the title Teapot Maker to people who had more schooling then me, so he was changing it to Graduate Teapot Maker, which was the title for people who were still students. There was no change at all to my pay, raises, or duties. He didn’t seem prepared for me not to care or for no one else there to acknowledge my title change.

    1. Southern Yankee*

      It had to be petty satisfaction that no one else paid attention to the title change.

    2. Pebbles*

      We had a customer that was deeply offended by my coworker’s title of “Software Engineer” because, as the customer put it, only people like his dad who had the proper schooling from one of a select group of colleges, proper training, and proper certifications, could be called an “engineer”. At best, my coworker was a “technician” so the customer was going to refer to him as such. Otherwise, a plumber might call himself a water engineer, an electrician might call himself an electrical engineer, etc. My coworker never took his official, company-templated email signature that stated his title of “Software Engineer” off any of his emails to the customer and we continued to refer to our coworker by his title.

      1. Engineer Girl*

        Actually that’s a real thing. The word “engineer” is regulated by state law.
        That said, companies are allowed to call their employees engineers so your coworker is OK, as long as he doesn’t sign off on any regulated products.

        2. Qosanchia*

          One of my first jobs was Tier 1 helpdesk, and the official title was “Support Engineer.” It rankled me to no end. I was a technician, and it honestly bugged me every time I saw it.
          Company got bought, my title changed to Technician, and while I appreciated the change, I would probably trade it back.

        3. Engineer Girl*

          It’s kind of like the difference between physician and physician assistant. Both have extensive training but the scope of authority and practice are different. And most people outside the industry don’t know what those differences are. Hence massive confusion, even among those who practice.
          People can’t tell the difference between a programmer, a computer scientist, a software engineer, or an electronic engineer. No, they are not the same.

        4. Cathie from Canada*

          In Canada there was a multi-year fight between the engineering colleges and the computer science departments about which could offer degrees in “software engineering” and whether that term could even be used at all.

        5. Pebbles*

          Yes, I know, however my coworker is in a country where the title “software engineer” is not regulated or otherwise reserved, but there are certain titles that are registered and there is a list of qualified people that one can search. The customer (in the same country as coworker) looked up my coworker and did not find him on the registered list, and got upset. My coworker was not in any way misrepresenting himself.

          1. Engineer Girl*

            The issue isn’t the software part. It’s the engineer part. Software engineering isn’t registered in most places. They even removed the PE test for software engineering in my state. That said, using the word “engineer” in the job title is still regulated. It doesn’t matter which kind.

  71. former cashier*

    When I worked as a cashier in Target if a customer was especially horrible to me (seriously though why are some people so mean to cashiers) I would start to scan the items on the conveyor belt slower…and slower…..a n d s l o w e r.. .. .. . .a n d s l o w e r . . . . until I could see them seething at my incredibly frustrating pace. I would take their money and punch in the amount slowly and bag their items at the same pace too. And to make sure they knew I was being a d*ck specifically to THEM, I would then make sure they saw me scan and bag the next customers items very fast as they collected their bagged items. I’m lucky I never received a complaint.

      1. lawschoolmorelikeblawschool*

        No kidding! I get riled up when I witness it, but I try to remind myself that anyone who behaves that way is a very miserable person (or a sociopath).

      2. Marge*

        Yup. And if I were the customer behind the rude person, I’d be 100% on board with it taking a few minutes longer.

        1. Rebecca in Dallas*

          And then I would seek out the manager to compliment the cashier on their efficiency and top rate customer service! Just to cancel out any complaint received from the previous customer.

    2. Mimi Me*

      I worked at a major Florida theme park. I would have these huge lines of tourists waiting to pay for dress up clothes. I had just finished the transaction of the person in front of me – literally handing her the receipt! – when her family member comes up and hands her a huge pile of stuff which she then proceeded to drop on the counter between us. She gestured to the stuff and made this hand motion for me to hurry up. (We didn’t speak the same language). I shook my head, handed her the items, and pointed to the back of the line. And then took the person who was standing behind her. She was pissed, but I wasn’t giving an inch. Her first transaction was several hundred dollars and several bags full of merchandise and there were at least five people standing behind her. If he’d dropped it while I was still in the middle of the transaction I would have gritted my teeth and done it, but hell no, she had paid and had receipt in hand. Sorry honey!

    3. Tinybutfierce*

      When I worked as a barista several years back, we had a customer base that was overflowing with some of the most chauvinistic, outright-asshole men I have ever encountered. They’d come in, be super friendly and chatty with the (male) owners, then come up to order and pay with the women-only cashier staff and just be objectively TERRIBLE. One guy in particular would always just bark his order at me in the most monosyllabic way possible (it was not a language issue; he spoke several languages, including English, fluently). After several customers had complained about getting the wrong size drinks, the owners came down hard on us counter staff to make absolute sure we were confirming the size. One day, one-word-man comes in.
      OWM: Coffee.
      Me: Okay, and what size coffee would you like today?
      OWM: Coffee.
      Me: Yes, would you like a small, medium, or large.
      OWM: Coffee!
      Me: Small, medium, or large?
      OWM: COFFEE!!!

      I rang him up for a small without saying a word, told him his total, and was done with it.

      The next time he came in and ordered from me, he actually greeted me, said “please/thank you”… and politely responded when I asked what size beverage he wanted.

    4. Larry Nyquil*

      During one of Kohl’s Black Friday scams– sorry, “sales”, I had to take a callwho wanted to know the price of some good. The trouble started as soon as I picked up.

      Me: Thank you for calling Kohl’s, this is Larry, how may I help you?
      Caller: *indistinct mumbling*
      Me: I’m sorry?
      Caller: Vacuum *indistinct mumbling*
      Me: Which vacuum are you asking about sir?
      Caller: Roomba *mumble mumble* vacuum *indistinct*
      Me: I’m sorry sir, you’re going to have to speak up, I can’t understand you.
      Caller: *perfectly clearly, and loudly* CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO SOMEONE THAT KNOWS WHAT THE F*** THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT??? Ugh.

      Now, protocol dictated that I directed them to the manager, but…

      Me: Of course sir, let me transfer you. *hangs up*

      1. Thany*

        As someone who worked customer service over the phone for several years, I deeply appreciate this.

    5. iglwif*

      Hahaha that is exactly what I do when I’m crossing the street and motorists are visibly annoyed at having to stop at a crosswalk / stop halfway into the crosswalk instead of at the stop line / were clearly going to run the light until I started crossing: I walk r e a l l y s l o w l y until I’m past their car, then speed up.

      I’m sure it doesn’t teach them anything or affect them in any way, but it makes me feel better because I am a petty, petty person.

      1. nonegiven*

        I see people, who are in such a hurry, pull past the sensor and stop in the intersection, while the light is still on yellow. The light thinks they already crossed the intersection and stays red until someone else drives onto the sensor behind the crosswalk. I laugh and occasionally pull up behind the sensor and watch them get frustrated before I pull up onto it.

      2. Jen*

        Me too! If the driver was driving responsibly seems friendly, I’ll cross as quickly as possible. But when they barely stop, I take my time.

      3. Jennifer Juniper*

        Ummmm….you do realize that someone could literally kill you for doing that, right? People who are annoyed at having to stop at the crosswalk could run you over for taking too long…especially if you do that on purpose.

        What I do is make eye contact with people, smile, wave, and mouth “thank you.” That way, they see me and won’t hit me. I also cross as fast as possible.

    6. Jack Be Nimble*

      I used to bag groceries, and if people were rude to me or my coworkers, I’d put their bread at the bottom of the bag. My absolute pettiest moment was putting someone’s water at the bottom of a bag on a 100+ degree day. They were wearing a shirt with a racist slogan, and I was having none of it.

    7. Ali G*

      I was a cashier at TJ’s and there was this one woman who came in and was always on her cell phone and would just toss her credit card at me and then turn her back to me to continue her conversation. We had the PIN pads where you swipe your own card. I would just stand there and wait for her to turn around before motioning her to run her card. I never picked up her card or spoke to her. She did this repeatedly. It was an interesting little standoff, but if she wanted to pay for her stuff she had to swipe her card.

  72. iceclown*

    Coworker kept peeing on the floor in a shared temporary office. We all privately complained about it but did nothing. Finally another coworker (one of my most favorite people) made a sign about not peeing everywhere, printed it on hot pink paper and taped it to the floor in front of the toilet… where it was immediately peed on.

    2. Mr. X*

      They peed on the floor of a shared temporary office…..or the floor of a bathroom IN the office? I’m pretty sure you meant bathroom but all I can imagine now is someone going “mine!” and peeing on stuff a la Robin Williams.

    3. Larry Nyquil*

      Is this the part where you say your coworker was a service dog? …please?…

      1. MayLou*

        A service dog would never wee on the floor inside. They are far too well trained for that. Perhaps this colleague needed clicker training.

    4. Seeking Second Childhood*

      Your office needs the company president from earlier in this comments section who wrote a snarky company-wide email in a similar situation! “In layman’s terms” …made me laugh out loud.

  73. Naughty me ;-)*

    In charge of IT in a place of hopeless people. Every time I am due to go on holiday/day off or generally unavailable I reduce the email inbox size of my bosses email so he has to clear out his emails instead of asking me to increase it. I also do this if I am busy and he’s hassling me it gives him something to do and keeps him out of my hair.

    1. Anonomoose*

      If you want to escalate, I have a nasty script written that flips a random bit in a random file in a directory. I’ve always speculated that adding it as a scheduled task to run once every couple of weeks, would eventually drive a user mad*

      *Note: please don’t actually do this. Elaborate wish fulfilment is fine, major data corruption may lead to security auditors

        1. Anonomoose*

          I sort of wrote the script to be deliberately hard to retrieve useful things from backup, but I accept a professional might be able to do a better job than me :D (it doesn’t do anything to the start of the file, to hopefully avoid headers, and easy to recover from errors.)

          My other script interacts with excel, and, using the rather excellent python library, removes formatting, highlights things in frustrating ways, changes fonts and cell formatting, etc. You can specify number of errors, and there’s a remove all formatting option too, which really just looks like an accident. I need to write one for word and powerpoint at some point.

  74. Justalittlecat*

    I was working out of my company’s office in Jordan and there was a coworker who also didn’t normally work from that office there with me. Just a truly odious man, ticked off all the boxes: sexist, racist and Islamophobic (which like, what are you doing in Amman?). To give you an idea of this man he openly mocked a coworker to her face because due to religious reasons the coworker didn’t shake hands with men (she didn’t touch men she wasn’t related/married to in general). Anyway I let slip that I was planning on visiting Petra one weekend and he just bandwagoned my plans entirely. Booked a seat on the same bus there, thought he would join the tour guide I’d reached out to, etc. I let him do it because I was feeling pretty powerless (I was junior and he was maybe mid-level) but it became apparently he hadn’t looked up the travel at all and assumed he could just tag along with me, who had done research into what I wanted. So I let him do that, didn’t speak up at all. We arrive in Petra for our gorgeous weekend tour and our guide meets us and is like ‘okay, get your passports out!’

    He hadn’t known his passport was a requirement. He’d asked me in passing if I was bringing mine and I had shrugged and been like ‘idk’…except I had, in fact, known, having looked it up. He couldn’t get into Petra without one and had to book a new bus there and then and just go home. No amount of wheedling/begging/threatening worked. Also it was an amazing weekend and I highly recommend Petra.

    2. Workerbee*

      Wow! Odious is the perfect word for him. *residual shudder*

      I am delighted you managed to sidestep the passport issue for such a lovely payoff.

      1. jb*

        This. Even more so than the Pyramids.

        Although I bet when it was inhabited there was quite a bit of passive-aggressively not cleaning out the water basins on the path in through the canyon.

    4. jojobeans*

      OMG this is amazing. I also live in Amman and still haven’t made it to Petra yet despite being here nearly a year, so thanks for the tip!

  75. Clawfoot*

    This was actually done to me. My direct supervisor left for another company, and my new manager did not like that I’d negotiated a lot of remote-work time (I was in the office two days a week, Mon-Tues, and remote the rest of the time, because I lived in a city 1.5 hours away).

    The first thing my new manager did was change our weekly team meetings from Tuesdays to Wednesdays, and insisted that I attend because she had “team building exercises” she wanted us to do. (It was a 10-minute game of Pictionary at the end of an hour-long meeting I could have telecommuted into.)

    Then a few weeks later I was “reorganized” out of the job entirely. I was walked out, and they packed up my desk and sent me my things. Well, they packed up MOST of my things. I’d received, from the company on my two-year anniversary, a company-branded leather notebook (very nice). They did not send that along. Nor did they send along my company-branded, obviously used and tea-stained mug that was on my desk.

    I don’t know if they thought they were being kind? Maybe? But it just struck me as incredibly petty.

    It wasn’t important enough to me to raise a stink about it, but sheesh. Give a company six years of your life and they withhold their mug from you. Nice.

    1. Bubbleon*

      When I started my first job I kept nothing personal at the office for a year, I was always worried I could be fired at a moment’s notice and would die of shame if I had to pack anything up. I’ve gotten far more comfortable and now treat my desk as a second home in terms of decor and comfort, but I also know that my company wouldn’t even be as good as yours to pack up most of my stuff in the same situation. They could keep all the branded stuff though, we don’t have anything good!

    2. wihewatr*

      Possibly they saw the company logo & assumed it was company property? Of course, it could have also been “That looks nice, I want it.”.

    3. I hate wearing red*

      Haha when I got laid off, I went home and immediately got rid of my company logo polo shirts. They were a color that I particularly don’t like to wear and we were “allowed” (required) to wear them on casual days with jeans or khakis. Now I can’t remember if I threw the polos in the trash or donated them to a homeless shelter.

    4. Q to the la to the rue*

      When I was let go from my position without notice I had to repeatedly ask that they send me my personal items or arrange a time I could come pick them up. Finally one day a UPS box arrives at my house. They just dumped everything in, including a glass candy dish, which had of course shattered into million little pieces and got all over everything.

    5. Salymander*

      My grandmother gave me a nice mug, and I brought it to work to drink my coffee from. It had a cute cartoon on it, and was quite distinctive. Everyone knew it was mine. It was an office of only 10 people.

      My grandmother died soon after she gave me the mug.

      About 6 months later, the wife of one of my bosses came in one afternoon and commented on my cute coffee mug. I thanked her and said that it had been a gift. Shortly after that, it disappeared.

      Later that day, my coworkers told me that the boss’s wife stole the mug on her way out the door. She had behaved in a very rude, entitled way in the past, and could be really mean. I was very young, and a bit scared of her. We all were, really. I was advised to forget about the mug. She had stolen things from other people, and it was “just how she was.” I was a very introverted and socially awkward person, so I thought that was it. The mug was gone.

      A few days later, she stopped by again and just *smirked* at me as she walked by my desk.

      I told her that I had some sad news. The mug she had seen and been so fond of had disappeared! I mentioned it because I knew she would want to know! I continued monologuing *loudly* about my poor, lost mug. About my grandmother who died after giving me the mug. About how coffee just didn’t taste the same without my mug. Because of course someone who appreciated the sterling qualities of my mug would want to know all about these things. Loudly. In great detail. In front of everyone in the office.

      Everyone was silent while I gave my Mug Eulogy. When I stopped speaking, the mug-stealer stood there with her mouth hanging open, red-faced, and then continued on her way.

      The next day, my boss sheepishly handed me my mug and mumbled an apology before shuffling off to his office.

      No one ever said another word about the mug, but after that day my coworkers would often pour coffee into my mug and chuckle just a bit.

      I felt kinda petty, because it was just a mug, but it was *my* mug, dangit!

  76. Dust Bunny*

    I was afraid I was going to go nuts trying to train a set of temporary occupants of a shared workspace to use our recycling bins correctly. The space they usually occupy has formal recycling service. We don’t; I take it home to my curbside bin (it’s not a lot of recyclables), so it has to be sorted differently. Fortunately, they shaped up before I had to escalate the level of detail and thinly-veiled crankiness on the signs.

  77. Ali G*

    I have this one coworker who is manipulative and thinks her work is more important than anyone else (it’s not). She has this really annoying habit of sending meeting requests to “check in” when she feels you have taken too long to get back to her on something. Yesterday I received such a request for something that is very low priority for me. I declined the request with no explanation.

    1. Hindsight*

      I have a coworker who does the exact same thing instead of walking 5 feet to my desk and just asking me a question!!

  78. anon for this*

    I recently started a new team lead role, replacing someone who made a lateral move to a different team with slightly more internal cachet. Week 1 of the handoff, they were super laissez-faire. Every meeting I had with them was super-brief, bare-bones facts, “You got this, you own all this now, feel free to do whatever you like.” Week 2 we were both in some larger team report-outs where I shared that I was making a lot of changes and some specifics about the work is in flux, but we’ll meet all the deadlines and the team is doing well. After that my predecessor started asking, “Do you want to have a check in? Do we need to go over things?” It was super concern-troll-y after the way they left things during week 1. No thanks, I got this.

  79. Crazy Cat Person*

    A previous employer of mine introduced food waste bins for compostable items (bread crusts, coffee grounds, mouldy fruit, etc). Some staff didn’t like them – I have no idea why – and started putting in random rubbish. I don’t know what they hoped to achieve, but what happened was that the cleaning staff had to pick out the non-compostable rubbish by hand, from amongst soggy and sometimes mouldy old food. Eventually the Big Boss had to intervene before all the cleaners walked out in disgust!

    1. SusanIvanova*

      When I broke my ankle, my mom came out to help and the stepdad tagged along. He mockingly called me a “treehugger” because I had my trash separated into 3 bags for recycling – I’d be shocked if he actually put them in the right dumpster/bins. Sounds like he’d get along with those employees.

    2. Collarbone High*

      I worked in an office that didn’t have recycling, so I put up collection bins near my desk and took it all home with me.

      One day someone dropped in a nearly full soda bottle with a loose cap, and the slowly leaking soda contaminated all the other recycling and caused an ant infestation in my garage that required an exterminator. I sent an email asking people to please empty their bottles and one woman wrote a furious, pages-long email saying she would never recycle again because I was making it so hard. For the rest of the time she worked there, she would walk by my desk, scoop recyclables out of the bins and throw them in the trash.

      3. StaceyIzMe*

        Wow! That is SO needlessly hostile! Just ask yourself “do I want to recycle within the system parameters available?” If yes, follow parameters. If no ask yourself “is there a mandate that requires me to recycle?” If yes, follow parameters. If no, use the main trash. No need to be dramatic.

    3. Asenath*

      The super at my apartment building says if there’s anything in the recycling that shouldn’t be there, he throws the whole bag in the general garbage. No way he’s picking through bags of the stuff – he doesn’t have time, and it’s not his job. And our system is very simple – plastics in those translucent bags so you can see they’re recycling, and placed in the garbage room. Regular garbage bagged and to the garbage room, of course, and paper or cardboard in giant plastic bins.

      Some nitwit put household garbage in one of the paper/cardboard bin. All the contents had to be put in the regular garbage (and those are big bins, so there was a lot of it), and the bin itself had to be scrubbed out and dried because of, er, leakage from the household waste.

      Apparently, that’s not as bad as the people on an upper floor who dropped cat litter, wrapped in a not-very-sturdy bag, down the garbage chute from one of the higher floors.

  80. singularity*

    The pettiest thing I’ve witnessed were passive-aggressive notes in the bathroom about cleaning up after going and notes about people getting their lunches stolen from the communal refrigerator. I did have a colleague at one point go to the trouble of cleaning out the cans of food he used for his dog and refill them with chicken or tuna salad after his lunch got stolen. He stored the dog food ‘tuna salad’ can in the office fridge. He’d sit at his open area desk and eat it out of the can with the dog food logo showing. When people gave him funny looks, he’d say, “Oh, it’s not that bad once you get used to the smell.”

    1. Emma*

      It turns out that if you mix chunks of Mars bar with orange jelly (jello for the Americans), you can make a convincing dog food lookalike that tastes pretty reasonable. My friend had a discworld themed wedding and someone showed up as Angua, and made everyone a little uncomfortable by sitting through the ceremony eating this concoction out of the can with a fork.

      Great fancy dress, and I’m sure this knowledge will come in handy, someday, somehow…

      1. Lucy*

        I would definitely eat Mars bars in orange jelly. I would struggle to eat it out of the tin, though, however well I thought I had cleaned it out.

        1. Loux in Canada*

          I could never!! And I am constantly cleaning out cat food cans for the recycling. (I have a cat, and am currently fostering a mother cat and her five kittens… Needless to say, I go through a LOT of cat food.) No matter how well I cleaned out one of the cans, I would not be able to eat out of it after.

        1. Emma*

          Right?! Unfortunately I missed it because I had to work in another city, I’ll always regret that!

  81. BRR*

    My colleague who was in charge of finance tasks for our department walked past the copier/scanner and asked me to scan a one-page invoice and send it to her. It literally took more work to walk to my desk than just scan it. Not that this justifies it but it’s sort of understandable why they did it. My coworker was mad at my manager because my manager accidentally sent an IM to this coworker complaining about the coworker (it was meant for someone else). My manager was grossly inappropriate to do this and my coworker was wrong to take it out on my manager’s team.

  82. Knitting Cat Lady*

    I have IBS. Stress tends to aggravate it.

    I was a grad student for a year. Didn’t finish because of my abusive supervisor. She was vile. Even threatened to kill me a few times.

    Due to my IBS I can produce some REALLY noxious farts. Paint peeling and window pane melting.

    One day, when she had stepped out of the office but forgotten to lock it, I felt a big fart coming on, went in there and let it loose…

      1. anon for this*

        I used to “crop-dust” a particularly odious co-worker 25 years ago, just walk by and cut the cheese.

    3. Free Meerkats*

      And just so you know, if you open the flat top drawer of someone’s desk (say, that of an odious supervisor), drop trou and fart into it, then close it, the fart will still be there in all it’s glory an hour later.

    4. Curmudgeon in California*

      I’m literally laughing. I can’t hold mine long enough to target them…

  83. Mimi Me*

    I worked in a large insurance call center. The call center was made up of over 200 people, but we all were part of smaller teams working on specific policies. The entire department used to do food tables but eventually it started turning into 5 bags of chips, a few bottles of soda, and four or five good dishes that people had worked hard on which everybody then turned up to eat. The team I worked on decided we’d had enough and we worked on our own food table – there were sign up sheets, assignments, etc. Our food table was a pure success, but we limited it to our team only. One of the senior people on our team literally stood guard at the food table to make sure there were no other teams partaking of our viddles. She made herself a little badge that said “Food Table Police” and she had a whistle. Our manager was 100% behind us too as she always brought in this labor intensive dish for every food table and then watched as it got gobbled up by those who didn’t bring anything in. There was a lot of grumbling from other people outside of our team for days afterward, but it became a thing that teams regularly did from then on. Well, most of the teams. The team that had the majority of grumblers was also the team that had the most amount of people who never brought anything in for food tables to start with.

    1. The Tin Man*

      The badge and whistle…that is fantastic. Reading (and picturing) that makes all of the awful things in here worth it.

  84. knitter*

    OMG so many…

    My coworker regularly locks me out of our shared space. I don’t have a key.
    Same coworker edited a google doc to make her a contact for a program I run. (I returned the petty by sharing everything as view only or as a pdf)

    …but a pattern of petty turns into bullying and she’s now under investigation for that among other things (like creating a hostile environment (specifically toward religion and race)).

    1. Observer*

      Well, I’m glad that your employer is taking this on. That’s pretty awful.

      Why can’t you get a key, at least?

        1. Works in IT*

          My organization doesn’t like giving out keys because “what if they quit and keep the key?”

          My department is now on a quiet warpath to make everyone aware that the consequences of not having enough keys…. employees leaving doors propped open or unlocked…. will cost more in the long run than just giving keys.

          1. Observer*

            Then get an access controls system that lets you give each person a passcode / pin. Then you just deactivate if they leave. A LOT cheaper than someone getting in because the door got propped open.

          2. Curmudgeon in California*

            Badge access is awesome. Except when the power is out. Then everyone leaves anyway because the computers don’t work.

  85. Kathenus*

    I was managed a program that was well liked by our particular stakeholders, and we had our own newsletter for them (we were part of a larger organization). When the decision was made to end the program (for economic reasons, which were understandable, but they way it was done was – let’s just say – not ideal), I sent out a newsletter to our stakeholders informing them of the program ending, thanking them for their support and inviting them to visit again before it did, and giving them the direct contact info of my boss and grandboss if they had any questions or comments…

  86. Emmykins*

    I had a former coworker who HATED me for ridiculous reasons (like, the Director liked and respected my work. And her brown nosing had no effect on him). She would do things like order pizza for everyone (but me) and proceed to eat it at a table in the office I was using. Joke was on her since I don’t care much for pizza. Tie one time she pushed me too far was when everyone went to lunch on day and I brought my leftovers back for lunch the next day. I got to work three next day and SOMEONE had thrown my lunch in the trash. Since there were only 2 ppl there, I knew she did it.

    It was a toxic environment and I left soon after. But karma is wonderful. Jerkface’s second child was born soon after my departure. On my birthday and she knew it. Lol.

    1. TexasThunder*

      “Jerkface’s second child was born soon after my departure. On my birthday and she knew it. Lol.”

      Sorry, don’t follow?

      1. Works in IT*

        I read it as Jerkface is the sort of petty person who would be reminded of the shared birthday every year.

        1. Lucy*

          I mean, I am not a jerk (I hope) but I definitely know which former coworkers share a birthday with one of my children, and whose child was born on my birthday. Fortunately in my case it’s nice former coworkers, but I wouldn’t be able to shake the knowledge if it had been coworkers I didn’t like!

  87. Fern*

    I used to be an office manager for the tech support call center of a software company. One of the employees (Carol) would complain about everything. Customer outreach programs, software updates, what people brought to potlucks. Everything.

    One of my jobs was to hand out the direct deposit slips and live checks to the employees on pay day. Where she was sitting, I handed hers out like fourth and when I gave it to her, she said “I wish you had handed this to me first”… even though she had a direct deposit slip so she already had the money in her account. From that day on until I got a new job two years later, I would always make sure I handed out the slips in a way that Carol was last to get her slip, but in away that she never figured it out. And she’d complain to me, but I’d say something like “well I started with Judy and went through the rows, so that’s just how it played out, Carol”. Surprisingly, this never got old.

    2. anonforthis*

      At oldjob I used to hand out the paystubs. We never bothered with the overpriced envelopes offered by our payroll provider, as nobody saw the point. I only ever handed them directly to employees. If someone wasn’t at their desk, I took it back to my office and locked it up until it could be put in-hand. (Everyone had direct deposit, so it never affected when people actually got their money.)

      Until one day our “I’m an expert on everything” employee (EOEE) made a big stink about how I gave him his paystub while he was talking to another coworker. Coworker might have seen his paystub! I was being lax about security of personal information! Gasp! But it’s not like coworker was leaning over EOEE’s shoulder so they could both see his monitor, or any similar situation. They were seated at desks across a 3’ aisle from each other. (I feel I should note that at the time of this incident, EOEE had been at that job for almost 2 years, and had never had any previous problem with how we distributed paystubs. But – what a remarkable coincidence! – it did happen to come just a few days after I had to correct him on something he was wrong about.)

      So the powers that be decreed that henceforth we would use the overpriced envelopes. But for every payroll after that, I made a point of folding his paystub back and forth along the perforated folding lines, and using my fingernail to crease the folds to maximize the potential for the paystub to fall apart. (That’s a pet peeve of mine – I keep my paystubs in a file folder at home, and I hate it when they fall apart because then the folder gets all jumbled.) I’m sure EOEE never noticed, or cared. But it just became my weekly little “I HATE you, you insufferable jackass!” ritual.

      1. TootsNYC*

        You should have refolded them a different way every time before you put it back in the envelope.

  88. Seal*

    Years ago I worked at a terribly dysfunctional library. Not only was there rampant bullying directed towards the paraprofessional staff by the librarians, the librarians themselves did not have the slightest idea of how to manage. They had an assistant who was not only tremendously incompetent, but just plain odd. We had a large paper recycle bin in our office that got filled at least weekly. For reasons known only to her, the odd assistant started regularly going through the recycling. At first, we thought she had tossed something in by accident and was trying to find it, but after seeing her pawing through the bin daily for a couple of weeks realized that was not the case. Since the recycle bin was in the middle of a shared workspace that she didn’t work in, her new hobby was increasingly disruptive and annoying. So one of my coworkers and I wrote a note that said “I caught the assistant going through the recycling again – should we tell her boss?”, crumpled it up, and stuck it a couple of layers down in the bin. The recycle bin diving stopped the next day, but the assistant’s dirty looks at me and my coworker continued for at least a month.

    5. Iron Chef Boyardee*

      “For reasons known only to her, the odd assistant started regularly going through the recycling.”

      I used to go through paper recycling bins at work looking for discarded envelopes, in case they had interesting stamps and/or postmarks I could add to my collection.

  89. Mr.G*

    We had an employee at my previous job who kept a journal/log of all the other employee’s names, and how many times they left to use the restroom, and for how long. Whenever management had to speak to her about how much time she was spending away from her desk (which was often), she had it at the ready to whip out and point out other employees who were spending more time away from their desk. You can’t help but wonder how much more company time she was wasting by keeping such detailed notes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

    1. singularity*

      Oof! I had a boss that did this when I still worked retail in college. He would time people’s restroom breaks over the course of a shift and if it added up to at least 30mins, he would try to have your pay docked by that half hour! Obviously this didn’t work out that well for him because he was spending all of his energy timing our bathroom breaks and not managing the big stuff.

      1. Mr.G*

        I know right. They just end up wasting more time policing others, and ruining staff morale in the process.

      2. Peggy*

        Oh ugh!

        I once had a boss who would reprimand me if I used the bathroom too soon before or after a break. I never figured out what amount of time was too close to a break to be considered acceptable. I also think he didn’t understand human physiology well, because if I have a half hour lunch and consume food and liquids, chances are that some time not too long after lunch is over I might need to pee.

  90. Schnoodle HR*

    I quit a very toxic job, where a particular coworker, Nemesis always got her way and always got me into trouble of sorts (and others, it wasn’t just me!). On my last day, I stole one of her Coke Zeros and drank it on my drive home.

    I don’t even like Coke Zero, but let me tell you, this particular one WAS THE MOST DELICIOUS THING I’VE EVER DRANK.

    1. Anon-Today*

      That literally made me laugh out loud! It’s a good thing I wasn’t drinking my carefully sequestered Diet Coke at the time.

    2. Seal*

      At my last job, my office was located right in the middle of another department. Both the other department head and I were told there were no other options so we had to make the best of it. She did not like me at all and was especially resentful that she had to see me on “her” space, so she went out of her way to make sure I knew it. Her department would regularly have treats and parties right outside my door and make a point of not invited or even asking if I wanted so much as a cookie. Since they always had leftovers and left them sitting out, I would wait until they were all putting the office and help myself. Office treats taste better when they’re tinged with spite.

    3. lnelson in Tysons*

      Hi Schnoodle! Have to wonder if Nemesis notices. Would probably have been sweeter still if you had taken the last one!

    4. Crystalline*

      I read this in the voice of Flynn Ryder. As in, “YOU SHOULD KNOW, THIS IS THE STRANGEST THING I’VE EVER DONE.”

      I applaud you for not stealing them ALL. :)

  91. Hooray College Football*

    I am a petty person. I have a support staff member who has treated me rather poorly on several occasions. Sometimes, she needs me to sign something, and she will email me and tell me I need to come to her desk to sign. Note, this is nothing that I need, and it has no benefit to me to sign it. So I ignore her emails until she has to get up off of her lazy rear and bring the paperwork to me.

  92. My Life In Socks*

    I work in higher ed. Had to room with a co-worker on a trip. I had legitimate grievances with her, but the combination of having to room with her and also having a recent medical condition sent me over the edge. Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I am also known as one of the friendliest and easiest people to get along with on campus, so I can generally avoid the petty.

    However, there’s this woman. Something major that she was the cause of had just happened and I was having no luck resolving it with her because she was clueless. Meanwhile, during the trip, she kept going on and on about the hotel shampoo and conditioner and how she would pick it up each morning hoping that they’d be replaced when the rooms were refreshed each day. On the third day, they were.

    So I picked them up and put them in my bag before she got to them.

    (Note: I brought my own shampoo and conditioner. I didn’t need them. I just wanted her to go through the extra work of asking for them at the desk.)

  93. Linzava*

    I don’t know if this counts, but one of my first jobs was an ice cream parlor. Only 2 employees had keys, myself and another girl. Someone broke in (with keys) and stole the cash from the registers and seed money in the tip jars. A total of $404. Boss called me on my day off to ask if I was involved, after speaking to me for a few minutes, he assured me he knew I didn’t do it.

    Next morning I open and the other girl is there, everyone knew she did it, her mother managed another store, the only way she got the job because she had a criminal history.

    We of course start talking about the robbery, I go on and on about how patetics someone has to be to steal the $4 from the tip jar. I insulted the “mystery robbers” so much that she left. I was stuck doing both jobs, but my boss gave me a ton of slack.

    They pressed charges, her mother testified against her and was well. She was full time, so she only stole the equivalent of 2 weeks salary for herself and spent 2 hours listening to me call her pathetic and a loser.

  94. sjw*

    I am currently amusing myself by regularly changing the default language on the Keurig machine to “French”. I don’t know why I find it so funny but I do! I’ve heard a few mutters wondering why it “keeps doing that”.

    Pettiest thing I ever observed was back in the actual receptionist “era” of our company (before automated attendants) someone always had to cover the front desk for the receptionist when she went to lunch. There were 2 admins who shared that responsibility. One of them kept tabs on when her “day” was, refused to switch with the other admin for any and all reasons (doctor appointment? Too bad!) , and tracked to the minute if the other admin was late returning from lunch and would inform the other admin that she “owed her 5 minutes” .. and would expect to be repaid the following day. She would literally sit in her car watching the time and come back the exact number of minutes late that the other person had been late the prior day.

    1. Free Meerkats*

      I found the setting on our printer/copiers that allows one to change the theme from bright to dark. I randomly change it from whatever it’s on to the other one. One coworker has fits every time it changes. No change in the functionality, all the buttons are the same, it’s just light on dark or dark on light.

      It amuses me.

      1. Lis*

        Omg our copier randomly seeming switches from collating print jobs to printing 5 of page one then 5 of page 2 and now I’m wondering does someone change it passive aggressivly

    2. Qosanchia*

      A previous coworker once accidentally installed the Dutch drivers for a new printer at a client site, then set it up on the server and pushed it out to everyone automatically. I still get on computers there, go to change something for the printer, and it’s all in Dutch. I giggle every time.
      Coincidentally, one of the employees there is Dutch, which helped when I needed to figure out some settings. Also fortunately, it’s not as hard to parse (for an English speaker) as something like Czech or Mandarin would be.

  95. Your Anonymous Receptionist*

    This is pretty low on the petty scale, but it makes me feel better. I do front desk reception. I remember the names of recurring visitors who are polite to me and just let the person they’re meeting know they’re here. I ask the people who are rude to me, “What was your name?” every time they come in.

    3. BigSigh*

      Haha, I have a coworker that I asked to stop clipping her nails at her desk. Her petty revenge was similar! She then pretended not to know who I was every time I saw her for months until she left on maternity leave, even though we sit ten feet apart and had lunch together several times previously.

  96. Anon-Today*

    My boss is the master of pettiness! I don’t know where to start.

    There’s the time when I told her I was leaving at 6:00 and she replied to my email at 6:01.

    Being called onto the carpet for “communication issues” because I didn’t put a sticky note on something that wasn’t the complainer’s business to worry about anyway.

    Having everything that I write be nitpicked for things like not having a period at the end of a parenthetical sentence, having a list of items that all have periods except one, saying “staff” instead of “personnel,” etc.

    Then there’s the time that my boss mentioned someone in another department who happens to be a friend, and mispronounced the name. Since she had acted as if she knows her quite well, the gaslighting actually worked, and I checked with my friend about how to pronounce the name. That’s when I learned that my friend had never met my boss, and yes, I pronounced her name correctly.

    I wish I’d kept a list, but these things happen at least weekly, and I’d rather forget them.

  97. WKRP*

    The pettiest thing? Being young and dramatic, I used to talk smack on a blog about an old coworker who openly detested me while I worked with her. I never mentioned her name directly, but made fun of anything and everything. If you knew I wrote the blog, you knew who I was talking about.

    Apparently, I hit a nerve. My old coworker complained to HR that a friend of mine who still worked at the company was involved in the blog. Friend was hauled in to HR and reprimanded. Friend asked me to take down my posts, which I did, because seemed silly to get her in trouble for vague rantings. (I’m still not sure how my friend got in trouble for what I wrote, I never mentioned her or inferred her presence at all)

    1. CL*

      If you mentioned anything that happened after you’d left, then you’d have to have gotten the information from somebody. Your friend would be the most logical suspect. And, to be perfectly honest, your behavior went beyond petty into almost bulying if you were continuing to badmouth her long after you were even dealing with her.

    2. Little Pig*

      I’m not sure there’s any pettiness here. You’re mean, and the coworker made a reasonable complaint.

    3. WKRP*

      Thanks for the judgment. I didn’t mention anything that happened after I left because I didn’t mention work or the company I worked for. It was a personal blog, I talked about my dog, getting brunch on the weekend, my dodgeball team and occasionally the horrible coworker I had. I won’t defend myself (because it was childish) but I also won’t defend her (because she was actually quite horrible to me when we worked together). If you want to accuse two bullies of being mean to each other, go right ahead. But, let’s not cast stones on the stupidity of our past.

      1. StaceyIzMe*

        I think that this is known as “plausible deniability”. It isn’t ideal, but it’s done on free time, and nobody is identified, it’s hard to assert a major moral failing on the part of someone who is merely venting. The fact that the readership seemed to include former coworkers is more problematic, but it’s not in the territory of a moral failing, in my view. Possibly a case of “yeah, you could have taken the high road here, but didn’t”. If a blog post had an expanded “reach” of tenfold, a hundredfold or more of the norm, that’s when things would become more difficult, in my view. But even in cases of slander or libel, “it’s the truth” is generally presumed an adequate initial defense.

        1. WKRP*

          If 5 people read that blog on a regular basis I would have been surprised. And, to end this on a fascinating note, coworker told others that I was “in love” with my brother. So, again, while I acknowledge my own lack of maturity and drama — it happened over 10 years ago with both parties moving on and ignoring each other. But, if it makes others feel like they’re advocating on behalf of the downtrodden and outcasted, such as it is.

  98. Ayup*

    My boss once collected the tufts of fur left around the office by my coworker’s dog, called her into his office, and handed it to her. A not-so-subtle message.

    A few years ago I had left a bunch of frozen lunches in the shared freezer on a Friday, and the following Monday one of them was gone. Normally I would doubt myself and assume I’d eaten it and forgot about it– but Friday to Monday? No. I left a post-it IN the freezer asking the person who had taken it to replace it, including my name. Probably a month or more later, a hot-shot a-hole attorney came up to me and admitted he’d eaten the meal and promised to replace it. He never did (surprise…not).

    1. Observer*

      The first isn’t petty – if you’re bringing a pet (or a child…) to the office, clean up!

      1. Ayup*

        I think it’s petty to collect all the hair and hand it to her, rather than directly saying: hey, your dog is shedding all over the office, clean it up.

        1. SeluciaMD*

          I think it would have only been petty if he’d handed it to her and said “I think you dropped this.”

    2. Avatre*

      Now I wish we had done that with my ex-roommate who let her boyfriend and his husky move in without asking us… Then again, trying to talk to her about things semi-reasonably ended with her and my other roommate nearly getting in a physical fight, so maybe not. (God, I’m glad I don’t live there anymore.)

    3. Jennifer Juniper*

      I would have spent too much time petting the dog and encouraging puppy kisses to even notice the fur.

  99. SeekYou*

    I finally decided to leave a job after a lot of soul searching when I realized I couldn’t be successful or happy working under my nightmare of a CEO (my direct boss). However, I had lovely coworkers and direct reports I was sad to leave. My department had an ongoing joke about unicorns, so all my staff members pitched in and bought me a cute unicorn stuffed animal to take with me (which I still have today!). Coincidentally, my nightmare CEO bought me a bigger version of the same stuffed animal and tried to make a big deal of it at my going away party, a party that was really all about her. I ended up throwing her unicorn stuffed animal in the trash on my way out, and invited all my lovely coworkers out to drinks on my last day. She wasn’t invited. Petty, yes. But still gives me so much pride to this day. #noregrets

    1. WKRP*

      I archived all my old emails. They weren’t deleted, but I knew my boss wouldn’t know to look in the archive.

      1. MissDisplaced*

        Yup! I made sure to delete them off all the backups too, so there was no record of them. So petty, but the owner of that place was prone to saying his 13 year old could design… so there. Hope they had fun.

  101. Nea*

    My office is kept very cold, to the point that I leave a heavy hoodie there to curl up in if necessary.

    One day a co-worker turned on her personal fan as high as it would go early in the morning, aimed it so it passed her entirely and was full on me, and and left it on. She didn’t even turn it off when she left for the day.

    1. ProbablyTooPetty*

      Is there a way to…accidentally…slice through the fan’s cord so that it’s not noticeable but nevertheless makes it unusable?

      1. Anonomoose*

        On a UK plug, you can pop the fuse out, and replace the plastic cover. It’s then inert, perfectly safe, but perfectly non functional

    2. Curmudgeon in California*

      I think I would have stayed late and gone after that fan with a screwdriver.

  102. Cantgivename*

    I have this coworker who no one likes but she somehow convinced this committee at the university where we work to give her an award. So on the day she was getting the award, I said I had a doctor’s appointment and switched my work-from-home day to that day so I wouldn’t have to go to the ceremony.

    1. Alsocantgivename*

      Sort of similar situation- we have a former toxic coworker who for some reason likes to frequently visit our office. No one knows why because they complained about how much they hated it here (and all of us) all the time. Most of us will find any random excuse to physically leave the office so that we don’t have to interact with them. There was one time they visited at like 4:30 in the afternoon and I had to walk past them to get into my office. I just very unenthusiatically said “oh hey,” walked straight back to my office, grabbed my stuff, and left for the day out the back entrance. I even walked AROUND the building to get to my car that’s the level of effort I took to avoid talking to them!

  103. overcaffeinatedandqueer*

    I have a story from my mom, although I cannot ask the doer if she meant to be petty!

    My mom is a retired teacher. When I was about 13, our dog was one, and pissed that mom was ignoring her because she had to grade. Mom left the room to talk to me for literally a minute…

    Yep. Dog ate THEIR homework because she felt slighted.

  104. Jennifer*

    A small thing but I love when someone sends me a message accusing me of not sending them something when I’ve sent it to them already. I always send them a message with the original email attached. If they are nice, it’s okay, mistakes happen, but it’s so annoying when they are rude about it. I don’t understand going in on someone like that when you haven’t even searched your inbox to confirm that the message wasn’t sent.

    If they were rude, I add a little smiley face to the email. A little petty.

    1. Peaches*

      Haha, this x10000.

      I ALWAYS do this. We have a customer (who is a purchaser for a large hospital) who frequently send me emails, saying “Peaches, we have not received an order confirmation for such and such PO from you yet. We need this order ASAP! Please ship product ASAP, and send me the order confirmation.” She always sends these message with “high importance.” Here’s the thing – I have never NOT sent her an order confirmation after processing her POs. Furthermore, I usually process her orders within minutes of receiving it, and subsequently send her an order confirmation within minutes.

      So naturally, every time she sends an angry follow up claiming that I didn’t process her order/send over a confirmation, I attach my original email to her with the confirmation. She has never once emailed back to apologize.

      1. Jennifer*

        They NEVER apologize. So infuriating. I can’t say what I’d like to say, so a passive aggressive smiley has to do the trick.

    2. Tea Earl Grey. Hot.*

      Yes!! Always! Usually the response I get, if I get one, is “Oh.”

    3. Middle Manager*

      I’m all over that. If it’s an honest mistake, no problem, I’ll just let them know. If they come at me guns blazing, supervisor cc:ed, email YELLLING at me etc, I’m 100% going to attach the original email.

    4. Seeking Second Childhood*

      Recently I stayed late on a Friday to deliver a project to the person for whom it was hot and time-critical, and to another senior person who needed to sign off. Tuesday I got a message whining when I’m going to get around to doing her work. “You mean the one I sent to you & Fred via SAP on Friday?”

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        (Worst part there? I actually quite like her and I know she’s been given new projects without being taken off old ones — but her losing my emails & deliverables is affecting my attitude.)

    5. TootsNYC*

      ooh, I used to have to file paperwork for every freelancer I hired, and I’d hire well in advance and do the paperwork immediately.

      And then I’d get a snotty email from the HR guy about not doing the paperwork. After the fourth time, I started replying to that with the original email, the original attachment, and a note that said, “Chuck, this is the fifth/sixth/seventh time you have asked me for freelancer forms when I have filed them months in advance. Could you please set up a system that lets you find them instead of asking me every time?”

      And I cc’d his boss.

      Eventually he wasn’t around.

      And then there was the badge person who, when I emailed to say, “Can I send my freelancer down to get a badge?” would say, “You have to fill out this form,” and I’d write back saying, “I did, and I put the number of the form in my email. Do you not have records?” And then one time he said something like, “The number doesn’t help,” and I was like, “can’t you look them up by their last name? Aren’t things filed alphabetically?”

      He stopped asking after that.

  105. Art3mis*

    I used to be an Administrative Assistant, I was a “II” level and the next level up was a “III” I asked my manager what I would have to do to get promoted. She told me that I had all the technical skills of a III, but not the people skills. And no suggestions on what I needed to improve or examples of when I had displayed this lack. I figured that every other III, along with people in her role (who were also AAs that managed other AAs) would have the same or better tech skills than I did. So after that, any time a III or an AA manager asked for tech help with a spreadsheet or Power Point, (which was ALL the time as I was known as very computer savvy) I’d play dumb and suggest they call the help desk. Once during a team meeting with a lot of other AAs I let them flounder over a presentation they couldn’t get to work right. I knew exactly how to fix it, but you know, so should they.

    2. Ap0llo*

      But what your manager said doesn’t imply that all IIIs have “the same or better tech skills” than you; in fact just the opposite, that you have the same or better tech skills than any III. So some of them needing your help in that area makes perfect sense.

    3. Jennifer Juniper*

      Did you ask her what people skills you needed to improve and how to improve them?

  106. anon for this one*

    This one is on me. I had a highly OCD colleague who was a petty tyrant to the staff. I would tear small pieces off of post it notes and leave them in the hallway by his office. We would wait and see how long it took him to pick them up and then start grumbling about it. Sometimes I would go back and put another in the place of one already collected just to tweak him. Immature but deeply satisfying.

    1. LurkNoMore*

      similar story…when a tightly wound office manager would travel, I would move 3 or 4 things in the office and on his desk. Then we’d have a pool on how long it would take him to notice all of the changes when he returned. One time, he came in under 3 minutes….

      1. Garland not Andrews*

        It’s really fun just moving everything on the desk 1 inch to the right.

    2. CrickettheCat*

      …Did he actually have OCD? Because that’s an incredibly rude and thoughtless word to use to insult him. Either he did have it and you’re picking on him about his mental illness, or you’re using ableist and unkind language to insult him. Or both.

  107. Not My Usual Name*

    An employee was fired for posting a sign in the break room.

    The sign read, “The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves.”

    The office manager did not see the humor in this, so she terminated the employee. I’m not sure whether or not this falls into the category of “petty,” but it was certainly an overreaction, imo.

  108. Pettiness*

    I worked in a bank and our receptionist duties included some light data entry work, in addition to greeting customers and answering the switchboard. Our new hire was having a difficult time keeping up and her supervisor had tried (unsuccessfully) several times to help her manage her workload, but eventually decided to let her go. On her desk she had small decorative basket with balloons for the children that came in. Apparently, this was her own personal basket because when she came out of the supervisor’s office after being let go, she went over to the desk, dumped the balloons on the desk, took the basket and left, never to be heard from again. (Or maybe she just really liked that basket, who knows? No one actually knew whose basket it was!)

  109. Veryanon*

    At my current job, I had a former co-worker (thankfully she has retired) who, I kid you not, was the most passive-aggressive person I’ve ever met, always with a negative comment about everything.

    Actual examples:

    Me: Oh, it’s sunny today.
    Her: Did you know you can get skin cancer even from indirect light through the window?

    Me: I had a pipe leak in my house and it’s been a real mess.
    Her: Some people just shouldn’t be homeowners.

    Me: [enjoying a cup of tea]
    Her: I don’t drink the water here, I don’t think it’s healthy.

    I finally just stopped talking to her altogether and worked remotely as much as possible. I was never so happy to see anyone leave.

      1. Veryanon*

        I forgot to mention about how she would repeatedly tell me I smelled like chemicals (I don’t; I use scent-free detergent and fabric softener and don’t use a lot of perfume or other products); she’d make snide little comments about the fact that I work jeans to work (which we are allowed to do here); she was always talking about shopping at the health food store and that products at regular grocery stores are just full of poison; she once told me I spent too much time on personal calls (I had a 30-second call with my daughter one day when she came home from school); and on, and on. She was just horrible.

  110. Bostonian*

    I’ve been a victim of pettiness! A few times, actually, at my last job. Here’s just one story.

    Parking was tight at this job, so the lot that was closest to the building always filled up fast. One day, I decided to park in the closest available spot to the building, even though someone in the spot next to it had parked way over the line. (I guess this story includes some pettiness from me, as well.) I had a small car, so I was still able to fit in the empty spot, though I was a bit close to the horribly parked car.

    The horrible parking coworker was apparently super pissed that I parked to close to his car, so he left a threatening message in the frost of my windshield. (I guess this happened in winter.) This guy was known for being shady about a bunch of things, including always staring at the women. I suspect he also was the one who regularly threw out my (not expired, not large) container of almond milk from the fridge. (It mysteriously stopped disappearing once he left.)

    1. Turtlewings*

      He was angry with you for successfully parking in the next space despite his awful parking job? How does that even make sense?? “How dare you use this spot for its intended purpose after I was rude and made it really difficult for you”?

      1. Arts Akimbo*

        Some people intentionally park badly in order to take up two spaces, so that no one parks near them and risks accidentally dinging their precious vehicle. It’s really obnoxious.

  111. Anon for this*

    I was fired from my first job out of college (receptionist/ assistant in a law firm) because the head of the support staff wasn’t involved in my hiring because she was away at her competitive dance competition (visual- 60’s super slim and blonde who was very very vain). Her husband who was the owner of the firm adored me and I think that had to do something with it. Her first day back from her trip was my first day and the convo went like this:
    Her” who the hell are you?”
    Me “I am the new receptionist”
    Her ” Where did you grow up”
    Me ” Says hometown”
    Her looking like she had poop in her mouth ” Oh…..that’s not good. What High School did you go to”
    Me “Local high school known for its great academics and sports but isn’t where the old money crowd sends their kids”
    Her looking utterly disgusted ” OH NO”

    I was fired 2 weeks later. On my Birthday. She waited to fire me on my birthday.

    1. The Original K.*

      A VP where I used to work was fired on her birthday. Like, there was cake at lunchtime and she was gone by 3. I kept thinking, damn, y’all could have fired her yesterday! (I suspect she was fired for petty reasons, though I don’t know for sure. She and her boss loathed each other, it was palpable. And she’d been hired to turn around a struggling team, which she’d done.)

      1. Anon for this*

        Oh that is horrible! If you are going to Fire someone don’t bother with a cake!

      2. Anon for this*

        Oh that is horrible! If you are going to Fire someone don’t bother with a cake!

        1. I'm that person*

          Or at least write
          “Happy Birthday”
          “You’re Fired”
          in frosting.

            1. paxfelis*

              And now I have, “He Shrutes, he scores!” with excited crowd noises playing on my mental soundtrack.

    2. Cringing*

      New CEO hired a new executive assistant for himself and two other execs. EA was on the job for about a month when she gets a call that her mother, who is in hospice, may not make it through the night. CEO is on a plane and can’t be reached. EA asks the other two execs if it’s okay to leave early, to which they say, of course, please go be with your mother. EA also leaves a message for CEO so that he’ll know what’s going on when his flight lands. EA’s mother passes late that night, which was maybe a Wednesday or Thursday. EA returns after missing about three work days, and is fired the day of her return. The reason? She is “unavailable” when the CEO needs her.

        1. Iconic Bloomingdale*

          This is not petty. It is mean spirited, heartless and lacks basic human compassion.

      2. Curmudgeon in California*

        That’s horrible. That CEO should end up with only nasty, petty and spitefully passive-aggressive EAs for the rest of his petty, miserable life.

  112. Aggressive Coffee Maker*

    Okay I’m going anon for this. I work at a University and one of our faculty is Satan. She is such a nasty bitter person and I hate working with her. She throws these huge tantrums if anything goes even the tiniest bit off kilter and it makes her crazy when people don’t react to her ridiculous tantrums. So petty thing number one is I’m annoyingly cheerful and bubbly with her all the time. All the time. It’s not in my nature and I’m not that way normally but for some reason it makes her crazy when I’m just super smiley, especially when she’s throwing a fit about something. I think she likes people to get worked up and upset with her and when I won’t I can see her brain melting. It’s fantastic.

    Petty thing number two – We make coffee for some events that we do and I had brought in a coffee from home that I hadn’t planned on using to mix things up for once. She didn’t like it so here comes the meltdown. She came busting in asking what I did to the coffee, trying to shove it in my face so I could smell it, all while literally shrieking about how bad the coffee was. And here I was just Oh? It doesn’t taste good? Weird it’s the exact same coffee I always use? And she was literally freaking out, telling me the coffee was horrible and she just couldn’t believe it and I just kept saying (in the brightest tone of voice possible) how weird it was because it was the same coffee and just going about what I was doing. She eventually flew up back to her bell tower or whatever when she realized I wasn’t going to react. I’ve never used that coffee again (it was really gross) but ah to see a grown ass woman have a nuclear reaction to something so petty was just beautiful.

    1. Paralegal*

      I was fired on a Sunday night (9pm) before I was set to return from vacation on Monday.

      1. twog*

        My dad was fired when he returned from vacation once.

        He sued and got his job back with no service break affecting his pension (he was a firefighter/EMT)

        His boss, who had done the firing, retired before he came back to work so as to avoid him.

      2. Ashley*

        Someone who worked for my company (different department) found out he was let go when he came back after a vacation and his computer login had been deactivated. When he went to his manager to find out what happened, she brought him to a meeting room and gave him the news.

        1. Rob aka Mediancat*

          That’s more or less how I found out I was fired from one job, though I’m fairly sure they weren’t intentionally being malicious; by horrible timing, the person who was supposed to fire me was caught up in traffic and got to work an hour late. leaving me an hour to cool my heels while I tried to get reconnected to the network.

    2. Luna123*

      At my old job, my boss had a part time personal assistant. The Friday before Christmas, it was pretty slow, and he spent about a minute (I watched him do it while we were both on our lunch breaks) doing a little cat stick-figure in Paint and replacing an absent coworker’s desktop background. The coworker who was pranked didn’t care at all when she got back, just fixed her background.

      Our boss saw what the personal assistant did and was soooooo horrified that he would spend *so much time* doing that, so she fired him the day we got back after Christmas. When she was explaining to the rest of us why he was gone, she really kept going on about how long he’d spent on that doodle, and how weird it was.

      She gave him a paper sack to put his things in and then left him alone, so in response he stole a bunch of printer paper, pens, basically anything he could reasonably carry out.

    4. Anonymouse*

      I have two petty layoff/firing stories but neither happened to me.

      My friend was working for a call center, which is hell on earth if you’ve never done it. She didn’t particularly love it but she was good at it and it paid pretty well. At one point they had mandatory overtime, which was fine with her because she wanted the extra money. She came home from working 12 hours straight and had a new message on her machine. It was her boss, telling her she was laid off, effective immediately.

      We live in Texas, where any kind of snow/ice in the forecast causes the whole city to shut down. Once there was a particularly bad ice storm and a friend emailed her boss early in the morning that she planned to work from home that day in order to stay off the roads. Her boss told her that was not an option, she had a very important meeting scheduled for that morning. No, it couldn’t be rescheduled. So my friend spent 2+ hours white-knuckling her way into the office. The important meeting was to tell her that she was laid off… effective immediately.

  114. Law & Author*

    It wasn’t me, but a while back when I (a lawyer in government) was working with a paralegal on something, my boss called me into her office and told me that the paralegal had complained that when I saved something in our document management software, I hadn’t put her name in the author field. Apparently she saw it in there with me listed as the author, complained, and then changed it to her name. My boss thought the whole thing was ridiculous (it was because of a default setting! I didn’t even go type my name in there, it was just set as my default — and aside from occasionally searching for documents by author, no one ever relied on that field for anything). I offered to apologize to the paralegal, but boss told me not to worry about it.

    The best part: the paralegal had been begging for new, more challenging work before this, but her work wasn’t helpful. Not like she needed some coaching, but I asked her to find specific things or to summarize a straightforward resource, and she found most of the things but not everything, or her summary skipped over big chunks of material, all without any explanation or follow-up questions. So the document she got upset about had been substantially rewritten by me, because what she gave me wasn’t useful.

    1. zapateria la bailarina*

      sounds like you had a crappy boss… why did she tell you about the complaint if she thought it was ridiculous and didn’t want you to apologize?

  115. SusanIvanova*

    We had an in-house design shop to make icons and other art for our software products. However they were very much geared towards web and Windows, which have a subtle “you know it when you see it” difference in style and color from Mac design, because we only had one major Mac product. So my Mac team was allowed to hire an outside designer as needed, usually late in the release cycle.

    So we get to that point in the latest release and my product manager tells me we’ve got our own dedicated in-house designer this time. OK, that’s great, here’s my requirements, let’s see the art.

    First red flag: the designer emails the art to the PM, who emails it to me, instead of attaching it to the problem ticket.
    Second Communist army of waving red flags: It’s not Mac-style. It’s not even close. *It is black and white line art.* The sort of thing you got from a floppy disk full of clip art. It might look good in 1972 on a mainframe; it’s not going to fly on a 2015 Mac.

    Unfortunately some of these icons are for borderless buttons – no icon, no way to tell there’s a button, so our testing folks can’t test it. So I check it in with the intentionally petty comment “this will do as a placeholder until we get the real art.”

    Oh, the “artist” was so upset. (Mission accomplished!) But as a side effect of that comment showing up in the problem ticket, the PM finds out that he was *not* assigned to our team. He’s not part of the design team at all. He *wants* to be on the design team, and thought this would be a good way to stealth his way into it. (You’d think you’d do your absolute best in that case – but then, maybe he did.) As far as the in-house team is concerned, we’re still supposed to be using the outside designer.

  116. RobotWithHumanHair*

    In my last job, I had to work with a particularly lazy and annoying coworker. On the wall adjacent to his desk, there was a hardwired clock that covered a hole from which its wiring came, maybe six inches across. I was always the one to fix the clock whenever a time change occurred. So one day, in a fit of frustration and mischief, I bought an Annoy-A-Tron from ThinkGeek. For those not familiar with this product, it’s a little circuit board that’s only purpose is to make a beep at irregular and infrequent intervals. I hid it behind the clock when my coworker was late for work once again.

    Him: “What’s that beeping?”
    Me: “Huh? I didn’t hear anything.”
    (a couple minutes later)
    Him: “There it is again!”
    Me: “I seriously don’t hear anything.”

    He never, ever found it.

  117. Marzipan*

    I worked in a record shop one Christmas – so, at a really busy time – and one customer got really huffy because they’d decided to stand somewhere that blatantly was not the queue to pay, and I’d kept serving the actual queue. So, I graciously took the case for the item they wanted, and walked into the back room to get the disc. As soon as I was in there, they couldn’t see me anymore, but all the people in the real queue still could. They were all in hysterics as I comically moved v e r y s l o o o o o w l y through all the movements of getting the product and putting it on the box. It was extremely satisfying to be that petty, I’ll be honest.

  118. Scarlet Magnolias*

    Many many years ago, the small town library I worked in had a number of patrons who were “difficult” as in one dreaded seeing them come in the door. One was an older man who would come in with his lunch (think Limberger sandwiches) spread out the New York Times carefully on the main table and read and eat (loudly). He HATED with a fierce passion when anyone else sat at the table and would twitch and glower and burp at them.
    Once a month I would do statistics from Reference, Childrens, Teens and Circulation. This meant piles of paper spread out and a large calculator clicking away. So I would make myself comfortable at the main table before patrons came in and spread out all my paperwork.
    Naturally when he came in, and realized his routine was not going to happen as planned, he was not happy. But he sat with his sandwich and paper and jostled my papers. I just smiled and outlasted him. Very petty.

  119. Feotakahari*

    This was a retail job where all the metrics were focused on selling things. Lazy coworker would do everything he could to sell, but wouldn’t clean up after himself or perform any of the support duties we were supposed to share. Angry coworker hated his guts. Boss and Supervisor were out of town, and Boss asked me to “keep them from killing each other.”

    That day, Lazy was supposed to reorganize the stockroom, a long, boring job that didn’t do anything for his metrics. I reminded him twice that he really ought to start reorganizing soon. The second time, he started lecturing me about how he worked faster than me and didn’t need as much time. Then Angry broke in and told him to stop being so condescending, and they started yelling at each other while I tried to get them to stop.

    Angry called Supervisor to complain. Lazy said “[Expletive] Supervisor” and called Boss, like a child going to Daddy when Mommy wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Boss was dealing with his father’s funeral and wanted absolutely nothing of this!

    This ended with Lazy swearing at Angry in full view of customers and walking out. He never came back, which was probably just as well.

  120. KHB*

    When I was working in a giant open-plan office, I had the desk right next to the printer. Nobody seemed to care where the printer table ended and my desk began, and they kept leaving stuff like the communal stapler and abandoned printouts on my desk and encroaching on my work space. One day, I decided that if people kept putting the stapler on my desk, that must mean that they think it’s mine, so I took it home.

    This happened in 2005. I still have the stapler.

  121. anon today and tomorrow*

    A previous company went on and on about how the industry decline meant they couldn’t give us raises or bonuses. Yet, the CEO received a five figure bonus that year, as did many of the high level execs.

    The company decided that they’d spend the money to renovate our cafeteria. They apparently spent thousands on it. The only change? They placed chalkboard walls all along the seating kitchen in an effort to raise morale by “providing a fun environment for people to share fun stories during lunch” (quoted from the HR email sent out about the change).

    I waited until no one was around and wrote “you gave us a chalk blackboard instead of raises????” Not sure if it’s petty or not, but it did make me feel better.

    1. Art3mis*

      This isn’t a petty story but one time I was in one of those “town hall” type meetings with some executive spouting off about revenue and sales and all that jazz. Well everything was up that year, revenue, profits, sales, productivity, on and on and on. And then he rhetorically asks the crowd, “And what number isn’t up?” I said “Raises” a little louder than I’d actually intended and EVERYONE in the room whipped their head around to look at me. My coworker was sitting next to me trying to contain her laughter. The exec continued, pretending to not hear, and I said, much quieter, “OMG I didn’t realize I said that so loud!” the person in front of me turned around and said, “It’s OK everyone else was thinking it.”

  122. sofar*

    During my first temp job out of school, I was treated horribly (another story). One of my tasks was to manage the company president’s email — delete spam (he refused to use any kind of mail filter), forward messages to the correct people, notify him of important stuff, etc.

    One day, I took my (30-minute) lunch, and a few spammy emails came through during that time. He yelled at me and did not care when I said I was at lunch. And then he launched into a paranoid rant, questioning how “these spam-o-rammers” managed to FIND him (his email address was on the company website). And screamed more about how I needed to always delete these immediately because, the longer these emails sat in his inbox, the more likely the “viruses” and “trackers” could infect his computer.

    After my temp appointment ended, I waited a few months and then started signing his work and personal email addresses up for literally every spammy mailing list (coupons, restaurants, loyalty programs, any free email subscription I could find). For almost a year afterward, every couple months or so, whenever I thought to do so, I’d sign him up for a few more. Everything from Subway’s Deal of the Day to weird local Listservs.

  123. GS*

    I get unnecessarily aggravated when people use the catering I’ve ordered for events. I was outside by the coffee/tea/soda one time talking to someone, and another guy comes up and starts helping himself to coffee. I immediately was like oh hi! Are you here for x? (KNOWING FULL WELL HE WAS NOT) and he said no. And I was like oh gosh so sorry this is for that! It’s out of our budget, so, y’know…

  124. Electricity Stealer*

    I had a manager that once accussed me of stealing by charging my cell phone at my desk. I was stealing electricity from the company by charging my phone. How dare I! Worst boss I ever had and she was awful to everyone. When I left the company, I signed her up for all the junk mail I could think of….Coupons, Travel Vouchers, Baby stuff, elderly care products, hearing aids, Democratic National Committee (She is a big time Republican), absolutely anything I could think of. Ran into a friend who still works with her, and she said that every day she makes a comment about how she gets all this junk.

    1. Peaches*

      My current boss accuses my coworker of stealing electricity! She has a small, personal heater that she uses frequently because our office is always freezing. My boss constantly rants to me about her “wasting money” by having her heater on. How are there actually two people who would accuse someone of that?!

      1. Artemesia*

        I had a co -worker who would go on a rant occasionally about people who would plug their phones in to charge at restaurants or stores or airports because ‘it is just like shoplifting.’

        1. The Gollux (Not a Mere Device)*

          Right. Why do they think there are free charging outlets at airport gates, if not for people to use them?

      2. Lynn Whitehat*

        They could save a ton of money by not over-air-conditioning the place.

    2. Essess*

      My spouse says he always waits to charge his cellphone until he’s in the office just to make THEM pay for the electricity to charge it.

      1. Vere*

        My father in law said he used to wait to poo until he was at work, so they paid him to go to the bathroom.

  125. VAP*

    I work in a dysfunctional department right now, where we regularly get fairly damaging passive-aggressive and petty behavior from the chair. My own petty moment was making up rules for a drinking game for our department meetings. We’d certainly never actually drink during them, and I didn’t make the mistake of writing them down anywhere, but we talked about it and the junior folks all know the rules (things like, Drink when S0-and-so mentions how busy she is with her committee assignment during a discussion about something completely unrelated”).

    1. Drew*

      It would fill my heart with glee if your entire department brings water bottles to the next meeting and actually plays the drinking game with them.

      Ferga: Oh, my stars, I don’t know how we can possibly take this on with my committee assignment eating so much of my time!
      Entire rest of meeting: *SWIG*

      2. VAP*

        I was recently saying, everyone is used to carrying water bottles. And given that we were recently yelled at by her and others for “conspiring” against the chair, it would also be funny to watch them trying to figure out if we were coordinating something somehow.

    2. Anonymouse*

      Haha a coworker and I used to keep track of how many times a VP said “Is that fair?” in meetings. It was bizarre, it was his go-to phrase. “Supply chain costs are up this quarter due to teapot packaging issues. Is that fair?” I think he averaged 13 times per meeting.

      Once, someone asked a question and VP responded with “Well, that’s fair.” And coworker and I both looked at each other with panic like, “Does that count? Do we count it???” I’m sure everyone else was wondering what got us so excited in an otherwise dull meeting!

    3. Bizhiki*

      This is such a good idea, and I will be implementing it on Monday. I have some team members who use the phrase “in that” incessantly (e.g. “blue is the best colour, in that I think it’s superior to all other colours”), and it’s spread to office newcomers like wildfire. If I don’t find some way to find humour in it, it’s going to drive me insane, so thank you for this idea.

  126. Kali*

    I had one coworker who kept pronouncing my name wrong, despite frequent corrections – it’s pronounced like “California”, everyone can pronounce it if they try – so I started hanging up on him every time he did it.

  127. Karen from Finance*

    My coworker and then-friend rage-quit on me. That was exhausting.

    So, she’d already quit, but given a month notice. She hated the job a lot and was angry at our supervisors, but needed the month to job search, and she figured that since she had given noticed nobody was going to expect her to do any work at all. She was supposed to be transitioning her account over to me, which I would be taking as well as my own. She was not handling the transition well. She reacted very agressively at any questions I had about the processes, literally any question about “have you tried this before?” or “why did you go for this method?” (which was going to be useful context for me) was taken as an angry criticism. She would ask me to set up a transition meeting in a meeting room with her, so that she could watch Netflix while I worked (a workload that was now 2x the usual one). I told her I couldn’t do that and that I needed her help with the transition. She took it well at the moment, said she understood. The next day (2 weeks before her agreed last day), she came in, told me this was her last day, packed her things and left.

  128. Massmatt*

    Working retail years ago, our chain announced some cost cutting measures (no overtime, cut back hours as much as possible, etc). Our store manager decided we would “go the extra mile” and abolish post-it notes, using scrap paper and tape instead. Now, in this business, we needed to use a LOT of post-its for things being reserved, etc.

    Beyond the insanity of someone thinking they are saving a company budget by banning post-it pads, I hated using scrap paper and tape (takes more time, and the tape damaged product) so I brought in a post-it pad from home. The manager reprimanded me for “wasting company money”. When I told him I brought this from home, he said it was still a problem because if anyone from the home office came and saw it around on the counter they would assume it was part of the store budget. So I had to take the pad home with me. So I kept bringing it in, keeping it in my pocket, and taking it home every day.

    1. Works in IT*

      I would have happily played the furious customer outraged that product was damaged by tape who wants to complain at the supervisor for “not restocking the post its” and demands the company pay to replace it with an undamaged product for you, if he was at all susceptible to such tactics.

  129. Sidonie*

    For my first five months at [current workplace], I had my first ever truly terrible supervisor, who we’ll call Karen. She was perfectly pleasant and supportive much of the time, but she had an absolutely unshakable belief that she was always right, and when it was challenged she would become combative and irrational. Sometimes conversations about small mistakes she made would be so focused on her trying to find ways she was actually right the whole time that they started to feel like gaslighting. There were a few jaw-dropping moments, but I’ll focus on the two (and a half) pettiest.

    1) [Current workplace] is a non-profit offering a few social service programs. One thing we do is maintain a small collection of household necessities–cleaning supplies, toiletries, etc.–and give them out to people who are in need. A local salon has given us several donations of product, mostly shampoo and conditioner, whenever they need to clear out their stock. It’s great! One day they had dropped off a box of product at our office, which was sitting in the entryway because it was very heavy. Our boss suggested we parcel out the items into bags to transport them to our storage.

    Supervisor Karen started doing this, taking a few bottles of shampoo to the back. I was curious as to whether I could take the whole box–most of my coworkers are significantly older than me and I grew up on a farm slinging hay bales, so too heavy for them often isn’t for me. I picked it up, found it pretty easy to carry, and took it into storage. Karen looked up as I came in, made a sour face, and said: “Oh, because I took the heavy things out.”

    Lady, you can’t even let me have better upper body strength than you??? Good lord.

    2) When things finally reached a breaking point (with another co-worker, actually), Karen was gently told her supervisory duties were being reduced. No pay cut, no punishment, just a little less management. She came in the next day, took her things, and left, sending me and one other co-worker who she thought was on her side a long email explaining how she had been unfairly persecuted and was being undercut by someone who wanted her job. I later learned this email was the only notice she gave anyone that she was quitting.

    2.5) After she left, she hired a lawyer and filed a grievance with the state, which funds the program we were both a part of. Her timing was uncanny–the state was experiencing a large budget shortfall in our area and looking for programs to cut. They terminated our grant without cause. Four of us lost our jobs. So in terms of petty revenge, she really took the cake!

    1. Beth*

      At my previous firm, I got really tired really quickly of the stupid systemic sexism of my two (male) bosses. One of the many, many things that drove me nuts was a pattern of assuming that only males are capable of lifting anything with any weight, and females are too delicate to do any lifting at all. I have always had strong legs, and at the time, I’d been working out and had pretty decent upper-body strength as well.

      It got especially annoying when we moved to a new office, a process that inevitably involves lifting and carrying items. So I finally got the perfect chance to make my point.

      You know the five-gallon bottles of water that go into water coolers? They weigh 40 pounds each. We had two full ones at the time, in addition to the one then in the cooler, so while my bosses were settling the water cooler into place, I picked up one bottle in each hand, walked over to where they were fussing with the cooler, and asked in a clear voice, “Where do you want me to put these?”

      They actually got the point. Petty, but it worked.

      1. Sidonie*

        That is amazing! There’s nothing I hate more than “can I get a few guys to help me carry this?” I try to make a point of volunteering when people say stuff like that (although it’s a moot point given that my current workplace is all women).

        1. Jennifer Juniper*

          If I worked at an office full of sexist assholes, I’d take advantage of their “chivalry” to the hilt! I also don’t have much upper-body strength and am clumsy to boot, so that would actually be to my advantage.

  130. Anja*

    A partner at a firm I used to work at wouldn’t really assign work – he’d talk about it and expect people to volunteer. It was just an odd quirk, but it really annoyed me. So I wouldn’t.

    Partner: Hey, Anja I have this file here………..
    Anja: Oh, yeah? *attentive look*
    Partner: I need someone to work on it……….
    Anja: *attentive look, cocked head*
    Partner: …………..
    Anja: ………….
    Partner: So…could you do it?
    Anja: Sure! Will do. Do you have a timeline for it? Anything I need to do?

    There was also a version for the phone. Which often had the additional distract of my colleague in the cube beside me giggling during all the long silences. It just really annoyed me for some reason. And turned me into the most obnoxious version of myself.

    2. SusanIvanova*

      The QA team in China used chat to communicate with us, and despite being told repeatedly, would not start off with the question. They’d start with Hello. Time difference being what it is, that Hello would come in just about the time we were leaving. So what should have been:

      QA (6:05PM my time): Hey, is it OK to give a llama a buzz cut?
      Me (6:06 my time): Sure, no problem, just watch out because they kick.

      became
      QA (6:05 PM): Hello
      Me (9AM, day 2, because technically it came after working hours): Hello
      QA (6:05 PM, day 2): I have a question about llama grooming.
      Me (9AM, day 3): OK, what’s the problem?

      And so on.

      1. BadWolf*

        OMG, I hate the “hello?” on IM. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat do you waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant?

        I usually let it sit for awhile which is totally petty. Although half the time, the reply is “Nevermind, figured it out.”

        Yeah.

      2. Jules the 3rd*

        My understanding is this is a cultural thing with the US being on the extreme ‘get to the point’ end, and some countries have the counter-peeve about how cold and abrupt their US co-workers are…

        1. Jules the 3rd*

          I have noticed that my relationships with co-workers in other countries became *more* effective / cooperative when I spent time saying ‘hello’. I don’t do that with US co-workers.

          1. Not my real name*

            I used to work on a ‘SWAT’ team in a big company where we filled in for open roles, did special projects and the like.

            We had a drinking game for the big company pep rallies, where we drank everytime someone else got an award for our work. Non-alcoholic or we all would have been wasted.

        2. Glengarry*

          I work in Thailand, and they do this on the phone. I’ve been here for years, and I still can’t stand it – every single phone call I receive goes:

          Me: “[CompanyName], Sawadee Ka”
          Thai Caller: “Hullorrrrrrrr”
          Me: “Hello, how can I help you?”
          Thai Caller: “Hullorrrrrrrr”

          I really, really, really want to hang up on them.

    3. Ayup*

      My firm just went through a trial and one of my coworkers, in the aftermath, was having a bad day and told me she was very disappointed that I (a legal assistant) hadn’t offered to work overtime for the trial prep. Say whattttt! I worked through lunch for practically the whole month beforehand, stayed late several evenings, and perhaps most importantly: NO ONE EVER ASKED ME TO WORK OVERTIME! I just did it because I saw the need.

      Oh and this coworker also just happened to take a week-long vacation during the week we had to prepare trial exhibits. Which was what I told her when she checked whether there was any reason for her not to be out that week. Funny enough, we’ve got another trial coming up at the end of the month and she’s scheduled to be out for two weeks ahead of time. :-|

  131. Master Bean Counter*

    Way back in the day I started working for a small company in a small town. Co-worker Bob was there when i started. We are in accounting. Bob did not get along with but one of the current staff. Bob quit at the first of the year. Leaving me and the terrible office manager to figure out year-end reporting. Bob sent flowers the next week to the only person in the office who he thought was nice to him. thanking her for being so nice during his time there.

    Fast forward two years, I take a new county job. Six months later Bob turns up as my counterpart in another agency. I figure great, here’s some one who can help me out with common issues. Wrong, didn’t take long for me to realized Bob really didn’t know much of anything. Never the less I maintained a good relationship with Bob and often visited with him at conferences.

    Bob then gets fired from his agency, for gross incompetence. His boss and my boss are friends. I hear nothing from Bob for a year and a half. Then I put in my notice. Bob sends his resume in for the job. He then calls me out of the blue to have a “chat” with me. Like I don’t know what’s going on. Come on Bob.
    Anyway, I regulate his resume to the bottom of the pile, knowing what a petty incompetent person his is. Not that my director would have entertained the thought of him anyway.

    During this time I find out I might need a professional favor from Bob. I talk to him about it he says, no problem just let me know when. After Bob found out he didn’t get my job, he stopped taking my calls. I never did get that favor from him.

  132. Niki*

    Once worked in HR in a place where the HR manager and the receptionist had a falling ouut because the receptionist was disciplined for repeatedly turning up late / going home earlier than she should. Receptionist then had an annual leave request denied for a day when no cover was available (she wanted the afternoon off to attend an event).

    Day she wanted the leave arrived, receptionist turns up complaining meekly of feeling unwell. HR office opens directly onto reception so we can hear her greeting people, on phone etc. As lunchtime approaches receptionist’s symptoms start to escalate dramatically, to the point where she’s basically just groaning incoherently down the phone to managers when putting calls through, coughing loudly and sighing dramatically to herself every two minutes and loudly telling any employee who walks through to the bathroom how wretched she feels.

    She would not tell the HR manager she was ill and needed to go home and the HR manager would not respond to her performance without being directly addressed. Seven hour stalemate. Receptionist was a woman in the sixties.

    1. Niki*

      Her sixties, I mean. I guess she also was a woman (or a girl at least) in the sixties, but that’s not really relevant!

    2. Ella Vader*

      I had a coworker at Old Toxic Job that would show up at work on death’s door. If she wanted a sick day but wasn’t actually sick, she’d come in and moan/groan/try to find someone who’d say she had a fever/etc. For some reason, she thought it didn’t count against her sick days if she was sent home vs. calling in sick.

  133. Deranged Cubicle Owl*

    About 10 years ago, I did my internship at a small digital television broadcaster. Writing lines for the teleprompter for certain shows, editing programs, adding subtitles, etc. you name it, were all part of the job. It was media, so hard and a lot of work. When I look back at it now, the chain no longer exists, they survived that long because of the (many free-working!) interns (not USA here, there are not a lot of paying internships) and the few staff members that did tons of work.

    However, there was one staff member, John, that arrived precisely at 9 every morning and left at 4 in the afternoon. He didn’t do any overtime, and even gave a lot of work to the interns without really teaching them anything (it felt like you were thrown in a lake and were expected to swim without getting swimming lessons). And when the work wasn’t up to standards or finished, he always blamed the interns.
    The thing was, every intern was pretty scared of John. He was verbally very aggressive and rumours had it that he had physically assaulted someone at his former job (‘till this day I do not know if that is true, but the way he behaved I was willing to believe that).

    The thing was, John only had a contract for six months that was coming to an end. Normally it is indeed just a formality before signing a long-time contract. So on the first day of his last week, he wanted to sign that contract but apparently the board said no because of how he treated the interns (as well as a few other colleagues) and that he wasn’t a team player and didn’t do any overtime (to finish assignments with a deadline, it wasn’t expected to do overtime every day, but when a program is scheduled to be broadcast, it needs to be finished you know).

    John was furious. He left the same day, and stole a laptop and media hard disk with all his work on. The company had to threaten with legal actions before he gave them back.

    TL;DR John was an aggressive staff member that mistreated interns and wasn’t rewarded with a long-time contract from the media-company, when his first six months were done. As a reaction he stole a laptop and a media hard disk. The company had to threaten with legal actions before he gave them back.

  134. Faith*

    I used to work for a department, where our leadership (director, VP, and SVP) were absolutely unable to advocate for us. If a request came from a different group, no matter how unreasonable, they would never push back. If another department blew their deadline, which left us in a lurch, there were never consequences for them. We just had to work until 3 am to meet our own deadline. The VP was the nicest guy, but he literally let everyone else walk all over our group. My teem has pretty much agreed that it was pointless to raise these issues because any concerns we brought up to him were never addressed. So, after a few months of this, I posted this quote in my cubicle: “The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership”. It hung there prominently for everyone to see for a year and a half, until I resigned.

  135. Beth*

    Back in my former career, I worked in the costume shop for a major opera company. Most of the stars in most of the opera productions were great, some were really amazingly wonderful, but there were occasional divas.

    For one memorable production, we had a tenor from a European country who surpassed all divas before and since in his truly horrible, snotty attitude. Just a few days before opening, he suddenly decided that he didn’t like his costume and a completely different one MUST be provided.

    What he got, instead of the custom-designed and tailored outfit that had already been made for him, was a velvet coat pulled from stock and hastily refurbished. The petty part was when we took a marker and wrote really ugly obscenities on the inside layers of the coat, which were then covered by the new lining. Petty as hell, but it eased the rage and tension in the shop that day, and we could think happy thoughts of him wearing all that abuse every night.

    The pin that was left in his breeches really was an accident.

    1. Submerged Tenths*

      OMG, THIS THIS THIS!!!! (I work in a costume shop, too). You have made my day. Thank you!

    2. Kitryan*

      My costuming story- I worked as a assistant shop manager/design assistant at a big regional theater. We were doing a victorian period piece and the romantic lead was an absolute insecure jerk. The designer and most of the rest of the costume dept was absolutely over him.
      During dress tech my job was to coordinate everything between the backstage/crafts/costume shop – a lot of running around and doing a dozen small tasks/errands at a time to make sure everyone has what they need.
      Diva dude actor did not have his formalwear pants in his dressing room and as the day went on and the scene he wore them in got closer and closer, he made sure everyone backstage knew they were not there. They’d been ordered and hadn’t arrived yet. No big deal, he had another pair of pants he could wear in the meantime and they’d be arriving in plenty of time to be ready for performance-just not for the first dress rehearsal maybe. But I really felt bad for him since it was clear that a lot of his behavior was insecurity and I wanted him to have his pants (also then maybe he’d shut up). So in my rounds I found the package with his pants as soon as it arrived. I got it opened, checked the order, and put it at the front of the work queue to be temporarily hemmed so he could wear them. While this was going on, I ran into him backstage. The ball scene was any minute and he didn’t have his pants yet. So he tears into me, yelling about how I’m not doing anything and this is terrible, we’re terrible, I’m terrible, etc.
      I don’t remember what I said, probably something about how they were just being hemmed and should be down shortly.
      Anyway, the ball scene started about 5 or 10 minutes before the pants made it down and two (petty) things happened: First, the actor did the thing that you should not do if you are an actor. He wore the ‘wrong’ pants out on stage (not the problem) and then he stopped everything and, from the stage, proceeded to tell everyone else on stage and everyone in the house how he was wearing the wrong pants and this was terrible and how could this be allowed to happen! The audience for this included the other actors and crew, all the designers, the production manager, the director, the shop managers…yeah, if you’re an actor, don’t do that. It’s very poor form. Second thing – the wardrobe manager found actor and proceeded to tell him that absolutely no one cared about getting him his pants and they were all fed up with him – except for me. She calmly explained that he had yelled at the single solitary person who was actually advocating for him and who was the only reason he (now) had his pants and that everyone else was perfectly happy for it to be last on the list of things to deal with.
      He apologized to me later and behaved more appropriately for the rest of the tech process.
      This was also a production where the lead was fired about 3 days before previews for among other things, going up (on her lines) repeatedly during dress tech and cursing out everyone around her.
      I miss theater.

  136. petty is as petty does*

    My work enemy* (she is an enemy) had coffee with my predecessor (her bestie) yesterday – bestie has a new job in the area and enemy may be angling for one with her and she changed the event from public to private yesterday when she realized people could see it.

    I asked about how her visit went in front of our boss today and it delights me!

    *she regularly sabotages and undermines my work – she’s terrible and for the first time I’m standing up to her, (possibly in a petty way) since I have nothing to lose

  137. Kali*

    Oh, also; I worked at McDonalds when I was a younger. One guy was a complete bully. He was only 17 or 18 – I was about 21 at this time, and a lot of the kitchen staff were older. He’d pick someone, every shift, to follow around and tell them that they were doing things wrong, for absolutely no reason. For instance, I was the lobby hostess and, after 9pm, we locked the main toilets and only kept the single-stall disabled toilet open (less to clean). He threw a hissy fit about that, and claimed it was illegal to let non-disabled people use the toilet.

    Another thing he got a bee in his bonnet about was taking orders out to parked cars. For some reason, he decided it was my job. It’s not – it’s the managers job, which I’d explicitly clarified with them, but I’d do it if I wasn’t busy. I was cleaning the staff toilets when he poked his round the door, told me I “had to” take an order out, put it on the table and then left. I washed my hands, rolled my eyes, picked it up and went to ask which car I was taking it to. I figured the customer had been waiting long enough by that time, and we could sort it out later. I can’t even remember what the reply was, but it wasn’t the information I asked for, so I dropped the bag on the floor and told him to fuck off. Later, the manager did ask me what had happened but after I explained – including the part about this guy carrying a bag of food into the toilets – nothing else happened. I quit the day that guy was made a manager. The store manager tried to argue with me about it, asked why I wanted to quit, arguing with any reason I came up with and pointing out that I didn’t have another job. Eventually, I just kept repeating “I quit” until he ran out of things to say.

    In other news, it’s now ten years later, I’m at university, and my personal advisor told me today that she thinks I have a very good chance of getting a PhD at Oxford.

    1. Drew*

      Holy crap, congratulations!

      Meanwhile, that shift manager is now … probably still a shift manager.

    3. Shoes On My Cat*

      Way to go!!!!!! Hope to see your “handle” here change to Oxford Kali in a few!

  138. ThrowAwayName*

    So many! But here is my most recent favorite: I work in an office where we see clients, and they are required to check in at the front desk for their appointment (there’s an electronic check in system that alerts me when they are here, so that I have time to prepare for our meeting- things like pulling up their file, reviewing past notes, putting together a rough plan for our meeting, etc). Well our office suite has 3 entrances- the front entrance, a side entrance, and a back entrance. The side entrance has a sign on it directing people to enter through the front. The back entrance does not. The back entrance is quite literally for employees only. You go straight to where our offices are, and it’s not clear how to get to the front. We have clients who will frequently enter through the back entrance and then wander around aimlessly because they can’t find the front desk. Sometimes they’ll find my office and wander in without checking in, which disrupts my work flow and is awkward since I didn’t have time to prep for their arrival. Both me and another coworker requested that a sign be added to the back entrance like the one on the side entrance. The request was denied. Why? “We don’t like the way it looks…” So it looks fine on the side entrance, but not on the back entrance?

  139. Ptarmigan*

    An engineer I once worked with left an ‘anonymous’ note on our boss’s desk, a list of A-Z reasons our company/he sucked (as in, one reason starting with every letter of the alphabet). It was funny because (a) everyone knew it was him, and (b) our boss was totally the kind of guy he could have just gone in and yelled at, no harm no foul.

  140. PettyLaRue*

    I worked with a man who was the absolute worst and made everyone miserable. I was usually the first person in the office, so I would go into his cubicle and snatch key pieces of paper with handwritten notes on them to throw into the shredder. I have no idea if this had any effect on him or his work since he never said anything to anyone unless it was a criticism of them, but it made me feel better.

  141. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    A friend (really…not me) had a boss that LOATHED the smell of McDonald’s food — especially McMuffins or something. It was really almost a childhood trauma thing for him. He banned people from bringing any McD’s into the office and would have a real snit if someone ate it outside the office and therefore had “McDonald’s breath” or in any way smelled like McD food. I have no idea what event prompted this, but one day my friend bought a McMuffin and hid it up in the drop ceiling space close to his office. I don’t think it was ever found and she eventually removed it before it could rot, but he went Berzerk for a bit trying to find who had a McMuffin.

    1. Sleepytime Tea*

      Random side note: My boyfriend HATES the smell of McMuffins. They are actually pretty much the only thing I would ever eat from McD’s, and it’s a very rare occasion. I don’t know what it is about the smell, because there’s nothing abnormal about it to me. But we were getting up early to go someplace and it was going to be a long drive, and I said I wanted an egg McMuffin. His response was “there is no way you are having that in my car.”

  142. The Other Katie*

    The office setup: An open cubicle farm, with a kitchenette at one side where we had a microwave and fridge for snacks and lunches, in which about 60 people worked in a shift. One person on our floor, Cersei, preferred her popcorn slightly scorched. Another person, Sansa, disliked the smell of burned popcorn. Sansa asked Cersei to please not burn her popcorn quite so much because of the smell. Cersei proceeded to burn popcorn at her morning coffee break, lunchtime, and afternoon snack time every single day for three weeks, for a total of 2,655 excess burned popcorn exposures. She had to be ordered to stop by her manager.

    1. Jessthepig*

      Ha! I like my popcorn slightly scorched too, but I would never cook it that way at work(agreed, smell is awful when it burns). However, I do cook it that way when I’m at home. After over cooking my popcorn more than a few times, my now ex husband moved the microwave into the garage for “popcorn cooking only”..and bought a new one for the kitchen.
      He got the garage microwave in the divorce.

  143. BikeLover*

    I was a young Army officer preparing to give a presentation to a very high level general (someone who’s name has been in the national news lately). I was very nervous. The first ppt slide went up- the title slide- and he said “this background is eggshell. It’s fall, it should be cream”. He stood up and left. That was my one shot at briefing him and his one shot to hear that particular brief.

    I’ve heard later that he did that did that to other people regularly.

        1. BikeLover*

          I will say he had a post-army career with the current administration that did not end well. He was pretty notorious for this kind of crap, but don’t paint all the military with that brush. He stood out because he is not normal.

  144. kc89*

    recently I’ve stared calling back rude customers who hang up without saying anything just so I can be like “oh it looks like we were disconnected!”

    1. Rebecca in Dallas*

      Once my cell phone accidentally dropped a call that I was on with a salesperson from our local theater (I actually didn’t want to buy any tickets but was trying to tell them politely, I know how hard sales calls are so I try to be nice and patient even if the answer is no). I’m not sure what happened but it made me have to completely reboot my phone. Once it finally finished starting back up, I had a new voice mail. It was that salesperson from the theater. “Oh, Mrs. [last name] it seems like our call was disconnected! I’m sure it wasn’t because you hung up on me because that would be SO RUDE. Please give me a call back if you would like to purchase the season tickets I was telling you about.”

  145. CDM*

    My co-worker Luciferinda put me on her enemies list after I installed a copy of a calendar software she had on my own computer one slow afternoon to see what it could do, and then uninstalled it.

    She was convinced that the FBI was going to arrest us all for software piracy over having two installs of a $20 program for a few hours, and that I was clearly a degenerate criminal.

    So, in retaliation, she started hiding work supplies that I had ordered for the engineers I supported. Even though the engineers she supported didn’t use the things I was ordering, and none of it had any value. I would order a stack of burn permits or lockout/tagouts, she would hide them amongst her files. I had to search her desk for my supplies while she was out of the office, which fortunately was a lot.

    She locked up all the extra copies of the annual internal directory after she handed out copies to everyone on her approved list so that I couldn’t have the contact info I needed to do my job. This was the 90’s, the corporate “phone book” was necessary.

    One of my engineers blandly told her he lost his copy the day after she handed them out, and promptly handed me the extra one.

    And after I left to have a baby and she finally got fired, she had the nerve to call a co-worker for updates on my infant’s medical status while he was in NICU so she could “pray” for him. I told co-workers to not tell her a thing, I didn’t want Luciferinda’s “prayers” in the same universe as my child.

    1. Kettles*

      Bringing your baby into it was a sick low blow. Especially when we all know that by ‘prayers’ she meant ‘gossip’.

  146. Murphy*

    My boss will frequently not come into the office and not tell me, sometimes for an entire week. Occasionally, stuff is on his calendar so I can figure out where he is, but usually it’s not. I just figure out on Wednesday that he must be out all week. When he does this, people will sometimes ask me where he is. Even if I’ve heard through the grapevine where he is, if he hasn’t told me and it’s not on his calendar, I make a big show of telling people that I have absolutely no idea where he is.

    (I do add that he’s usually pretty responsive to email, because that is usually the case.)

    1. Jackwagon*

      I had a boss like that years ago. Turns out he was a coke head. Explained a lot about his behaviors.

    2. JustaTech*

      I had a boss like this. You never knew where he was or if he’d show up to the lab, or if he was in his office (several floors up) or in one of *several* other institutions he had reasons to visit. And he was terrible about answering his phone. So you would just have to sit on a time-sensitive issue until he finally showed up.

      And then he would pull this stunt: I’ve just sat down to my lunch (soup) and he shows up “I need to show you this technique.” “Uh, can I finish my lunch?” “No.”

      1. Curmudgeon in California*

        I never ask “Can I finish my lunch?” to people like that. It’s always “Sure, after I’ve finished my lunch.”. If they insist “No, now”, it’s “I’m sorry, I need to finish my lunch first.” Threaten to fire me and I take it to social media.

  147. Incantanto*

    We’d just had a lab move and the qc department and the Ceos son were in argument r.e. placement of two ovens in the lab.

    Qc argument: put them in a place where a tube can be run to the fumehood so toxic fumes are removed.

    Sons argument: if you have them there it means one shelf above has to be moved and it looks untidy.

    The qc guys came in one morning to find the offending ovens had been moved without them being consulted after they had gone home.

    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      So…the company is letting employees breat he potentially toxic air? Yikes.

  148. JoJo*

    Decades ago, the Editor in Chief of our university’s student newspaper loved a head shot taken of her back when everything was still on film — no digital, we still had to lay out the paper by hand with wax etc. She started writing columns not even commenting on anything just to get that photo in the paper. One night I saw another editor snatch that tiny head shot from the production room while layout was happening, and it was kind of weird but whatever, maybe the photo people needed it, who knows. About a week goes by and she storms into the news room, face red, the editorial page editor behind her confused, the photo people apologetic — her head shot is nowhere to be found, nor can the negative be found. All that remains are some extra shots from the original shoot that she doesn’t like as much as the one that is gone.

    I never said anything to anyone and, to the best of my knowledge, no one but me and the culprit know.

  149. KayEss*

    I’ve told this story here before, but: I had a narcissist boss whose MO was to give her staff extravagent (but always somehow self-serving) gifts out of the blue and then be annoyed when we were, by her standards, insufficiently grateful for random crap we didn’t want or like. So for instance, she had expensive custom sports jerseys made for the business, each with our name and a number we chose on the back (side note: she obviously HAD to be number one)… and then got mad that several of us left them in our desks to put on for company events only, rather than wear them with great gusto and frequency in our personal lives. It was a pattern.

    Anyway, another thing she did was provide snacks and beer for the office, because she wanted very badly to be seen as a cool start-up boss instead of a desperate control freak. One time, she bought a big jug of chocolate-covered almonds from CostCo. That shit is delicious, so they disappeared quickly in an office of 20 people. But this was NOT OKAY—and instead of doing what a normal person would do and just… not buying any more expensive communal treats, she called an all-staff meeting about the Case Of The Almonds That Got Eaten Too Fast and announced that the next jug of chocolate-covered almonds would be rationed out daily by her buddy the payroll lady. If you desired chocolate-covered almonds, you went to the payroll office for your daily six, counted out into your palm like you were Oliver Twist receiving dollops of gruel.

    I was out of that job before than jug of almonds finished.

    1. Catsaber*

      LOL oh the idea of someone being so offended by snacks getting eaten TOO FAST is just hilarious for me. It’s all about the optics for narcissist bosses! (I know, I had one too)

    2. Iron Chef Boyardee*

      “the next jug of chocolate-covered almonds would be rationed out daily by her buddy the payroll lady. If you desired chocolate-covered almonds, you went to the payroll office for your daily six, counted out into your palm like you were Oliver Twist receiving dollops of gruel.”

      Did her buddy the payroll lady at least wear gloves while handling each individual chocolate-covered almond?

  150. Brownie*

    I came out from work one day to find someone parked over the line and so close that I couldn’t get in the driver’s side of my car. So I wrote a note saying something like “Sorry about all the scratches and dents on your truck, you parked so close I had to really push the door open to get into my car” on their windshield and then crawled into my car from the passenger side. Never touched their truck at all, so I hope they spent a few minutes in frantic inspection of their truck for non-existent damage.

    1. Jackwagon*

      My friend’s pet peeve, for whatever reason, are cars parked too close or over designated parking lines. He constantly complains about this when parking… I finally said …how can you be certain that the car previously parked in the space you’re trying to park in now, or previous car parked on the other side of offending vehicle hadn’t forced this car to park the way they did?

    2. JustaTech*

      My SO traveled to a remote site for work and ended up renting an enormous truck. Like, the biggest pickup I’ve seen outside a construction site. Naturally, he has no idea how to park this behemoth. At the end of the visit he comes out to his (admittedly) terribly parked rental truck to find a business card tucked into the driver’s side window.

      Ford 3:50
      And the Lord sayeth, you park like a f*cking moron.

      (My SO thought it was hilarious.)

  151. Fergus*

    I had a group employees that would not talk to me for some unknown reason. In 1997 I worked in NJ at a nudie bar called The Fantasy Showbar. The bar would have a meeting every Monday for all the girls, about 100. Not one would talk to me for any reason. My thought was that’s why they had to take their clothes off to get attention, they had 0 personality.

    1. lawschoolmorelikeblawschool*

      Was this some kind of weird establishment that paid employees in attention? That’s so weird, as most such jobs are done in exchange for cash. I wonder why they didn’t like you.

    2. L. S. Cooper*

      I can hardly imagine why these women didn’t want to talk to you. It certainly couldn’t have had anything to do with your assumption that none of them had any personality, and reducing them to just their appearance?

      1. Petty Teapot Manufacturer*

        Also couldn’t possibly be the obvious disdain for them and their occupation. It’s hard to imagine why Fergus could possibly rub anyone the wrong way.

        1. L. S. Cooper*

          Yes, I do fear that this one may remain a mystery until the end of days.

      2. Armchair Expert*

        It is definitely more likely that a hundred women all had no personality then it is that Fergus made himself unlikeable.

  152. Anonymous to Avoid Identification*

    One co-worker called IT to prove I was lying when I said I did not have a shared file open. She made me stand there and listen on speakerphone when she demanded that IT tell her who had it open – they did. It was co-worker herself (too many windows to notice).

    The same co-worker couldn’t stand the fact that I locked my spare shoes (winter weather) and sometimes my purse in a drawer she couldn’t access. She was a born snoop who couldn’t stand boundaries (in her mind, not sharing meant I was hiding a juicy secret!).

    She waited until I went on vacation, then claimed a file was missing and she had looked everywhere – EVERYWHERE! – for this critical information, but the only option was to summon security to unlock my private desk drawer in my absence. I have a mental picture of her standing eagerly next to the security guard waiting to find out what I kept in the drawer only to have it opened to discover – absolutely nothing.

    At that point, I didn’t trust her very much, so I had taken my spare shoes home with me before I left on holiday. The drawer was totally empty.

    She had to tell me what she’d done when I returned because there were too many witnesses to the break in. I asked if she had ever found the critical file she needed – and what was it that was so urgent – and she just said it was taken care of and slunk away.

    I brought my shoes back and kept right on locking that drawer.

  153. Lumen*

    Worked with a person who was pretty widely understood to be toxic, but it took years for the CEO to recognize it and stop promoting them. As soon as they got any pushback, they got angrier and angrier at work. Regularly ranted about coworkers when leading their team meetings (complaining to your direct reports about other people they work with: great look).

    When they finally quit, they baked and brought in this incredibly over-the-top fancy-flavored and carefully frosted layer cake with a hand-maid bunting banner that said “2 WEEKS NOTICE”. They tried to convince everyone that it was a nice gesture (they were pretty convinced of their own cleverness and that everyone in the office was too stupid to see the passive aggression). I’m not sure they realized how obvious the pettiness was.

    1. Bunny Girl*

      I love to bake and I’ve actually always wanted to quit with a cake. I’m not sure if it would be to be petty or not, but I just always thought it would be funny.

      3. Works in IT*

        I didn’t quit with a cake but on my last day I bought a cake, had someone from t

        1. Works in IT*

          From the bakery write “‘s last day” on it and left it in the break room. It was eaten quickly.

  154. LaDeeDa*

    I had worked at this company for about 1 year, and it was so cold. Not normal office cold, but COLD. I would wear a big heavy duster length sweater over my regular clothes, fingerless gloves, a pashmina, and I had a heater- my nose was red, and my lips were blue all the time. At one point I walked around and noticed that every person in a cubicle had their winter coat on, a blanket over their legs, a heater, gloves, scarves… it was ridiculous. So I emailed facilities and asked if they could check the heat in our area. The tech came over and he got on a ladder and climbed 10 feet in the air to take a temperature reading of the air coming out of the vent. 10 feet up. Up there it was 72F (22C) degrees, and I said: “No, you need to check the temperature down here, where we all are.” He did and the temperature was 63F (17C)!! I took a photo of him on the ladder and each of the temperature readings.
    I got an email from the head of facilities telling me it was all working fine- the standard temperature is 70 degrees. I emailed him back with a photo of the guy taking a temperature reading at the vent, the two different temperatures, several white papers and research on the optimum working temperatures, and photos of the people in the office wearing winter coats.
    The heat was adjusted in that area. We were still cold, but my teeth were no longer chattering.

    1. Katherine*

      At OldJob, a satellite branch of a large, nationwide company, my manager’s annual bonus calculations included a deduction for expenses (office supplies, utilities, etc.) so he would TURN OFF THE WATER HEATER to save on electricity, thereby increasing his bonus at the end of the year, leaving our entire branch with only cold water in all the faucets!

      He did turn on the water heater when the big wigs were vising our location, though.

      1. jb*

        Passive aggressive thing to do would have been to quietly break the knob one normal day, so he couldn’t turn it back on the next time he wanted to.

    2. Shoes On My Cat*

      At Old Job I worked Saturdays when that area of the offices was officially closed, except myself and a few managers catching up on work. To save money, they turned off the heat and for ‘safety reasons’ we were not allowed space heaters-though the managers had them but could close their office door & hide their use. Dress code was professional business (for women-suits with pants or skirts with pantyhose-and tights were verboten/Men had to wear ties with their suits, etc). So one WINTER I’m typing away and realizing that I am making an aweful lot of mistakes in my typing, which is not standard. Takes me a bit to realize my fingers are SO FREAKING COLD THEY ARE TOO NUMB TO TOUCH TYPE. I call engineering and get the run around that saving money, no one else there, etc. And that if I was cold I should just jump up and down for a bit to warm up. I told him that I wear his size in shoes so if he would kindly come up to my area, put my high heels on and demonstrate, I would be happy to follow his suggestion. –The heat was turned on within five minutes. (I did tell his boss about this and learned that engineer had decided to do this on his own. Chief Engineer took awhile to explain this though as he knows me and was in hysterics at the image of the conversation. I believe that Christmas, there was a White Elephant gift exchange in that department and one of the gifts was a cheap pair of high heels.)

  155. Mimi Me*

    Just remembered one that is specific to me and not the company / co-workers. I used to manage a nationally known, but still small-ish woman’s clothing store. The customers tended to be socially / financially affluent. There was this one woman who would come in regularly. She was incredibly rude and disrespectful every time she was in our store. She had come in with her teen daughter once, tried on about half the store, and left the fitting room a disaster. Daughter asks if they should clean it up. Woman acts horrified and tells her no, to remember who they were and that they were above the smaller people. I was furious, but she was buying a ton of stuff so I bit my tongue. Three months later same woman comes into the store. This is her first visit since the fitting room moment. She has bags of clothes – most with tags still on them, but no receipt. She wants to return them. The policy was 30 days, with receipt for full refund. No receipt meant store credit only and at the price currently in the system. She starts telling me that her husband has left her, that she doesn’t want to go back to work so she wants to return the clothes and use that money for a while (substantial amount folks!). My glee was almost visible. I honestly tell her that I can’t give her cash, that the lack of receipt means that I could only give her store credit for about 1/3 of what she paid for the clothes, and then I hand her an application and tell her that she could apply there because she has the perfect wardrobe to be one of the small people. Her expression lives in my head over 25 years later!!! GLORIOUS!

  156. just a random teacher*

    I once worked in a (dysfunctional in lots of other ways as well) school that had a policy that hats were not allowed to be worn in classrooms, but could be worn in the hallway. Some students pointed out to me that one of the consequences of this policy was that they tended to hang out in the hallway until it was precisely time to get to class so they could wear their hats. I decided that I’d start enforcing the hat policy at the bell rather than at the door so as to encourage students to get to class as they came to school in the mornings rather than wait in the hallway in a large, poorly-supervised clump.

    One of the other teachers was so upset by this that she actually left her classroom and walked up a flight of stairs to come into my classroom so as to enforce the classroom hat policy on my students before school! I mean, sure, technically they were not supposed to be wearing hats in the classroom, but they were sitting quietly at their desks during a time they were not required to even be in the building. At least my principal agreed that she was the one who was being ridiculous when I told him about the whole thing.

  157. Mail it yourself*

    At an ex-job, mail had to be taken out and put in a mailbox (the post office delivered mail, but would not pick it up). The outgoing mail basket was by the door. Anyone could take it when they left. But the jerk Associate Director insisted it was my job. He skirted a grey area of appropriateness in a lot of ways (which eventually let to his termination), which added to my bristling at this. I didn’t understand why everyone couldn’t just check the basket and grab mail anytime they left the office. At one point there were several pieces of mail that I knew were his personal mail. Not bills or anything critical, like postcards advertising his new art opening or something. I took them with me when I left work “to mail” and threw them in the trash at my subway stop.

  158. Catsaber*

    I’ve shared this before, but a former boss of mine made a lot of petty rules about stuff that did not matter at all – such as, she made us go by the wall clock instead of our computer clocks because she was convinced we were trying to leave ~2 minutes early from work. She also made a rule that we couldn’t “rush out the door” right at 5pm because it hurt her feelings (“it’s like you’d rather be at home than at work!” she said).

    Nothing about our roles truly required such rigid adherence to an 8-5 schedule, but she was convinced we were all trying to steal precious minutes from the company. Also she wasn’t happy that we weren’t utterly devoted to work.

    1. Vermonter*

      Did we work at the same place? We had to clock out on old fashioned punch cards despite being, ostensibly, salaried, and the big boss sent everyone a scathing email about not clocking out 2 minutes early. Also an industry where strict 8-5 (with no lunch break!) was not really necessary.

      1. Catsaber*

        We didn’t have punch cards or anything to track our time – we were classified as exempt, and the nature of our never required us to stay late. She just wanted us to appear as desperately devoted to our workplace (private university) as she said she was. Except she was never on time and took loooong lunches!

    2. Peaches*

      My current boss is like this! The irony of it all is that she is a salaried employee and takes total advantage of it (our hours are 7:30-4:30, and she has literally never arrived before 8:00. She also regularly takes two hour lunches). To clarify, she’s actually in a position where she needs to be there before 8:00; people are constantly frustrated by her absences. Anyway, if one of the hourly employees try to leave the office at 4:29, she will literally shout from her office, which is by the front door “woah, hey, what time is it?” Like your former boss, she frequently makes comments about how everyone “rushes out the door right at 4:30.” Um, yeah. That’s because we all showed up on time, unlike you.

  159. Audrey*

    I worked at a dysfunctional market for a few years. We had farmer tenants on the property, some of whom were married to board members and got away with breaking rules the other tenants had to follow.

    One of these farmers repeatedly put her flower displays past yellow lines in the parking lot she wasn’t supposed to pass, and the other tenants didn’t pass. I had my husband take pictures of the infraction so they didn’t see me doing it, and mailed blown up photos to the village who issued them a letter to move their displays back.

  160. LizA*

    I had a boss who, while never openly mean/hostile, just clearly didn’t like me much and was happy to see the back of me when I gave my notice. I had been there almost five years, in an office with fewer than 8 people. On my last day, the boss breezily told me “oh, I forgot to get you a going-away gift, sorry!” (Such gifts were typical and it’s not like I hadn’t given ample notice.)

    Soon after, the (lovely) Finance lady came over, gave me a nice little gift, told me “I’m so glad you’re getting out of this place,” and advised me never to use that boss as a reference.

  161. Vermonter*

    There was a man at my old job who thought he was my manager. He was not. Let’s call him my not-boss.

    After years of dealing with his petty, power hungry harassment, I decided it was time for a new job. I didn’t ask him for a reference because he wasn’t my boss. I didn’t even tell him I was leaving; I just announced my departure on the local industry listserv so people would know my position was open for applications.

    When confronted, I said to him, “oh, they offered [almost double his current salary], so I couldn’t turn it down!” (This was true.) To his boss I said, “my not-boss is the reason I’m leaving, bye.”

    Pettiest thing I’ve seen done? My actual manager left early on my last day of work so he wouldn’t have to give me an exit interview. (He was known for never, ever missing work.)

    1. London Calling*

      *Pettiest thing I’ve seen done? My actual manager left early on my last day of work so he wouldn’t have to give me an exit interview. (He was known for never, ever missing work.)*

      Yup, have been there. I was temping (temping! temps leave all the time!) and I told my manager I was leaving, giving more than the week’s notice I was required to give. From that day on she looked through me, and after lunch on my last day she disappeared to ‘meetings.’ Another colleague with whom I’d worked closely and helped out said ‘Oh yes, today’s your last day, isn’t it?’ at 3.30 just as I was leaving after wrapping up and handing over. No, they didn’t give me as much as a good bye card or look up as I left.

      1. Salymander*

        I worked for a friend of the family for several years, as a hostess/cashier in a restaurant. I left when I started university. This place employed a lot of high school students, so every year they would lose staff members who went off to college. My boss felt that, as a friend of the family, he was entitled to more *loyalty* from me than that.

        My last day was also the last day for several other college bound teenagers. Our boss threw a going away party after work for everyone who was going off to college except me. He made a point of mentioning that I was not one of the honorees, and told me that I was on clean up detail after the party.

    2. HB*

      I was in a bad work situation once and my contract wasn’t renewed. You get lots of notice (3 months) so it was very, very awkward. My boss was extremely non-confrontational (part of the problem – not managing terrible, toxic employees). I was going to announce I was leaving in my last two weeks to everyone else. I came back from a pre-scheduled vacation to find out unbeknownst to me or anyone else in the department, my boss had booked a 2+ week vacation in my last weeks. He wasn’t there and he gave me no instructions on what to do with my remaining work. I left detailed notes and instructions on everything that was ongoing because I am a good person. But I will never forget his cowardice in peacing out and not even emailing me to communicate anything in my last days!

  162. Passive Aggressive 101*

    One of my coworkers was really annoyed that people didn’t change the roll of toilet paper, but would just put the new one on top of the dispenser. She laminated a multiple page instruction manual complete with pictures on how to change the roll and hung it next to the toilet. Pretty sure no one touched that germ fest.

    1. Parcae*

      The toilet paper roll is my office pet peeve! Be right back, I need to type up an instruction manual.

    2. The Dread Pirate Buttercup*

      That’s… impressive. Gah.

      My pettiest thing witnessed was also toilet-paper-based — the two-page, single-spaced note posted in the bathroom about how someone was stealing toilet paper and the perp should “put it back!!!!!!!” Put. Used. Toilet. Paper. Back. I’m not sure how we were supposed to recover it? (This was just a random worker who [he thought] anonymously wrote this. I confirmed with the person who stocked TP that it was being used at the rate of approximately one roll per bum per week, which is pretty close to standard usage.) If I ever re-activate my Facebook account, it will be to recover the picture I took of that note.

      The pettiest thing I’ve ever done: my company’s client had several branches that would post discount codes, but refuse to explain when to use them (for example, is the “university” discount for students, employees, professors, people who are doing business with them, alums, people who are coming to see their team in games?). I said to my manager, “Look, if you’re serious about my job being getting [customers] in [product], when money is the objection, I’m going to start offering these discounts to those who seem to genuinely qualify. Our calls are heavily monitored by the client, and if how I’m using these codes is a problem, they can clarify.” He shrugged and said “fine.” Eighteen months later, after consistently not only having the some of the top sales volume in my department, but the highest per-call sales and the highest estimated net profit (“loss leaders” are a thing because they work, I guess), I was summarily fired for this. Unfortunately, the manager who signed off on this had moved on, and I had no documentation, so I had no way to contest this, and the company was so toxic I kind of didn’t want to.

      Amusingly, the client recently tracked me down, reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in working for them. Sometimes pettiness pays.

  163. bubba g*

    Each year, a bookkeeper at my school would send out ridiculous videos she made on how to fill out the supply order form. She would put in a secret code word at the end of the video that had to be used on your order form, proving that you watched the video. No code = order wouldn’t go through. I always filled out my order form correctly, but I had to sit through this &^%#!! video every year so that I could get the code send in my order. There were no options for FFWding. No other bookkeeper in the district did this.
    Upon checking further, no staff were filling out their forms incorrectly, she just wanted to exert control, and apparently had nothing better to do than make videos. If someone made an simple error, such as writing the date incorrectly, she would reject the order with an admonishment to watch the video, instead of fixing and obvious typo. Absolutely maddening.

  164. NopeNopeNope*

    A colleague Dirk once licked every single stress toy on the desk of irritating Bobbert who had briefly stepped out of office. We all watched Dirk do this but nobody ever told irritating Bobbert on account of him being supremely irritating.

  165. Ella Vader*

    Long ago in the dark ages when mainframe computer time was assigned an imaginary dollar-value and undergrads only got a finite amount unless we could justify some special computational need … when various classmates would finish the final-year assignments and leave town, they would entrust their account to a friend who could then use up the imaginary $50. This way I spent one friend’s unspent balance completely playing adventure all night in the lab (that text game with the twisty passages all alike.) And I went to use another friend’s account only to discover that someone else also had the password. I was annoyed by this – I don’t know why, it wasn’t like it was my account – and I looked to see what the other person had been doing. They’d been updating their resume. And it said that last work term they’d redesigned the HVAC system for a large warehouse. So I just changed warehouse to whorehouse. I never did find out whether that person had finished printing the resumes before I made the change.

    1. rocklobsterbot*

      I’d think the HVAC for a whorehouse would need to be a lot more complex

    3. irene adler*

      Excellent!

      Now the reader’s got to decide whether this is a typo or factual.

      1. wihewatr*

        Reminds me of a story a guy I know once told me. He was interviewing at a company, it was going well. At the very end, the interviewer said, I assume you meant to put “Willing to do SHIFT work” on your resume?

  166. Incognito Today*

    I have a relative (who shall remain nameless!) who was incredibly frustrated that someone kept stealing his yellow soda out of the break room refrigerator. He knew who was doing it, but the guy would just not stop.

    He finally drank the soda himself first, then replaced it with an entirely different fluid of the same color and put it back in the refrigerator.

    The thief apparently didn’t like the taste of the replacement fluid.

    No one ever stole his soda again.

    1. Ayup*

      I’m sitting here, mouth agape. Did he actually put pee back in the soda bottle or some other inane yellow liquid?!

  167. Dave's Not Here, Man*

    Anon for this, because sue-happy former coworker.

    After a former cow-orker sued me for defamation (I won), I went quietly nuclear on him. Some things I did:
    tuna juice in the vent of his truck,
    fish paste smeared on the CPU heat sink of his office computer (he really hated fish),
    repeatedly slightly loosened a valve core on one tire at the end of the day so he’d wake to a flat tire.
    he loved cruise control, so I’d disable the work rig cruise control on random times I knew he was going to be using it,
    this was in the time of pagers, I’d page him from payphones with random pay-to-talk numbers,
    hid a couple of random-activating electronic crickets in his office,
    and my Pièce De Résistance, when he was taking the afternoon off to fly to Hawaii for a week, I liberally rubbed his carry-on, which for some reason he’d brought into the office, with black powder and stuffed a couple of 9mm cartridges deep into a pocket. He missed his flight.

    1. AppleStan*

      I am so very angry I didn’t think of these things when I had a similar issue.

    3. MayLou*

      Some of these sound dangerous and illegal, not petty. There is such a thing as going too far, and I’d say putting someone at risk of having a car accident or being arrested on terrorism charges definitely falls into that category.

      1. Free Meerkats*

        I fail to see how a non-functioning cruise control puts one at risk of having an accident. It’s a convenience feature.

  168. NoName*

    Our department was moved. One of the more senior people refused to move because his new office didn’t have a window, and he deserved (although strictly speaking, by seniority, he didn’t). He made his complaints known at great length to everyone in earshot, whether or not they could allocate office space. Eventually the person who was supposed to move into his old office kicked up a big enough stink with a senior enough administrator that he was told to be out of the old office by Date, or she (the administrator) would personally see to it that everything in it was removed at his own risk of loss or damage. She’d have done it, too. But he still refused to accept his new office. After a complicated game of Musical Offices, he managed to get one that had previously been occupied by two lowly admins – for one person, it was the biggest and nicest of all the offices available, including that of the head of our group and a couple other more senior people. It had a window. Nothing else mattered. At least one of the admins got his official office – much larger than anything normally allocated to an admin, even if it did lack a window.

    Sometimes petty diatribes work.

    1. Anonsi the spider*

      Many years ago I worked as a contractor at a small branch office (= not an important place) of a very large co. Manager of the least important department threw a snit when he was moved to a basement office. Very large office, but no windows. The compromise: wall to wall, floor to ceiling drapes were installed on the “outside” wall. Because Important Managers had windows.

  169. Master Bean Counter*

    The time I was a pawn in a petty family squabble–also known as the reason I will never work for a family business again:

    I was looking to find a job in the area I’m in now before I officially relocated down here. I found one, with blazing red flags that I ignored, mostly because, hey I’d be moving and have a paycheck when I got here.
    Business was owned by Larry (25%), Larry’s son-Curly (50%), and Larry’s son-in law, Moe (25%).

    Curly ran the business, Moe was a manager, and Larry was working part time as he was semi-retired. Shortly after I started Curly started walking the line between being friendly and being “very” friendly. I was having none of the flirting crap and shut it down fairly quickly.

    40 days into this job I discover that Curly is doing some shady stuff. I played it off like I just didn’t understand what was going on and laid out a correction in the books for it. I then cornered Moe and basically asked him WTF? I was hired to find this and hopefully correct Curly’s shady ways. Dude WTF, that would have been handy knowing about that before I came.

    Anyway for the next two years the cycle was this: Moe or Larry would have me “improve” a process. I would find shady stuff–they knew what was going the whole time and never said a word. I was the hired bad guy who could get no help or training from Curly to do my job properly. Finally at this point Curly has decided he has had enough of me. Do you think he’d just out right fire me? Oh heavens no. He started taking me to down town petty town.
    First he took away my ability to do journal entries in the computer system, because he wanted that back. No, he was tired of me reclassifying his “expenses” properly. Then he locked me out of not one, but both company credit card accounts. He was going to handle all reconciliations at this point. Otherwise know as, if I can’t see the “expenses” I couldn’t do anything about them.
    During this time my parents needed the services of the company, that they were supposed to get the employee discount on, it says so in the handbook. But Moe declined my request for the price adjustment.

    Thankfully I found my escape shortly after all of this. I gave my notice and Curly became my best friend wanting to know all about the new place. He then texted me for every imaginable thing for the next two weeks after I left. I replied to none of them.

  170. Dis guy*

    Someone in the office changed the presets on our office copier from “Tarran Terrific” to “Tarran Terrible” because they didn’t like Tarran.

  171. onceinalifetime*

    I had a coworker for a while who was a real Eeyore… She moped around, sighed audibly, was constantly unhappy and usually complaining. Working around her was not enjoyable and we were a staff of four, so it was close quarters. I typically just ignored all her cues of misery, but one day I just couldn’t take it. That morning when I asked how she was and she responded “oh, fine” in a tone that suggested she really wasn’t at all, I asked “Are you sure? You sound like something’s bothering you.” I meant it pretty sincerely, hoping that maybe if she opened up a bit, she could lighten up and I could feel more understanding. Instead she got angry, stormed away, and spent the rest of the morning grumbling under her breath in my direction. I later noticed she’d changed her computer background to a cartoon that said “stupid people drive me crazy” and she went home “sick” that afternoon. It was the last time I tried being nice to her.

    1. Jennifer Juniper*

      I would yell, “Good morning! Happy Monday!” at the top of my lungs at her – before she got her coffee. I am quite good at weaponizing cheerfulness.

  172. MuseumChick*

    I work in the history field and you would not believe the amount of pettiness you see 1) In history in general 2) Between researches, academics, and industry professionals. 3) Between museum staff and problem volunteers are are always impossible to get rid of.

    Some favorite examples:

    1) In the elections between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Jefferson accused Adams of have the genitals of both men and women. In retaliation Adams began a rumor in the newspapers that Jefferson had died so there no point in voting for him.

    2) “Enthusiasts” of any area of history *always* believe they know more then academics and/or museum professionals. I watched an interview with an expert on General Sherman who told many stories for of “Civil War Buffs” who insisted they lived on a home that had been raided by Sherman’s army. When he would point out that Sherman’s army never in fact was anywhere near where the home was located the person would get pissed and argue at length that the expert was wrong.

    3) Had a friend get admonished by her museum director because she had taken a quick phone call from her mom. A long time volunteer over hear it and felt her tone towards her mom was “disrespectful”.

    2. lawschoolmorelikeblawschool*

      Do you happen to either (1) watch Drunk History, or (2) listen the podcast, the Dollop? Both are full of wonderfully silly stories like this about history.

      1. MuseumChick*

        Yes! Love them both! I’m way behind of both but yes, they are both great! And full of wonderful pettiness. This is why it’s sad so many people think history is boring. It’s little just a giant ball of pettiness, throwing awesome shade, and rage quitting.

  173. Madeleine Matilda*

    Toastergate – There was a toaster in our break room. We used the toaster just as we used the refrigerator and microwave. Turns out a staff member in another office down the hall had bought the toaster for his personal use which no one knew. Because other people were using it he got annoyed and moved it to another break room.

    1. cmcinnyc*

      Ooo, we may be coworkers. One day very early I was alerted that the toaster was missing. I had always assumed the toaster was from Facilities, but no, it was personal property and its disappearance was a crisis. I had to walk all over the building on toaster inquiry. Turns out another department was steamed that there was no toaster in *their* breakroom so they took it! I had to steal it back because they didn’t believe me. The offended coworker took it home.

      1. StaceyIzMe*

        Toastergate! (Followed by Jamgate, Jellygate, Buttergate and Nutellagate…)

    2. lawschoolmorelikeblawschool*

      The gubernatorially appointed chair of my entity once loudly stormed into the breakroom/kitchen, grabbed the Keurig machine, waltzed through the office yelling that it was off limits now and put it in their office, because one culprit had (unwittingly) been using a refillable pod which caused grounds to get into the next users coffee. Our lead attorney told them they had to put it back.

  174. AnonGoodNurse*

    This was several years ago – I had a particularly terrible boss. He was bad at managing, didn’t know our area of law at all, gave terrible advice, terrible instructions and was brutal to anyone competent who would make him look bad. For a while I was his target and we ended up having to get HR and my grandboss involved. Lovely.

    One day, I was sitting in my office talking to a colleague and I turned to look at my calendar. On the metal tray above the calendar was a magnet that said, “Sometimes, she kind of enjoyed working for an idiot.” I burst out laughing. I was so startled and found it hilarious. But I never found out who put it there. I had several close friends who also thought it was great, but hadn’t done. A few other candidates denied it also. My boss wasn’t well liked, so there was actually a large number of people who might have done it. But no one ever confessed. Eventually, I decided it was probably my grandboss who did it, but there was no way I could ever ask her.

    As for petty, I left the magnet hanging up.

    1. Damn it, Hardison!*

      I love this! I have a couple of these magnets on my desk – one says “she had no intention of suffering along” and the other says “I need more money and power and less [poo] from you people.” Occasionally in conversation with a coworker I just point at them.

    2. Jaid*

      I have magnets that say “It’s not easy pretending to work this hard all day long” I can only please one person per day. Today, I chose me.” and “My cubicle is my secret land of make-believe”, featuring office ladies from the 40’s and 50’s.

    4. Curmudgeon in California*

      I really need to take up cross stitch and make a beautiful little tapestry that says “A lack of planning on your part does NOT constitute and emergency on my part!” just to hand at my open plan desk.

  175. LibbyG*

    This post is wrecking my productivity in the best possible way.

    I indulged in a satisfying pettiness. I’m in higher ed and our really terrible president was finally retiring. As the reception for new graduates after commencement I noticed that the outgoing pres was standing around with their spouse for quite a while; not one faculty person or student was talking to them.

    On my way out of the event I felt sort of obligated to go over and say something friendly about years of service or whatever, but as I drew closer I thought about the terrible, damaging decisions that had been made and changed my mind. I instead breezed briskly by with a cheery “Have a nice summer!” as if I were totally unaware of the retirement. It felt good.

  176. Proud University of Porridge Graduate*

    My most petty thing was actually sort of inadvertent. At my first ever ‘real’ job, my office was next to the break room and had a door that opened into it. There were two particular people that were many many many levels above me that used to sit and chat over their lunch breaks. For weird acoustical reasons, it was as if they were sitting on either side of me, carrying on the conversation through me. They weren’t loud, it was just something weird about the place they sometimes sat vs. where I was sitting. So, feeling uncomfortable about inadvertently eavesdropping, I would shut the door when it happened but never said anything because again, many many many levels above me. I found out years later that they both thought I was incredibly rude for shutting the door. Apparently, they both took is as me passive aggressively saying they were too loud.

  177. Youngin*

    When I first started as a construction supervisor (as a 24 year old female) I was covering for a co worker, for 2 months, on a job I had not been to yet at that point. I was constantly disrespected by the male subcontractors and their laborers because they didn’t like taking direction from a person 10-15 years younger than them, let alone a girl. There was one particular laborer that would constantly tell every one on the site that he could do whatever he wanted because I was his ‘wife’ in Spanish, assuming I couldn’t speak it. (This man was at least 20 years my senior). If I told him to do X, he would ignore me and tell all the people around I could never be mad at him even if he didn’t do his work because I was his wife and I could never get rid of him. Everyone knew I wasn’t, but he used that as a way to undermine me and try and make a joke of me on the job site.

    One of the basic rules he wouldn’t follow would be not to leave your lunch trash anywhere but the trash can. I would walk to the job site after lunch and see tons of orange peels and wrappers in the area he typically ate lunch, by the pool. One day I saw he left his lunch on the edge of the un-fishied pool (which he was also not allowed to do, hide your crap people! I’m paying you alot of money to make the clients job site look good). That morning he had once again tried to make me look like a fool so I causally walked to his lunch and nudged it into the pool, which was only a foot filled with nasty green algae and stagnant rainwater. He was NOT happy. But no one ever saw me do it. Every time I saw him leave his lunch where it wasn’t supposed to be, I would pick it up and dump it in the pool. I figured the least he owed me was an hour of peace during lunch, and if he had no lunch he would have to leave the job site. I did this for the whole 2 months I was there. He eventually found out it was me, but only because I told him after I fired him officially for telling me he would “spank the first woman he saw if he didn’t have the materials he needed to finish the job”. I told my boss the second he said that and got the go ahead to fire him 45 seconds later.

    My “BTW I was the one throwing out your lunch everyday” while he was leaving that day made me feel so powerful, and petty. hehehe

    1. Bostonian*

      Awesome!

      For GoT fans, this is totally a Lady Olenna “by the way, it was me” moment. Badass!

    2. Sleepytime Tea*

      Oh god, please tell me you at least said it in spanish so that he knew you knew everything he was saying all that time.

  178. Cube Farmer*

    I didn’t like a VP of a company I was working for in the mid 90s. He was cocky, arrogant, and generally did very little work. It was the early years of the Internet and of having our computers connected through cables (no servers) and security was nonexistent. During the staff meeting on my last day, I gave a status report on all my projects and then, I’m front of about 15 people, presented the VP with a CD, announcing that I had backed up all the porn he had on his computer in case he wanted it all in one place. Super-conservative owner was not happy.

    2. JustaCPA*

      Did he actually have porn on his computer or was it ALL fabricated?? Inquiring minds want to know!

  179. Lava Is Pointy*

    I was on maternity leave, and when I got back I was pulled into leading a project that had launched a few months prior. I scheduled one-on-ones with all the leads (typical ‘get to know ya’) sessions, and in my first meeting with one of the leads, she pulled out her “Shit List” and started going through every grievance she had with every other person on the team. The red flags were the size of buildings.
    -This was my very first meeting with her
    -It was a hand-written list with each team member’s name and BULLETS under it of ways they had wronged her
    -It was literally titled “Shit List”
    -She was an independent contractor and had been on the project for less than 6 weeks
    -The document was over 20. pages. long.
    She spent the next hour going over each item line by line gleefully and flat out asked me what I was going to do to solve all these issues.

    1. CL*

      Please tell me you took the list from her hand, shredded it into tiny pieces, looked at her, smiled and calmly said, “Nothing.”

      1. Drew*

        Better yet, “I see one thing in common with all of these problems, so I think I can solve everything right now. Please clean out your desk.”

  180. Madeleine Matilda*

    Many years ago I worked in a small office of 6. We had a woman who was detailed to us from another much larger office. One day my boss, one of the best people I have ever worked with, was walking around with a birthday card for one of us. Now although our staff was small we were in a large two story facility spread out over a quarter of a city block so sometimes it was hard to find people if they were away from their desks. My boss couldn’t find our detailee to sign the card before our scheduled birthday gathering. Detailee filed a formal complaint with our agency against the boss for not having her sign the card. Lawyers had to get involved.

    1. irene adler*

      This one gives whole new meaning to the phrase “birthday suit”.

      (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

  181. inoffensive nickname*

    About 20 years ago, I got fired after 11 months of a particularly awful job as branch manager for a temp agency. My boss, the owner, failed to remove my name from the alarm company’s call list and over the course of a few months, I received frequent middle-of-the-night phone calls (before cell phones were popular) about an alarm going off at the company. Several times, I very politely informed the alarm company that I was no longer employed there and gave the owner’s name, and asked the alarm company to update their list. I called my prior employer twice, asking them to remove me from the alarm company’s list. My city has a hefty fine for frequent false alarms. The last time the alarm company called, I picked up the phone, acted worried about the call, told them to call the police and the owner would meet them at the business.

    They never called me again.

    1. 1234*

      That. Is. Awesome. You would think “fired people” would be the first people someone removed from the list of “point of contact for the alarm going off.”

      I wonder how much your old boss was fined…

      1. inoffensive nickname*

        Local fine at the time was $500 per incident. I just remembered that he had asked me a few months after I started whether I had ever been fired. When I told him I hadn’t, he said, “Everyone should get fired at least once in their life. I highly recommend it.” As much as I hate to admit it, that was one of the weirdest, but best pieces of life advice I’ve ever received: I learned first hand that getting fired is not the end of the world.

    2. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      This is so common, it’s one of those things people do not think to remove authorization to despite it being SECURITY!!

  182. Malarkey01*

    A coworker, Jane, was very protective of her lunch hour (and the culture of our office was you eat lunch when possible and sometimes that might be late or early to accommodate other meetings) so her attitude was out of sync with the office. We had a grand boss that liked to schedule meetings right at lunchtime, and when Jane asked for them to be moved for her lunch grand boss said just bring lunch in with you if needed.

    So Jane brought in a loaf of bread, peanut butter and jelly jars, and a tray of cheeses and proceeded to make everyone in the meeting a sandwich and cheese plate during the meeting. Neither she nor the grand boss blinked at this and for awhile we all had yummy veggie trays, sandwiches, and once a full salmon (like the ENTIRE grilled fish cut into servings conference table side) during lunchtime meetings. It was the craziest showdown ever- and both people were pretty miserable so it was great to watch.

    3. Jennifer Juniper*

      Sheesh! Maybe Jane was diabetic or needed to eat at certain times due to other medical issues/medication timing.

  183. Alternative Person*

    I work at a language school. My co-workers are untidy, leaving flashcards/books/papers over the shared space after classes. So I took to throwing them behind the bookshelf. When one of them pulled it out looking for stuff it was like a waterfall. It was satisfying.

    We all got involved in the classic passive aggressive game of hide the good crayons, though I ended up sidestepping it by buying my own set of coloured pencils and refusing to share (I got a big set with the fancy colours. The kids love it).

  184. Move Over Thrawn - Florian Munteanu is BIGGER than you!*

    At my last church employer, one of the pastors (who was very big on keeping people “in their place”, especially women), overheard me saying how much I dislike whistling. Really grates my nerves. Since then he made sure to do it as much as possible.

  185. WellRed*

    I did this more as a joke, but … we had a kid’s scooter here that a couple of people would ride around dinging the stupid bell every day. I stayed late one day so I could steal it and hid it away.

  186. ThePeaceLilyKiller*

    I had a mean, lazy, incompetent co-worker. I can usually get along with someone who has two of these traits, but not all three. I watered her favorite plant every morning before she came in–with salt water. She fretted over that plant the entire month it took it to die.

  187. Have you tried rebooting?*

    Every time I make the smallest of mistakes, my co-worker will email me, correcting me, and cc’ing our boss, even after she tells me verbally. It’s like having a four year old co-worker who tattles.

    1. Drax*

      oh yeah, my coworker likes to think that accounting and operations are essentially the same job and can be done in identical structured manners (ex: 7-10 we do Z, 10-12 We do X, and 12-3 we do Y, except on the 14 and the 30th we do W instead of X) which in small shops with no money to carry any inventory is 110% unrealistic – I’ve spent all day trying to track down a specialty item instead of the things I wanted to get done this week.

      So while trying to ‘help me manage my workload’ (y’know instead of just taking her job she dumped on me back) she literally sat in a chair beside my desk and watched me work. Didn’t want to learn anything to help, she literally just stared at me working until I told her she can leave or I will and I won’t be coming back.

      We’ve had issues ever since.

  188. dawnsname*

    I had a boss (in a department of seven people) stop speaking to me for two years because I got pregnant…by my husband. Two other co-workers in the same department did not speak to each other for eight years because (before I got there), one told the other that she was being silly (the offended party could not remember the rest of the conversation, just the word silly). Fun times.

  189. ZuZu*

    I worked in a coffee shop in high school and college and often my manager would be ringing through customers on the register while I made the drinks. Any time he called a drink “special” (i.e. “Extra special non-fat caramel macchiato!”) it meant to make the drink decaf. He would say it in the nicest, friendliest tone possible, but it was always because he hated the customer. Moral of the story, if you want your caffeine, be nice to the baristas!

    2. Turtlewings*

      This is one I can’t get behind. It is just not cool to ever, ever tell someone you’re giving them X thing to ingest when it’s actually Y. You don’t have any idea what you could be doing to them. What if that person was depending on the caffeine to keep them awake during a long drive? What if they’re allergic to the chemicals in decaf? (Yes, that’s a real thing.) The other way around has even more horrifying potential — if you give someone with a heart condition unexpected caffeine, it could kill them. Give people what they’ve ordered and paid for, or you’re the jerk, not them, no matter how rude they were to you.

  190. lailaaaaah*

    My manager at a very toxic company last year refused to travel to our Area Manager’s office on his birthday, because the expenses would’ve eaten into our office’s bottom line. He suggested we come over the next week- AM refused, because that was the birthday of her favourite team member, and she didn’t want him to have to ‘share his big day’.

    My manager said he still wouldn’t make his team make the trip to her office twice, and so AM spent the rest of that afternoon AND EVENING calling him to scream at him about how horrible and disloyal he was. Then when we went to her office next Monday, she told everyone not to talk to us.

  191. PettyPetty2x4*

    I once worked a soul-crushing job in a very toxic place. The company was having some financial struggles, and they were doing a lot of hasty layoffs and trying to guilt everyone into saving as much money as possible. I finally found another job, after 8 years, and I gleefully put in my 2 weeks’ notice. The place had gotten so stingy in the past 2 years, that they completely stopped buying office supplies. A lot of people brought their own and kept them locked in their desks, but the remaining supplies were hoarded often and there was a lot of drama surrounding the sharing of these supplies. The office only had one good, heavy-duty stapler, and our office produced reams and reams of paper reports needing said stapler. It sat in a place of honor in the middle of the department, and screaming matches erupted if it was moved even an inch from it’s spot. Taking it back to your desk, for even a moment, was career suicide.

    I staying late on my very last day in the office, and I took that stapler with me when I left for the last time. I have it at my desk at home, and I barely ever use it, but it’s my trophy of pettiness. I was underpaid by 30% there, lied to when I brought it up to management, and pressured to donate my time to the company “off the books” all the time. I now have a much better job and a really great heavy-duty stapler.

    4. Lynn Whitehat*

      I used to work at a company that decided to stop providing coffee and coffee makers. So instead of everybody taking 5 minutes to get a cup of coffee from the break room, everybody built a 45-minute Starbucks run into their day. Now tell me how much you’re saving on coffee?

      Remember that scene in “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”, where the sister brews a cup of coffee and then pours it out every Sunday? And the mom lets her, because she wants her daughter to have the luxury of not counting every penny every minute of the day, and coffee is so cheap? I thought about it a lot.

      1. Major Caffeine Deficiency*

        I was a military officer in [unspecified country] which over the course of my career gradually tightened the budget to the point where we were no longer provided with free tea and coffee making supplies in the office (and we’re talking teabags and instant coffee prior to that, nothing fancy). Not sure how many cups of tea you’d have to not-drink before you could afford a fighter aircraft …

        1. Mad Mathematician*

          Lets do the math. If you have 50 people in your office, and they don’t have one cup of coffee per working day (based on 260/year), at the price of $1/cup, my calculations say about 6,200 years. For a fighter jet worth $81 million (Googled it). Halve that if everyone doesn’t drink two cups per day. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going without coffee for that long.

  192. Holy Carp*

    Many years ago, my toxic misogynistic workplace used to order new merchandise by hand-writing orders on paper forms backed with carbon paper. The original was snail-mailed to the manufacturer and the carbon copy was kept in a file box in the office. When the merchandise arrived, the carbon copy would be pulled and the items checked against it.
    When I came to the conclusion my soul had been crushed enough at this job, I decided I’d just up and quit at the end of my planned vacation, without any new job in the offing. I was on the verge of a breakdown. So my last day at work I took every opportunity to pull random orders from the file box and throw them in the garbage. A colleague with whom I remained friendly told me later the nasty manager couldn’t understand why they were receiving so much stuff without orders in the file.

    1. irene adler*

      Hoping someone suggested to that manager that they don’t have to pay for merchandise not ordered by the company.

  193. NunyaBeeswax*

    I worked as a teacher. Stated hours were 8-12 and 1-4. I was in daily by 7 and frequently worked through lunch. One afternoon in my second or third year in this job, i had a terrible headached and asked if i could leave at 3:50 – all of my work was done and i was just waiting out the clock. My boss said sure and told me to feel better.

    The next morning I came into a sick leave form for .04 of a sick day. I caled boss and said surely all the extra time i worked routinely would allow me to take those 10 minutes without penalty. She said no, the stated hours are explicit.

    The next day, my desk phone rang at 7:30. I answered and it was boss. As she started to tell me why she was calling I interjected and said that I would call her back at 8:00 as the work hours were explicit. She told me i was being petty.

    I was being petty. And it felt great.

  194. Gymmie*

    Not me, but a manager friend of mine at the same company had booked a conference room every week. Apparently, a VP (not hers) was annoyed she had booked out so much time, so he printed out all the months of reservations and put the whole stack in her bosses mailbox. Hahahaha

  195. Anti-petty*

    Maybe this is the opposite of pettiness…shutting someone up by being agressively nice.

    A coworker used to constantly complain about not making enough money. To dramatize her situation she would claim that she didn’t have enough money to eat lunch on a given day, even though she would often go out for morning coffees at fancy coffee shops. A coworker finally walked her to the grocery store and bought her groceries. She was incredibly embarassed because it turns out she *did* have enough money for lunch, she just wanted to complain.

    1. Edie*

      Actually I do that as well, and it’s a passive aggressive tactic in some ways. In other ways no one but the target knows what you’re doing haha!

      Nothing pisses a person off than if they hate you and you are super nice all the time.

    2. Jennifer Juniper*

      I would have asked if she needed help applying for food stamps and given her resources for hunger services in our area – because I would have taken her at her word and been worried about her!

  196. Miranda*

    Took part in some malicious compliance. Boss told me to cc her on everything. I did. After two weeks I stopped bc she started making passive aggressive comments to me.

    Also, at the same job, I was told the big boss knew a lot about computers. Well, a lot of directories were open, including the back up of deleted files. No, I didn’t delete everything or anything incredibly important. But I did delete certain resources/contacts I had provided to the agency out of the goodness of my heart. Gone from the server entirely. This was the day I quit, btw.

  197. ragazza*

    I used to write some external reports at my company and in a former boss’s bio, he said he was an “award-winning writer.” This boss was not only toxic and manipulative, he was a terrible writer (which didn’t stop him from editing me of course). I don’t know what award it was but it had to be some rinky-dink thing. So I deleted it from his bio whenever I did one of those reports.

  198. HigherEd Person*

    I left an AWFUL AWFUL job, where I was responsible for recruiting and enrolling people into 3 very tiny Graduate Teapot Studies programs. When I left, I threw out all my paper files of things I had in progress (everything was backed up online), because I knew my horrendous boss had no idea how to use the online system.
    They had the poor sweet admin call me about 1.5 months later (when I was already happily in a new position in the same university) asking for help finding my files. “Gosh, I have no idea! Everything is in the online system, though!”

    #maybealittlemoremeanthanpetty

  199. It's mce*

    I left an OJ at a company I worked at for almost ten years for many reasons (toxic co-workers, cheaply-run, no more advancement). I got a job around the time when my boss and colleagues were also looking; they didn’t seem to care much for me anymore. When I gave notice, I made sure that I cleaned up my files, let important staff and contractors know and prepared directions for the issues coming out when I was gone. On my second to last day, my boss presented me with a card and told me that they were way too busy to plan anything for me (which was bull because they have taken other leaving colleagues out for lunch) and to contact them later on. Ironically, I found out my new job was one that a crazy ex-coworker who was laid off applied for and didn’t get it. So my old-boss added insult to injury, saying that it was going around that I took an opportunity anyway from someone who needed it more than I did.

    So, I came in earlier on my last day, before everyone else got there, and cleared out some notebooks that I would need from there for my new editorial job and also dumped out their water supply in the fridge.

  200. Sorry not sorry*

    I was one of a few young, female employees in an office dominated by old men. Several of them could’ve been my dad or grandfather, and they loved to remind me that they’d, “Been in this business longer than you’ve been alive.” The “sweetie” or “honey” at the end was implied, since they had learned they couldn’t actually say that anymore.

    One man in particular made a huge showing of passive-aggressive sexist comments. Things like cursing loudly as soon as I entered a room and then making a huge deal about it by apologizing for cursing in front of me. Calling me by my last name, but mispronouncing it no matter how many times I corrected him and asked him to call me by my first name. Suggesting booth babes for our tradeshows or scantily-clad women for our ad campaigns because it would “attract attention” to us, and sitting smugly while I rejected that idea in front of a whole room full of men who were used to having women as props in “the good old days”.

    Anyways, he was obviously bothered by the fact that I was taller than him. I had massive computer monitors, so every time he entered my office, I would intentionally sit directly behind the monitors so that he’d have to come around my desk to look me in the eye. Then I’d stand up to talk to him, towering over him. It clearly bothered him SO MUCH, but what was he going to do? Complain that the little lady stood up to speak to him and wore heels to tower over him? And he couldn’t go back around the desk because I’d just sit down behind my monitors. It really gave me a lot of satisfaction to match his stupid behavior with a clear-but-benign power move.

  201. nnn*

    Back when I worked in fast food, we had a timer on our drive-thru, and we were supposed to get cars out of the drive-thru in under 1 minute.

    As part of this, we were supposed to ask cars to pull forward and park if their order isn’t immediately ready, and we’ll bring the order out to them.

    There’s this one regular who comes through every day, orders something that needs to be made to order, and then refuses to pull through and park. He’s singlehandedly throwing off our times and we’re getting yelled at by management all the time specifically because of him. (Unfortunately, he doesn’t come through at a predictable time every day so we can’t make the food in anticipation of his arrival.)

    So one day he comes in as usual, orders his special order as usual, sits in the window refusing to move as usual, so the front counter cashier decides to take matters into her own hands.

    When his order comes up, she loudly announces “I’ll take the special order out to the parked car!”

    Radiating brisk efficiency and carefully choreographing her movements so her gaze never falls on the drive-thru window where this guy is still sitting, she grabs the order from the chute, hustles outside to where the guy should be parked, then stops and looks around in utter baffled confusion that there are no cars parked there.

    The guy in the drive-thru sees what’s happening, so he brings his car over to where he should be parked. She lights her face up in delight and relief “There you are! I thought we’d lost you!” Hands him his order, wishes him a fantastic day, and hustles back inside.

    I wish I had her acting skills!

    5. Lalaroo*

      I really hate when they ask me to pull up though, so I empathize with that guy! Several times the employees have totally forgotten that I’m still waiting, and it’s so frustrating to see multiple cars behind me get their food and leave.

      Also, I feel like it’s kind of cheating to make people pull up so you can reset the timer. That customer you made pull up isn’t getting served faster, your timer is just not reflecting actual serving times now.

      2. Gramarye*

        That’s not true. The person who’s pulled up won’t get their food faster, but they’re also no longer preventing everyone behind them from getting their faster orders.

        It definitely sucks if it feels like the employees have forgotten about you – happened to me before – but also it sucks if you’ve just ordered french fries and the person in front seems to have requested the Epic Mealtime 100-burger special. Pulling up is just being considerate for others in the line.

  202. Our Parents Are Fighting*

    The most delightfully petty work thing I’ve ever seen happened when my Big Boss and my Grand Boss were both promoted, with Big Boss taking over Grand Boss’s old job, and Grand Boss slated to move to another floor with all the top dogs. Well, Grand Boss didn’t want to cede control over a project that Big Boss was now supposed to oversee, so here’s where Petty Thing #1 happens: Grand held the project meeting in their office and required Big Boss to attend, even though Big Boss had no earthly reason to be there.

    Big Boss responded with Petty Thing #2: They sat in the meeting circle with the rest of us (there were about eight people there) reading a newspaper, with the paper held high in front of them so they couldn’t see or be seen.

    Grand Boss pretended not to notice, but then asked Big Boss to weigh in on something, at which point Big Boss sloooowly lowered the paper just enough for their eyes to peer out over the top of the A section, answered the question, and then sloooowly raised the paper until they were hidden behind it again.

    At the time, I was in “If I don’t move, maybe they won’t see me” anxiety mode, but in retrospect, it was one of the most deliciously petty exchanges ever and it’s one of my favorite party anecdotes, esp. to people who know one or both of them.

  203. ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*

    Pollyanna was a shy, but dedicated, hardworking woman. Mariana was her bullying, extroverted boss. I got in trouble for talking too much to Pollyanna, which boggled both our minds as we were quite productive staff.

    Pollyanna, in those days, manually hole-punched various documents. For months, she saved up that confetti generated by the hole-puncher. Envelopes of them accumulated in her desk.

    One day, she gave me the sign: she was ready. Mariana left for lunch, and I still don’t know how no one saw us, and we emptied that confetti everywhere: on her desk, IN her desk, IN her shoes, everywhere. Sorry, we GLEEFULLY emptied that confetti.

    Then we calmly returned to our desks. And waited.

    Ohhhhhhhhh, Mariana was NOT pleased. Much raging and complaining ensued! And she couldn’t figure out who did it because Pollyanna was just so “meek” and “quiet.” I quit a year later and I’m sure she still didn’t know who did it.

    Watch out for the quiet ones…

    1. Toodie*

      I used to save those dots, and my boss used to leave his car door unlocked. I fed the dots into the vents inside his car, and set the fan to High. That was fun.

    4. Construction Safety*

      Anyone remember key punch cards? THAT was a lot of confetti!

      Muhahahahahahahah

  204. West*

    When I worked as a cashier at a retail store, if a customer was particularly rude, if they paid in cash I would give them what I called the “gross” change. The dollar bills that an earlier customer had pulled out of their bra or back pocket, still damp, the pennies that didn’t even look like pennies because they were so rusted through. Usually I would avoid giving the “bad” change to people by tucking it into my drawer at the bottom of the stack, but the mean customers got the gross stuff. If they were paying with a credit card, I would not explain which button to press to “approve” the amount and watch them push buttons until they figured it out, usually as they got more frustrated and kept swiping their card. It was the little things that would get me through the day…

  205. Delta Delta*

    I worked at a law firm run by toxic glass bowls. The culture did not include reviews. A boss told me one day that my billing had been disappointing for several years, and that he had meant to tell me but just hadn’t gotten around to it. This and other things made me get ready to give my notice. Not long before that, boss came to me and questioned me about a fee I charged a client, alleging it was too low. I sent him an email that, if printed, would be 3 pages, detailing in bulleted form and including dates and where applicable, voicemail timestamps, how I came to the fee based on my hourly rate. I spent more time on the email than I did on the case.

    His response was “thx.”

  206. snarkarina*

    I had to copyedit something for a tech writer that REFUSED to follow our style guide despite numerous reminders. Fed up, rather than deleting the second space after a period or inserting the serial comma in redline and allowing him to simply accept my changes, I actually used multiple comment bubbles with “remove second space,” “insert serial comma here,” “spell out this acronym on first use,” etc., etc.

    It got to the point that the comment bubbles ran off the end of the page, and sadly it didn’t make a difference; he wound up terminated a few months later because his writing wasn’t up to snuff.

  207. Freaky Friday Faculty*

    An hour after I left my last day at a public library, an anonymous staff member deleted my library card. I was next in line for a hold I had had for three months, too. >:( After that I had a friend make me a card with a fake name so it wouldn’t be messed with again.

  208. Penguin*

    A past coworker of mine was at one point put in charge of delivering an annual talk on proper security by employees (things like “company vehicles are to be locked when not in use” and ”don’t leave personal valuables in company vehicles” and “visitors must check in at the front desk” and “side and back doors must be left closed and locked”).

    People were particularly bad about company vehicles. Also, meetings rarely started on time; people chatted a LOT. So said coworker slipped out while people were talking, went to the parking lot, and proceeded to collect all the personal valuables from the unlocked company vehicles (keys, wallets, cell phones, etc.). They returned to the meeting room and started the meeting by “auctioning” off the valuables. People got the message when the first wallet came up for “bid”.

    Management later forbid doing that claiming it was “theft” but employee behavior improved, at least for a little while.

  209. Sabina*

    I once sent law enforcement to a co-worker’s house to do a welfare check on her. She was over an hour late to work and hadn’t called in. Of course, she was often over an hour late to work and never called in, but I was tired of it (when she was late I or another employee would have to open the front office and sit at her reception desk.) Her supervisor was for some reason afraid to address this with her. She showed up later fuming and I was all “thank god, Karen, you’re OK! I thought maybe you had fallen and couldn’t reach the phone!” Was this the best use of law enforcement resources? Yeah, probably not. But there was like a %.0001 chance she was NOT ok, and I wanted to be caring co-worker….

    2. Jules the 3rd*

      You know that can get people killed, right? Worst for PoC, but white people still face that risk. The police are not toys.

      1. Tinybutfierce*

        Yeah, as a mentally ill person who’s explicitly told people to never call the cops to do a welfare check on me out of fear for my own safety, to say I’d be offended and furious if someone did that to me is a massive understatement. That isn’t just petty, it’s outright malicious.

    4. Jennifer Juniper*

      Sabina, why the hell didn’t you go to HR, your manager, or Karen’s grandboss?

  210. Middle Manager*

    We had a supervisor get in a petty fight with her employee over if a certain word should be hyphenated or not. It wasn’t for a common phrase, more industry jargon, and I’m sure there was no grammar rule on it. But the supervisor spent like a full day “researching” the proper way to hyphenate and then scheduled a meeting with her supervisor and her employee to present it. Everyone else was stunned that she wasted so much time on such a petty and unimportant thing just to try to prove to her employee and boss that she was “right”.

  211. Tableau Wizard*

    My boss removed our entire team from a list-serv intended for managers because we had our mobile phone stipend taken away. We are not managers, but it was appropriate for us to have access to the information sent to that list-serv. I think her logic was that if the Execs didn’t want to treat the team like leaders by paying for our phones then the team shouldn’t be expected to know the stuff on that list?
    I’m still not even sure why she did it really.
    But ultimately it means that she forwards a bunch of emails to us when she remembers or asks us about stuff that we haven’t seen when she forgets.

  212. Ardis Paramount*

    I was a music specialist at a large Catholic school for a number of years. I’m Protestant, though, as were about one-third of the staff.
    Staff meetings were required, every Wednesday. They were long affairs, opening with prayer and winding our way through a lengthy agenda throughout the school year. Several staff members had a ritual of writing down their estimate of the ending time of the meeting and initialing it, like an office pool. It was a little, mild joke: someone would whisper “3:45? You’re dreaming!” or “5:05? I’m not talking to you ever again.”
    For a couple of months the game grew to about a dozen teachers and teacher aides…until the school principal got wind of it. She brought me into her office and said “if you have a problem with how I run meetings, you should have come to me.” She accused me of instigating the game, and I wasn’t willing to throw any of my colleagues under the bus, so I didn’t confirm or deny. Later began occasional meetings during my scant prep time, where I was to sit in front of a picture of Jesus and think about if I had “the light of Christ in me.”

    I did find ways to push back – as an accompanist and music director during the long all-school masses, I played piano while students and family and staff took Communion. I played hymns…and other pieces of music…such as an extremely stately and reverent “Theme From The Rockford Files” or the local university fight song. No one noticed.

    1. Tangerina Warbleworth*

      I am laughing so hard. My father is an organist and fills in for other organists when they go on vacation; and I SWEAR he once played an equally reverent version of the “Jeopardy!” theme during Communion……

        1. Ardis Paramount*

          Hey, it was darned “stately” – essentially the chord progression of the “Rockford Files” theme over half and quarter note rhythms (like “Abide With Me”- feeling.) I did the “Bob Newhart” (original show) theme, too, and the university fight song.

          When I did this, they were always buried in a stream of improvised anthems while hundreds of people took communion (which I was excluded from, as a Protestant.)

          1. Gumby*

            Our organist kept inserting bars of happy birthday into the “we finished the communion hymns but people are still communing” music a couplefew weeks ago when one of our congregants was celebrating her 101st birthday. Many of us caught it and all of us thought it was great!

  213. Wells*

    An extremely negative colleague kept blowing up every time my team made (reasonable, normal) noise in our shared office space to the point where everyone was walking on eggshells because they were scared of her temper. When we were on shift at the same time, I started alternating between 1) finding lots and lots of reasons to open and close an extremely squeaky door and 2) humming juuuuuuust below the level where she could complain. Petty, but kept me going.

    1. Jennifer Juniper*

      How about taking up a collection and buying her noise-canceling headphones? Misophonia is a real disease. She could have been suffering from that or hyperacusis.

      1. Wells*

        I’m certainly not going to armchair diagnose a colleague. That would be hugely inappropriate. Besides, the gift would come across as a passive-aggressive response to her complaints. Given how poorly she’s treated everyone around her, taking up a collection for a problem that we don’t even know exists is just about the last thing I want myself or my team spending money on. I will leave it up to her to handle her health and its impacts on work, if (and that’s a big IF!) there is a medical issue at play here.

      2. Lady H*

        I have misphonia; as I am an adult, it’s not an excuse for blowing up at people or for making others deal with the problem for me by buying me expensive noise-cancelling headphones. Good grief!

  214. Aew*

    We work with remote teams. When they should be working and we know they are not, we “test” them by changing passwords to the project they are on. Then we wait to see how long it takes them to tell us about the password not working.

  215. Auntie Maim*

    At OldJob, there was a tradition where our unit would all go out for lunch one day during someone’s last week of work. The person who was leaving would get to pick the restaurant and the manager would pay for their meal. When I was finally getting out of that hellhole, I picked a restaurant and let everyone know what it was. The day of my farewell lunch, my boss came into my office and told me that she didn’t like anything on the menu there and tried to give me money to cover my meal as she wouldn’t be going.

    I refused the money, then went home early.

    1. Katherine*

      At OldJob, a small family-owned business (!!!), one of the employees had worked there for 20 years and had decided to move on to something else — she wasn’t old enough to retire, but she and her husband had met their financial goals (whatever they were) and she was just quitting her job to stay home or something. Well, the owner of the company adored her. There was a farewell dinner that must have cost $1,000, a going away gift, flowers, a speech. There were tears from the owner! Honest! She cried during the speech!

      Cut to a few months later, I put in my two weeks’ notice. Nothing. She basically ignored me the entire two weeks and on my last day, finally sat down with me to go over the status of my work and projects — everything was caught up, I’d worked ahead as much as possible, scheduled automatic reports for various things, and left step-by step instructions (with screen shots!) for everything else. At 5:00pm she walked me to the door, gave me an awkward one-armed hug, and told me that I’m a good person. There were no tears from either of us.

  216. booksnbooks*

    That is so awful! Did she ever get her come-uppance for doing such an awful thing?

  217. KayEss*

    Since someone mentioned coffee… I once had a coworker who loudly claimed she could tell the difference between coffee made with water from the sink in the kitchenette versus from the one in the adjacent single-occupant bathroom. They shared a wall and the two sinks were literally not more than 5 feet apart.

    Another coworker started coming in early specifically to make the first pot of coffee using “mystery water”… i.e. either kitchen water or bathroom water, based on his personal whim.

  218. Tangerina Warbleworth*

    After fifteen years in higher education, started a new job at a university. I was one unit in a division of units led by an Assistant Provost. Found out, way after I was hired, that he had wanted to hire a different candidate, with much less experience, but was overrruled.

    I realize over time that coworkers in my division are getting emails from him about retreats, volunteering days, etc. that I don’t receive, so I miss the event and look bad for not participating. I speak directly to the AP’s secretary — you’re right! she says, and puts my name on the email list. I get an invitation to the next thing, show up, the AP gives me A Look and turns red. I miss the next two events, because I never received an invitation. I go to the guy now serving as the email invite List Keeper, and — you’re right! he says, and adds me to the email list. I get the email invite to the next presentation, show up, and AP gives me A Look and turns purple. Missed the next two events, because no invitation….

    After he left, I went to the current List Keeper, got my name back on the list, and haven’t missed an invitation since. AP was the only other person who had access to email invite list.

    Did I tell you that I worked at a Jesuit university? And that the Assistant Provost who was taking my name off the invite list so I wouldn’t know, wouldn’t show up and then look bad was an ordained priest?

    Yes.

  219. Two Tin Cans and a String*

    My dad owns and runs a midsize company in the food industry. Determined not to start my career as “the boss’s kid” and being regarded as a nepotism hire, I decided to take a job stocking shelves in a local supermarket instead. As soon as the manager learned my last name he got incredibly hostile, implying that I was just a vapid rich girl slumming it, that I wouldn’t do any work because I didn’t need a paycheck anyway (I did, I was trying to be an autonomous adult!) and constantly making snotty remarks about my family.

    I kept my head down, stocked shelves and bagged groceries while everyone else there got more and more hostile toward me. One of the cashiers consistently “forgot” to give me the new login codes for the register, then reporting me for logging in late. Whenever I had normal questions about how to do the job (modern checkout registers resemble flight control towers I swear to god) they’d make some snide remark about how buying a fancy college degree must not take much smarts. That sort of thing.

    The final straw for me was when I had just finished rotating the produce, picking out bruised and ugly fruit, and the manager was hovering trying to catch me in a mistake. I had to leave briefly to help a customer and when I returned, he was punching apples to make them look bruised.

    Punching. Apples.

    I know quitting with no notice is a big no-no, but I think the Lords of Labor will forgive me for that one.

    1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      This is exactly when quitting without notice is not a no-no. They were being horrible to you, you should never give notice when you’re fleeing an abusive setup like that.

      I cannot believe they were so petty and so batsh*t that they bullied you, like if you really wanted to skate by in life, you’d have taken a job with your dad and not at their store. Their brains are super malfunctioning under all that jealousy and seething.

      1. Two Tin Cans and a String*

        It’s really weird how some people automatically assume that being from a certain background makes you a snotty, immature brat. It’s part of the reason I left my home country, to get away from it. (Not the main reason, but it helped my decision.) I was sick of being “Oh You’re John’s Daughter” or “Ah Yes Gerald’s Sister”. Like no. Please. I have a name.

        Don’t get me wrong. I’m not under any delusion about my privilege in this regard and I’m definitely not complaining. But it also sucks, like, a lot? My parents are wonderful people who work incredibly hard and always, always taught me never to take anything for granted, that I was lucky to have access to education and support and that I should not expect to live off their savings. Kinda sucks when you internalize all that and get bullied anyway. Or people constantly imply that your loving parents are scum. I’m not going to lie, that supermarket job really damaged me. It was super hurtful and it’s hard not to get a snotty “well that’s what I get for trying my best” attitude about it.

        So now I’m desperately poor in the US trying to honorably scrape together enough boot straps and quarters for a bus ride to the food bank. I win probably!

      2. Cloudy with sunny breaks*

        ‘Punching apples’ seems like it should be a qualifier as to how toxic a work place is.

  220. Ama*

    I worked in an office where I got put in charge of the office candy dish (I had no choice; I sat at the closet thing we had to a reception desk and the head of the foundation underwriting our entire operating budget insisted we have one — at least she was willing to cover the cost of the candy, too). The first year we were spending a ridiculous amount on candy, and I realized it was because people were waiting until I left for the day (or on the weekends — it was a graduate school so people were working all hours) to fill their pockets with candy and take it back to their desks. Without fail when I came in each morning the dish was empty.

    I know it wasn’t my money paying for it, but I became irritated that it was SO important to maintain this candy dish even while the same person who insisted we have one insisted my department didn’t need additional staff (obviously even a ridiculous amount of candy doesn’t add up to a full time staff position, but we are talking petty here). So I stopped filling it before I left for the day, even if it was already empty or close to empty — it cut our candy expenses almost in half immediately.

    As an additional petty touch, faculty and grad students who were nice to me got told where the extra candy was stored, so they could help themselves even when the dish itself was empty, while those who were rude could complain all they wanted about the dish being empty at the end of the day, and I would just shrug and say, “sorry, guess people get really hungry after I leave.”

  221. The Man, Becky Lynch*

    Pettiest thing I’ve ever done [because ef it, I’ll roast myself]…

    I had always kept a pencil cup on my desk and started getting frustrated by people taking pens from that, instead of keeping track of their own or having the manners to ask first. So I converted my keyboard tray into a desk drawer [just grabbed an old envelope box and it fit perfectly, boom] and tossed all my pens, pencils and other small office supplies in there so that it was out of sight. That way people at least had to ask if I had a pen which I was happy to hand over if they needed it, I just hated the snatch-n-grab mentality some had developed. [Needless to say it was also towards the end of my decade of working there and I love them all to this very day but man, we were all grouchy and petty at our own times.]

    1. Essess*

      I think I’ve shared this before… I had a boss that always took my pen whenever he stopped at my desk but he claimed he wasn’t taking them. I went out and ordered a bunch of pens embossed with “Stolen from xxxx’s desk” and began using those at work. After about a week, I went to his office and asked for all my pens back. He couldn’t deny that he’d taken them this time since most of them on his desk had MY name on them.

      1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

        LOL this is awesome. It’s a one-up to the places that tie things or lock pens down so they don’t walk away.

        I still like how some places go so far as to tie fake flowers on their pens and then make a “pot” for them to stick in as their pencil cup, it’s my favorite creative way of saying “Don’t steal my pen also I’m cute.”

      3. nnn*

        When I was a kid, my grandmother gave me all these pencils with my name on them, so I kept one of them in my music folder for band practice.

        One band practice, I discovered it was missing. Oh well, it has my name on it, it will turn up somewhere in the music room.

        A few weeks later, sure enough, I did find it on the floor of the band room so I picked it up and put it back in my music folder.

        The next day, someone wrote on the notice board “Lost: one “nnn” pencil. If found please return to the trumpet section.”

        I’m not a trumpet player. There was no one named nnn in the trumpet section.

        The trumpets found the pencil with my name on it, never once thought it might belong to me, and appropriated it for themselves!

      4. Office Gumby*

        At one time, my desk was nearest to the photocopier, where lots of people printed out Important Documents that required signing. They’d print the doc, stop by my desk to borrow a pen, sign the doc, then leave, taking my pen with them. Always a black or blue pen, never the red.

        To prevent this, I swapped the ink cartridges between my blue and red pens. However, since the Important Documents were Important and the people getting them signed outranked me, to avoid getting in trouble over a “prank”, I clearly, in big letters, marked all my pens with “THIS IS A RED PEN”.

        People would stop by my desk, grab what looked like a blue pen. Before they would sign, I’d tell them, “That’s a red pen.” At first, they doubted me, until they tested it.

        Sure enough, every pen they grabbed (all in blue cases), signed in red. (Interesting, they never grabbed and tested a red-case pen, which would have signed in blue.) Only once or twice, did someone take a pen, sign a document, fret that the ink was red (for legal purposes, it had to be blue or black), then mutter about the pen. Nobody ever complained, for I had clearly labelled all my blue-case pens with “THIS IS A RED PEN.”

        People stopped taking my pens after that.

  222. Pipe Organ Guy*

    Almost a year and a half ago I became the regular organist at our church, after being the official substitute for some years. My predecessor had taped a note to the music rack of the organ console; in that note, she made the request that all other organists needed to wash their hands before playing, because someone had gotten some sort of sticky residue on the keys. She also requested everyone to make their erasures not over the keys, because the little bits of eraser residue would be harmful to the console mechanisms. The first thing I did on assuming the post was get rid of this note and simply take a damp paper towel and wipe off the keys. As for erasures? I think organists have been marking and erasing in their scores for centuries, right over the keyboards, without ill effect. There had been an incredible amount of drama associated with this individual over many years, and many of us were not sorry to see this person go.

  223. Submerged Tenths*

    Back when I was a bartender, a guy came in who ordered a dry vodka martini. So i made him one. It was returned, not “dry” enough. So i poured straight vodka and added an olive. Yes, you got it . . . . returned again.

    Some people.

  224. Cattiebee*

    Back in my barista days, I had a manager who encouraged each of us to give out one free drink per shift as a way to brighten someone’s day. Most of us would give the free drinks to our regulars. It transpired that we unintentionally were giving free drinks to the *same* regulars, particularly to the regulars who tended to show up during slow times. Once we figured this out, we made sure to be more random in giving free drinks. However, one regular had been the recipient of daily free drinks for a couple of weeks at that point (she was actually the customer who made us realize we were giving free drinks to the same people), and had become accustomed to it.

    I was the lucky duck who got to be on register the first day after we decided we would be more random in giving out free drinks; when I had the audacity to ring up her order and ask her to pay for it, she got so angry and informed me that the other baristas weren’t charging her. I kindly explained what happened and that we were trying to make sure different customers got to be surprised with a free drink. She then “asked” (yelled at) the barista making drinks behind me if he would just make her order because I was being a b*!@&. Now I had been working there long enough that difficult and abusive customers had long since ceased to faze me. I calmly told her that he wasn’t allowed to do that, and if he did, he would be putting his job in jeopardy. She was super angry, but she handed over her card and the transaction went fairly smoothly after that, albeit with her muttering stuff under her breath.

    The evening went on, we closed, and I had forgotten all about it until I showed up the next day for my shift and my manager called me into the back and played a voicemail to me. It was *minutes* of this customer literally screaming with colorful language about how rude and disrespectful I was, that I overcharged her, that I was abusive to all of the other baristas, and all of these other ridiculous accusations about me and repeatedly demanding that I be fired immediately, saying she was our best customer and she would take her business elsewhere if I weren’t fired, etc. etc.

    All because I asked her to pay for the drink she ordered.

    Fortunately my manager knew me well and knew the customer was lying, so my manager just found the voicemail hilarious. I have to admit it took me a minute to find the humor in it (though I eventually did). One of my coworkers recorded the voicemail and would play it whenever we needed laugh.

    But petty met petty: My manager stayed late to make sure she was there when this customer came in that day, and looked the customer straight in the eye and smiled as she asked me to take over the register and help her. As this customer did not follow through on her threat to take her business elsewhere, for the rest of my time there, this customer was never helped by anyone other than me if I was working (and since I mostly worked the shift that corresponded to the time this woman tended to come in, that was a lot).

    And you can bet your bippy that we made this woman’s drinks with decaf for as long as we all worked there. And when we hired new employees, one of the first things we always taught them was to make her drinks with decaf so she went at least a couple of years without ever receiving a caffeinated drink from our store. So I’d say we were successful in out-pettying the pettiest customer we ever had.

    2. Just Employed Here*

      I don’t get this whole “giving decaf to people who have ordered and (in this case, eventually) paid for regular”. It came up earlier in the thread as well.

      If a customer is abusive, you deal with that. You don’t even need to serve them at all, if they’re that bad. But you don’t mess with their food which they have paid for.

      And I’m someone who does occasionally drink decaf, on purpose. Thank goodness the places I go to are such that you see the baristas make the drink. They always have to dig around for the bag of decaf beans because they don’t make a lot of it.

  225. Hiring Mgr*

    I accidentally took some money out of my co-worker’s locked desk drawer. It wasn’t much, but enough to tide me over before payday. I’ve always regretted it, yet have never had the courage to admit my culpability. Jim, if you’re reading this….I’m sorry

    2. Katie the Fed*

      How do you accidentally steal something intentionally?

      Be VERY glad you weren’t caught and fired.

    3. Lepidoptera*

      This poster always makes joke posts, and the incident being referenced is a plot point from The Office.

      Alison, didn’t you tell this poster they had to use /s or similar due to constantly causing uproar? It’s very tiresome.

      http://www.google.com to catch the filter

      2. Hiring Mgr*

        I guess I should have gone into TV writing since I came up with this all on my own, in my mind. And yes, I should have put the /s tag in there, but i figured on a “what’s the pettiest thing you’ve seen at work” thread, it might not matter as much.. Mea culpa.

        Lepidoptera, what is your link supposed to go to? It’s just google

          1. Hiring Mgr*

            Yes, and I have stopped that.. .but I thought this type of thread was a little “looser” because everyone’s just telling stories ( i wrote my real one below). If that’s not the case, my bad!

            1. Twitcher*

              Seriously? The thread is for sharing things that happened, not indulging your weird need to make shit up on the Internet. This is getting bloody creepy.

              Get a blog, dude! Make your weird little stories up in your own space.

          2. Hiring Mgr*

            I guess I should also feel sad that you thought I would steal from my coworkers :(

    4. L. S. Cooper*

      This…. is not an especially funny or creative joke. Or fake story, or whatever.

      1. Hiring Mgr*

        Well, not all the reviewers liked Macbeth or Hamlet back in Shakespeare’s day either, but that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the best of the Elizabethean era writers. (Disclaimer: I was the understudy for Macduff in a school production in 1987)

  226. The Hamster's Revenge*

    Tool box wars. For background: a rolling tool box (base) is about countertop height, so setting a 5 drawer top cabinet on it will put the lid at approximately the underside of the kitchen cabinet uppers.

    New mechanic starts and he’s about 5’1″. Lead mechanic is about 5’10” and I’m 5’8″. New mechanic buys a new rolling toolbox with a 5 drawer top cabinet. He can juuust see into the top compartment when the lid is open if he gets on his tip-toes. Next week, for reasons we can’t explain, he brings in a 3 drawer intermediate cabinet and puts it between the base and the top. Now his toolbox is a full 5 feet tall and he can’t reach some of it.

    The new guy’s toolbox being taller than his pissed off the lead mechanic so *he* bought a 5 drawer intermediate cabinet. Now his toolbox is 5 and half feet high and he can’t see into the top anymore. New guy bought a second intermediate cabinet so his monstrosity is just under 6 feet tall and he needs a ladder to access half of it.

    Lead mechanic is so indescribably angry, he goes and buys an entirely new toolbox base, intermediate and top. When fully assembled it stood 7 feet tall and leaned at a weird angle. It was too heavy to move and half of it was unusable.

    The boss asked both of them to quit being stupid and shorten their toolboxes for 3 months straight and both refused. It was not until I got EHS involved under the guise that the toolboxes were earthquake hazards that they finally acquiesced.

  227. Why are potlucks the worst*

    Somehow at one job the task of scheduling monthly birthday potlucks was delegated to me. Some of the petty potluck-related incidents:

    If I just scheduled a potluck on a Certain Day at least 10 people would complain because there was not a “theme” for the potluck.

    One of my coworkers had a number of food allergies (including celiacs) and during her birthday month, several people would bring in pasta dishes even though the (now required) “theme” was taco bar.

    One coworker was underperforming and her boss actually approached me and wanted to cancel that month’s potluck because “We are all just really unhappy with Jane so we don’t want to do it.”

    We had a couple of employees that would only come in once or twice a week and they both came in on Thursdays which was the busy day of the week. I scheduled the potluck during THEIR birthday month on a Thursday so they wouldn’t have to drive in on their day off and several people complained to me about the potluck on a busy day. I stuck to my guns about it so Sara and John wouldn’t have to drive in on their days off and someone took a highlighter and drew a bunch of big frowny-faces on the sign-up sheet. I emailed everyone and said my workload was too high to continue planning potlucks after that. We never had another potluck.

    I’m at a new job now. And every time they try to rope me into birthday celebration planning I (politely) immediately decline. No thank you.

  228. Petty smasher*

    I once saw an admin assistant angrily throw a brand new dish scrubber into the trash because another staff person had *used it to clean dishes* in the office kitchenette. (This kitchen space wasn’t just used for staff lunch, we were an outreach organization that taught healthy eating classes and cooking demonstrations in the community.) The admin assistant thought the other staff person had left the scrubber too dirty, so instead of rinsing it off, she tossed it in the garbage.

    I’d assumed this was the admin assistant being petty and controlling, until I found out that she had been refilling the kitchen supplies out of her own pocket because our boss was too cheap to fund soap/sponges out of the office budget *even though we used the kitchen for business purposes.* (I truly believe no one knew she was doing this, or they would have been more considerate or offered to chip in. For the most part our office team was very warm and caring.)

    I was a department head with my own budget, so I found some wiggle room and took on the expense of a few bottles of dish soap and sponges/scrubbers a year. It was seriously less than $20, but totally worth removing the source of conflict.

  229. Bend & Snap*

    I gave my two-week notice at a toxic job to move into another industry. The company responded by moving my cube to the corner for the duration of my notice period (busted cube with a dead plant in it–I didn’t have a primo spot to begin with) and forbidding anyone to talk to me.

    At another job, we had a new VP who was a terrible fit and everyone hated him so he quit pretty quickly. Instead of the customary goodbye/thank you email, he just wrote SAYONARA, *company*, hit send, and walked out the door.

  230. Merry*

    We have a new (older male) employee who interrupts me all the time and just generally irritates me. We have very very frequent office meetings and I’ve taken to sitting in the seat that he always chooses.

  231. wihewatr*

    I worked at a toxic tech startup & I guess the developers deployed one or more particularly buggy releases. As punishment, the CEO decided the “blue jeans on Friday” rule was rescinded.

    I now have the good fortune to work at a company that likes to dig into the hows & whys when something goes wrong. There’s a very strong commitment to not use these post-mortems for finger pointing, but to instead look into what we need to do differently to ensure better outcomes going forward. So things actually do improve over time since we can have really honest discussions including each person feeling comfortable admitting where s/he dropped the ball.

    So much better than leading by instilling fear of retribution which only “fixes” things short-term, guarantees people will try to cover up mistakes, & results in the best people realizing they can do better somewhere else.

  232. Crazy Cat Person*

    I used to work with a truly obnoxious bully – he drove out three colleagues with his insults and false accusations, and tried to do the same to me but failed. (Long story, but basically he accused me of physically assaulting him, failing to realise that someone was standing behind him at the time in question who could state that I had never even raised my voice, let alone hit anyone.)

    Every morning for the rest of the time I worked there I would go out of my way to greet the bully with a cheerful “good morning, how are you today?”, just to watch him looking confused and clearly not knowing how to respond. Very petty of me, but utterly satisfying!

    1. Anon-Today*

      I am obsequiously nice to my tattle-tale coworker, just to imagine her squirming. As a back-stabber, she’s too good at hiding her true feelings, but I know there’s a piece of small intestine tying itself into a knot every time I smile at her.

  233. Phoenix Programmer*

    Not at work but it was school. My first roommate was a PITA and nasty about everything. She even purposefully triggered asthma attacks by spraying my allergens while I slept….

    I got transferred to a new dorm, and when I was moving she left her big presentation due in her next class open.

    I added a slide that said “I have hidden the word “Jizz” in 3 of your slides” … Then I only put it in twice!

    No regrets!

    1. Murphy*

      ONLY TWICE is the best part.

      (This just reminded me of something I did in college. I’ll make a separate comment.)

    4. JessB*

      This is amazing revenge!!! Wow! I love it so much!!!
      And Murphy is right, only twice is the best part!

    5. Jennifer Juniper*

      Yikes! Was she trying to murder you??? You could have done much, much more than that, including bringing her up on criminal charges or getting her expelled from school.

  234. R*

    I worked as banquet waitress when I was a teenager, and I worked with two miserable woman in their 50’s. We had an AA meeting one night in the large banquet hall, and they spent most of the night making snide comments. One even went as far to deliberately put a bottle of wine on someone’s table, and then say, oh sorry, and take it away. I do not miss working there or those people.

    1. Kettles*

      Ugh. That is so gross. What is with people trying to undermine people’s sobriety? It’s life or death for some people.

  235. CanCan*

    I often worry if I’m being petty correcting minor grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors when reviewing agreements (the low-$ ones). I’m a lawyer, not an editor, and many of those mistakes would not cause genuine confusion, so I could really leave them alone. But if I don’t correct them, no-one will, and we (a government organization – i.e. a representative of the Crown) will be presenting a badly-written agreement to an outside party. On the other hand, I feel like I’m signalling to the author of the agreement that they can’t write (which is sometimes true).

    1. Auntie Social*

      But you put the comma in the wrong place and it costs the client millions. You’ll be QC in no time.

    2. Anon-Today*

      It’s only badly-written if it doesn’t communicate what it intends to communicate. If it is missing something inconsequential, then at most it is badly edited.

  236. Suzwhat*

    Years ago I shared a cubicle wall with a person who would play her voice messages ON SPEAKER every morning as she booted up her computer. At a very loud volume. It drove me nuts. The cartoon Calvin and Hobbes had a Sunday comic about this very thing – someone playing voice messages on speaker from within a cubicle. I am ashamed to say I printed it out and left it on her desk.

    1. Indiana*

      That’s brilliant! My supervisors all have doors and for some reason, leave their doors open and take all conference calls on speakerphone. It’s extremely annoying.

    2. Delta Delta*

      I worked with some people who got into an absolute showdown over this. It started with the speaker voicemail. Then became a game of one upsmanship in who could singsong “good morning!” or “see you tomorrow!” to everyone in the office. Then it turned in to a death match over one of them leaving letterhead in a shared printer. Finally one of them quit. (and as it turns out the one who stayed is a real piece of work, and subsequently drove out 14 other employees due to generally being a horrible person. I left because I moved, which was a fortuitous excuse)

  237. Indiana*

    During the month of December, we don’t have much to do, and we have literally nothing for the last two weeks and the first week of January, but at least one person has to be in the office anyway. (Why? No one knows.) Anyway, I was so annoyed that everyone else put in their vacation time for those weeks way back in January, so as I sat there twiddling my thumbs Dec 27th, I created the following year’s PTO calendar just so I could claim the week of Christmas.

    1. Peaches*

      Haha, I love this. I have the same problem at my work. We are completely dead in December, especially between Christmas and New Years. I put in my vacation request for December 23rd and December 26th in on January 2nd this year, and it STILL hasn’t been approved, because everyone in our small office requested those days off. I imagine whoever has to cover will be sitting here sour all day, because literally NOTHING will be going on.

  238. I have one*

    I worked at a human rights organization that was pretty well-respected, until we got a new, nightmare CEO. CEO was certain of her own infallibility and famously impossible to work with or for.

    At the holidays, CEO sent a bottle of fancy liquor to all of the senior executives. Same bottle to everyone, with a card that said, “Hi Jane/John/Jen, thanks for all your hard work this year.” She had a temp office assistant who she put in charge of sending out the presents. One of the senior execs, Jane, sent CEO an email after she’d received her gift. She thanked CEO but noted that the card she received was actually addressed to John.

    CEO wrote back and let her know that the “issue” had been resolved. Because CEO had FIRED THE TEMP. AT CHRISTMAS. FOR ENCLOSING THE WRONG CARD IN A PERSONAL GIFT. And she told Jane this matter-of-factly, as though Jane, who had spent her career working on human rights issues, would be glad to hear this! Jane was rightly horrified.

    CEO was canned two months later but the damage she did to that organization is, unfortunately, probably irreparable.

    1. Ardis Paramount*

      “You’ll be glad to know I had the assistant beheaded. Here’s to another year of working for human rights! Love, CEO”

  239. mayfly*

    I have one, but it’s from my husband.
    He worked for a small firm for a couple of years. It was located in the middle of the city, horrible traffic, no work from home policy, set 8-5 hours (which meant rush hours traffic on both ends), and a boss that was prone to fits and funks. He ended up taking a new job with a much healthier company (more money, work from home opportunities, and paid for bus passes).
    When he handed in his notice, his work space was moved to the very front of the office ( in view of everyone) and his internet access was revoked. Despite being out front and center, the boss pointedly ignored him for two weeks, except for a few glares. It was nuts.

  240. ONFM*

    I was made the department head for a new section that had grown too large and unwieldy and needed to be split off from their old section. The workers were not happy because they had enjoyed the previous lack of supervision. I was brought in, introduced around, and shown my office. When I came in the next week, to start, they had removed all of the chairs and half of the furniture from my office – and my Director was out of town! I spent the first week scrounging around, trying to locate and replace the missing items.

  241. Theft for the greater good*

    When I worked in customer service there was a co-worker who decided she needed to keep tabs on everyone and email our boss (like how many times a day each of us went to the bathroom, visited the break room, how long we chatted with each other between calls). So we had cutesy little games and contests (write your best valentine and put it on the wall get a prize, guess your co-worker by their baby picture). I would come to work after hours and take hers off the board and shred it on another floor on my way out. Then the next day she would be furious that someone stole her thing, and I would whisper loudly to the girl next to me (so crazy would listen)something like I heard in the bathroom that grand boss was reading them late yesterday and took someones that he said was inappropriate or that she was disgusted by. Also I would steal her special pens and leave them on the grand boss’s desk so our grand boss was always seen with her pens, it drove her insane. She kept asking our boss for a formal meeting with the grand boss and the great grand boss to determine why the grand boss hated her.

      1. Theft for the greater good*

        Everyone has breaking point, and call centers are the 7th realm of hell.

  242. Rockin Takin*

    I used to work at a summer camp, and every year the staff would go on a camping/float trip. One year I volunteered to put it together. We had a strict rule that no one underage could drink, and anyone who could drink could not drink to excess.
    Two underage girls on the trip were pissed at me from the start. The first morning we realized they had taken some beers out of someone’s cooler, and later while we were floating they purposefully paddled slower so they could bum beers and cigarettes off these creepy older dudes.

    When we got back to work that Monday, they went to my boss and accused me of giving alcohol to minors. Luckily, my boss knew me well and they ended up getting in trouble for the whole situation.

    So they tried to be petty but it backfired on them.

    1. Kettles*

      Did the creepy older dudes who tried to get the minors drunk face any consequences? Or was it just the children who were punished?

      1. Rockin Takin*

        This was in deep Missouri, so no.
        These girls were 19/20, and they purposefully hung out with these guys (probably mid 30’s) so they could get beer and cigarettes.
        This wasn’t an official work trip, and I wasn’t going to tell my boss any of the things they did since it was outside of work. Only reason they got in trouble was for lying to my boss and harrassing me. My boss didn’t discipline them for drinking underage outside of work hours.

        1. Kettles*

          Ah; when you said minor I was thinking 13, not 19 / 20. But those adult men were still skeezy and behaving hideously. It’s pretty obvious they were giving the girls alcohol in order to try to take sexual advantage of them. I’m glad they were disciplined for harassing you though!

  243. Kelsi*

    I haven’t done it yet but I’m all geared up!

    This is not my day job but I’m a burlesque dancer–for the last seven years I was part of a local troupe. The boss ranged from “difficult personality” to “full-on nightmare to work with,” but the other dancers made it worth staying.

    Last fall the dancers all came together communicated some–demands, for lack of a better word? about how the troupe needed to change for us all to continue. The response was dismissive, and nothing changed. Pile on a lot more awful behavior from the boss in early 2019, so that when our contract renewal came up in late February, more than half of us decided not to continue. At the time, boss was surprisingly gracious about it, and it looked like we might be able to part ways on good terms. …At least, until mid-April, when she quietly blocked us all on social media and then made a pity-seeking post about how she’d had to “cut half of her cast” because we were in violation of our contracts.

    Now, another one of the women who quit and I were already going to the show this coming weekend, because w ewanted to support the dancers who stayed (who are still our friends!) And people do tend to recognize us when we’re in the audience, because we have a lot of regulars (and in my case, my hair color’s pretty unmistakeable). Before, I was going to say something polite but truthful if people asked why I wasn’t in the show about how I had been ready to move on to something new but still wished them the best.

    Now? We’re going to be gleefully, scathingly honest. It probably won’t accomplish anything, but it’s going to feel damn good!

  244. Colleen*

    I worked as a box office intern for an opera company one summer. The performers there all got a certain number of comp tickets to the shows they were in (it was in rep, so four shows at once). One of them (who was in the ensemble, so not even a lead or anything) complained about where we had seated his comps (keep in mind – these are free tickets) and was just an all around jerk, so whenever I was responsible for filling any of his comps I intentionally gave him terrible seats (even if better ones were available).

  245. it_guy*

    My all time low was when I was working with a sales manager who was totally ignorant and didn’t care about anything but making a sale. I quit counting the number of times that he would throw me under the bus for doing something that he asked for, but turned out to be the wrong thing.

    I got my revenge by explaining why stuff wasn’t working and throwing in Star-Trek techno-babble in, knowing that he would never catch on. “The report failed because the Heisenberg compensator blew a whole in the Jeffry’s tube.”

    And to my embarrassment, he REPEATED IT TO THE CLIENT. They thought it was funny as hell, and solidified his nickname as “The guy in the suit who doesn’t know anything”

  246. Buffet Justice Now*

    In college, I waited tables at a restaurant where 90 percent of the customers got our unlimited salad bar and buffet instead of ordering an entrée off the menu. When I started, employees could either choose from a short list of options for a free shift meal, or we could pay like $2 and go through the buffet once; the money went into a fund for our holiday party.

    We got a new general manager, and along with doing a lot of other stuff that irritated the staff, he posted a long, long memo on the time clock shortly after he started, explaining that employees were no longer allowed to pay and go through the buffet. It wasn’t just that we hated this — it was also that his tone suggested that we were moochers who were taking advantage of the company by… availing ourselves of a policy that had been in place for at least a few years by then.

    I had already put in my two weeks and accepted another job, so I wrote “CAPITALIST SWINE” on the bottom of the memo. Apparently, the new GM was ENRAGED when he saw it. Probably didn’t help things that he bore a striking resemblance to Porky Pig.

  247. oneweeknotice*

    at my last gig, my manager was a long-time employee who found himself in a management role after several layoffs and was completely clueless about what the job entailed. what he did know, however, was that a local restaurant had an insanely cheap tamale special for lunch on Tuesdays.

    so every Tuesday around 11:45 he’d drop tools, saunter out to our pod and say “who’s coming to Tamale Tuesday?” of course, a handful of underperforming lackeys would agree to go with him, but I fought tooth and nail declining every week, saying I didn’t like the food there.

    once he’d arrive back in the office, some time after 1, I’d take my own lunch break. at the same restaurant. I just didn’t want to subject myself to an hour of his inane company.

  248. Under the Milky Way*

    A co-worker who had taken to coming in late and leaving early for years, complained about an0ther coworker for leaving the office early on a Friday. 2nd coworker left 1/2 hour early because they weren’t feeling well (turned out it was a reaction to antibiotic). Complainer made a big enough stink about it so that the supervisor agreed to discuss leaving early with 2nd coworker (supervisor wanted to show complainer that they were taking complaint seriously)

  249. velocisarah*

    My first out of school job was at a tech incubator with co-working space, as staff for the incubator itself.

    Someone stole a bag of M&Ms we had in the storage room, and all the employees in that day went on a man-hunt before I realized I could go through the security footage and find who took it, since the M&Ms had been within sight of one of the cameras. It took about 20 minutes of searching, the group of us chocolate detectives, to find it was a community member none of us took too kindly to (loud/rude, big ego, disruptive at events, etc.).

    I’ve never seen so many people doggedly obsessed with recovering M&Ms, the level of petty all around (like, hours of investigative work) was spectacular. (It didn’t help we were all over-worked, under-paid, and not supervised on that particular day.)

    So we found him in the co-working space, brought him into our office, asked him if he’d seen our M&Ms, and casually noted that our office had security cameras. He lied to our faces – even after he knew the jig was up!! – and left the office before I could show him the footage.

    The next day, we found the M&Ms back exactly where we’d lost them, and that particular member was a lot better behaved after that.

  250. Ada*

    Told the supervisor of an employee they really needed to be taking down what customers say *verbatim* for what we were doing and not summarizing what was said Well, I got what I asked for. Including every “um,” “uh,” “hmmm,” “ah,” and “*sigh*” that was uttered.

  251. Canonical23*

    One of the department managers kept losing a soda here and there. They’d buy a 12 pack and put it in the fridge and not mark who it belonged to – and we had a good 30ish people in the building working. This person was a piece of work already – misused company credit cards, would leave work after an hour “because they just didn’t feel like staying” and their staff feared them because their performance evaluations consisted of 3 page lists of every perceived slight that the employee had committed in the last year – so my suspicions were that in the beginning people thought the sodas were for everyone since there was no name and then when the manager started sending out threatening emails, people didn’t care and doubled down.

    But the manager decided that the janitor (which we contracted from a cleaning company) was stealing them since they cleaned after hours and put up a camera in the break room to “catch her in the act.” My employees found the camera hidden underneath the break room table and – reasonably – flipped out. The camera had been recording (audio and video) for days, presumably to also record any private conversations in the break room. We brought a grievance to the head of the organization since recording without consent in our state is illegal. Nothing was done and my employees and I faced a huge backlash for bringing it up. We all left within 2 months and last I heard, that manager was still there and was up for a promotion.

  252. notasecurityguard*

    fair warning: this story gets kind of intense

    I don’t know if this qualifies as petty per se (it might veer into “obstruction of justice” or “sueable retaliation” territory) but I’m an SRO (basically a police officer who works for the police department but in a school) and i had a kid come to me alleging that his teacher had chokeslammed him and he had marks on his neck so i had to investigate it. Being a mandated reporter I also had to let social services know and that i would give them the results of my preliminary investigation the next day. So I do my investigation, and conclude that the teacher did not in fact chokeslam the student but rather the marks came about when the student tripped trying to attack the teacher. While I’m on the phone explaining all of this to the social worker who’s been assigned to investigate the principal comes barging into my office to start screaming at me for involving social services and ranting about how “we do things our way here and you come to me before you call social services on one of my teachers” etc… (i should also note that part of the reason i was assigned to that particular school was that a student had DIED there the year before due to negligence, how the principal still had a job is beyond me because i know it’s a union gig and i know people typically shouldn’t get fired over single screw ups but like a kid died, i’d have thought there’d be an exception for that). I explain that I’m on the phone and will be happy to continue this discussion when I’m off (perhaps not as diplomatically as I could have said it but i mean…). So I finish with Social Services (who by the way cleared the teacher to return to work in about 4 hours thanks to my investigation) and explain to the principal that while they may do things a certain way I do not in fact work for them, and I do things the right way (i was perhaps a touch insubordinate in that conversation but A i wasn’t his subordinate, B i was right, and C, see above about a kid dying on his watch) and that if he had a problem with me as a mandated reporter conducting appropriate police action he was free to call my commanding officer and I’d be happy to dial the number for him.

    So he shut up because presumably he wouldn’t have liked jail but then the pettiness came in. If i asked for someone to come relieve me at the front desk so i could relieve myself it would take 45 minutes, if i needed information from him it would take all day to get it, he once even called the cops on me (i don’t KNOW it was him but i saw him on his cell phone 3 minutes before someone i got notified by the police dispatcher that there was a 911 call for a man with a gun where i was standing and matching my description and there wasn’t anyone else out there), just constantly shit like that.

    After about 3 months the transfer i requested to a different assignment came through

    1. The Supreme Troll*

      I just want to say that I respect the job that you do and the difficulty and challenges that come with it. I have been in private contract security for many years, but my job is nowhere near as stressful or challenging as yours. Best of luck.

    2. Essess*

      I would think that the 911 report could have been followed up on, by checking the phone number on the incoming 911 call.

  253. literal desk fan*

    If anyone else from my company reads this blog, this will be pretty identifiable, but it amuses me too much to not share.

    A couple years ago, my company decided to do an office refresh, which meant they had to move most of us to this unrented office space. My department was lucky enough to have to be there for 6 months (other depts only had to be there for 3!) in a windowless conference room / almost-sauna. We put a shower curtain rod across the entrance to the room and hung the ugliest effing long, purple, fuzzy curtains you’ve ever seen and added a “welcome” mat that said “go away” to welcome people into our space. We also lined the walls with one of those massive paper rolls and spent the 6 months adding random quotes (funny things we said) and terribly ugly clipart to the walls.

    And to top it all off, we created our own window out of black poster board and put up a curtain rod with curtains. As the only person in our department with any sort of drawing ability, I was tasked with creating scenes to put into the window frame. One of them was a dragon breathing fire, another was a rainy day, and another one was an autumnal graveyard with all of our names on headstones. (Guess which scene stayed up the longest.)

    One of the company execs came to walk around our space one day, and I was completely unable to make eye contact because I would have just LOST IT and died laughing as they read the quotes on the walls.

  254. Auntie Maim*

    I had started a job at a new library and had only been there about a month. I’m not the most social type, so I’d only met a few of my new coworkers, but I was starting to get a feel for who was who. For some reason, the library’s dean went out of her way to tell me, not once but twice, that I shouldn’t associate with one of the other librarians. The dean had some beef with her that I hadn’t been privy to, as I was so new.

    I ignored the directive completely as I’d already spent some time with this librarian and thought she was pretty cool. One thing led to another and we were married three years later. We joked that we should have invited the dean to our wedding, as one way to make sure I’ll do something is to forbid me to do it. We didn’t invite her, but now that we’ve both moved on from that library, I still have to talk my wife out of mailing the dean a bag of glitter dicks. When it comes down to it, she’s way more petty than I am.

    1. mmmm222*

      Haha! I worked for the company that ships those for a while, and always wanted to know the stories behind what each person had done to deserve the “gift”. At least this one was a happy ending!

  255. Lily in NYC*

    The SVP of my former dept. and I never got along (everyone hated her; she is the worst coworker I’ve ever had). The first petty thing I did to her was to suggest to her assistant that he should book her a middle seat on a 13-hour flight (she was awful to him in every way so he did it with glee).

    She was really into hierarchy and blind obedience (she used those exact words) and I noticed that when she sent emails to multiple people, she entered their names by order of seniority (in the To: field). I started making sure to put her name last in every email and calendar invite I sent. I also made sure to tell a few other people who also hated her and they started doing the same thing. The best part is that she could never complain about it because she realized it would make her seem like the petty one instead of me. I am sure she noticed and I am sure it really bothered her because she cared about stuff like this to an extreme extent.

    1. 1234*

      For the flight, wouldn’t she notice the seat number and ask the assistant to change it?

  256. Peachywithasideofkeen*

    One of my old bosses would routinely park in one of the handicapped parking spaces. (For some reason she thought it was ok because it was a private parking lot? ).One of my coworkers called the police on her during her notice period. The boss was so pissed, but the coworker insisted it wasn’t her. She somehow got the police to tell her what number the complaint came from and it was from the coworker’s office phone.

    1. Curmudgeon in California*

      Heh. Your coworker should have waited until she went to the bathroom and did it from her (the boss’s) phone.

  257. Katie the Fed*

    One of my coworkers had a very small figurine of Hillary Clinton on her desk. She sat next to someone with VERY different political beliefs.

    She kept walking in to find Hillary turned around, put in a drawer, knocked over, etc. Never proved it was the neighbor, but someone was messing with it.

  258. ElizabethJane*

    Some back story – my office provides free coffee and a selection of flavored creamers. I don’t like flavored cream so I bring in my own from home and keep it in one of our refrigerators, with my name on it (it’s common practice for people to bring in their own juice/condiments/whatever and label it so it doesn’t get thrown away).

    I figure since I’m bringing my own anyway, and skipping the expensive coffee shop run I can be a little extra about it and bring in this ultra-rich, ultra delicious creamer from a local dairy. One day a co-worker forgot to bring her own in so I let her use some of mine. This co-worker has boundary issues under the best of circumstances and does weird power play things all the time. For the past several weeks she’s been “forgetting” her own creamer and just using mine. On the one hand, fine, it usually won’t last more than a week and I typically don’t use the whole container every week. On the other… really?

    I’ve started bringing in an additional cheapo grocery store brand creamer and giving it to her every Monday morning. Yes, I am spending $2 a week to be petty and passive aggressive.

    1. Roger, OverandOut*

      Ask her for the $2. Next time she says she forgot her creamer, tell you brought in an extra she can use (the cheapo one), but would appreciate it if she contributed to the cost.

  259. Tinybutfierce*

    I managed an art supply store for a small (and terrible) company. After I took over from the previous manager who’d been there for a good few years, I had a lot of customers introduce themselves to me; some were genuinely lovely people, a lot were just jerks trying to ingratiate themselves to get special treatment. There was one woman who owed my store THOUSANDS; she’d been allowed to create a store account, which she used to ring up supply kits for the college art classes she taught, and then never paid (why she was allowed to do this beyond a single semester is still beyond me). She made a very big point to meet me early on, before i’d been informed of the debt she owed, and always made a weirdly big show of using her educator ID to get our store discount. I finally contacted the college she worked for to discuss payment arrangements. Not only did they have NO idea about the supplies she’d bought under the school’s name, we found out she’d quit months ago; apparently she was furious she was passed over for a department head position, took all her gradebooks and whatnot, and flounced without a word, and no one had heard from her since.

    A short time later, she came in again, and I guess had forgotten she’d already introduced herself to me, because she did it again. I gave her my best southern belle “oh, we’ve met”, and made sure to ask if she was still teaching, because I’d heard ~through the grapevine~ that she was no longer at School. She didn’t try to use that invalid ID ever again.

    1. Red Fraggle*

      I’m crying laughing. This is beautiful, glorious justice! I dealt with similar art store regulars (same mindset, but not as successful at scamming) for years, and I salute you. (If it’s the company I think you’re alluding to, I also hope you’ve gotten out of there.)

      1. Tinybutfierce*

        Man, some of the regulars were the WORST. We got a lot of super fun local arts folks who were really chill, but the vast majority of our customers were like textbook examples of Entitled Asshat Who’s Never Been Told”No”. I once had a guy claim it was a “bait and switch” for our store to sell things at different prices than our website, and he refused to pay anything other than the online price. Because corporate was utterly spineless (among other garbage things), I spent 20 minutes with this one guy, going through his purchase line by line, all to save… $3. :|

        The company is based in the Southeast with a handful of stores and site/mail order catalog, and I’m very glad to say I’ve since escaped and work somewhere MUCH nicer. And now I order my art supplies from somewhere else that actually pays their employees a living wage. 0:)

  260. Quiltrrrr*

    I had this Director…real piece of work. Condescending toward us non-management folks. For a morale event, he rented some really large grill and placed it at the receiving dock. We had to cook our own food, and the department provided some frozen burgers.

    I brought in my own steak, seasoning, and utensils. Cooked my own steak. Made everyone jealous. This was many years ago, and I still remember it clearly.

  261. de*

    I went through like, seventeen rounds of requests and follow-ups re: a promotion I felt I deserved. Documented, made the case, everything.

    Finally got told by senior leader it was not to happen, and they wanted me to work for someone else, other than senior leader. I tried to make the case again, but finally had to leave his office.

    So ten minutes later, I decided I’d just go home. Walked to the hallway, and as I was getting in the elevator, senior leader was too. When he asked if I was going to lunch I made hard eye contact, said “I’m sick so I’m going home” and the ride down was silent.

    (I eventually left for a way better opportunity.)

  262. YarnOwl*

    Okay this is kind of a long one but worth it I think.
    I work in a marketing department that publishes a lot of client-facing materials, and there is one person in one of our offices who LOVES to nit-pick our stuff (which, for the record, we are extremely thorough with copy editing and proofing our materials and very rarely does anything get by without us catching it (watch me have a bunch of typos in this comment lol)). I found out after this story happened that she has a degree in marketing and works in an unrelated job, so some folks think she like to be picky about stuff to show…that she’s better than us? Something like that?
    Anyway, a few months ago, she emails me about some things she thinks are wrong in a document we’re publishing. She CC’s her boss and her office head, and outlines these issues. A couple of them were matters of preference that I’m willing to bend on, and the rest were flat-out wrong. I emailed her back (only her, not CC’ing her boss or office head), thanking her for her feedback and telling her the two items I’d be fixing.
    She responded, re-including her boss and office head on the email, with an extremely rude point-by-point explanation of why the other items were actually wrong and needed to be fixed. This email was probably five paragraphs long and she had clearly spent a lot of time on it (but also gotten everything wrong). I had responded with a brusque but still polite point-by-point explanation of why she was wrong and thanked her, again, for her feedback. Her emails were weirdly aggressive enough that her boss called me to apologize and tell me he had no idea why she was CC’ing him and that he didn’t ask her to do that or encourage it at all.
    Cut to a couple of weeks ago. We are publishing another document that includes an article pulled from a reputable aggregation site (so we did not write it) about a new study that was published this year. She sends us an email, with her office head CC’ed (but not her boss – we suspect after the last incident that he asked her to leave him out of it) along with the head of the department we worked on this document with, telling us that publishing this article will make us look bad because it’s junk science and everyone knows there’s nothing to back it up.
    The head of the department we worked with on this piece sends her an extremely thorough, well-written, and polite explanation of where the study came from (a huge meta-study of almost 600 studies performed by a well-respected team) and where it was published (one of the oldest, most respected scientific journals in the country) , and thanking her for her feedback and telling her he’s happy to explain anything she has questions about.
    She responds with an email nit picking various parts of his email and the article published, clearly digging in her heels. Her complaints were so bizarre and incorrect that we were all asking ourselves where she had pulled that from and how she had come to that conclusion. And again, we did not write this article, so we aren’t sure why she was nit-picking all of this stuff with us. She also said, at the beginning of her email, to take her office head off the email because “he ha[d] seen enough.”
    She clearly was not interested in an actual discussion and just wanted to argue with us and browbeat us into admitting that she was right (even though she was far from it). We didn’t respond, and instead the department head who had sent the initial response forwarded the email to her boss, her office head, and the head of the division he works in, letting them know that she was being incredibly difficult and rude to our team and to him when it was completely unnecessary.
    Later that week, her boss was in our office and stopped by to chat with us about something totally unrelated. When this incident was brought up, he mentioned that she had been making a ton of mistakes in her work lately and that he wished she would spend as much time focusing on that as she did nit-picking our work!
    On one hand, I kind of feel bad for her, because the kind of person who wants to spend that much mental and emotional energy arguing and being rude about something that is so incredibly low-stakes AND that she is completely wrong about probably doesn’t have a lot of positive stuff to focus on in her life and work, but on the other hand, she is so unnecessarily rude and aggressive and adversarial that I can’t believe it!

  263. Murphy*

    In my junior year of college, the girl in the dorm room next to me was frequently loud at night. My school had a big music program and one night, during finals week she thought it was OK to practice on her drum pad at 4am. I went over and asked her nicely to stop because I had a final at 8am (100% true, but also it’s 4am have some sense!) She called me a bitch.

    In the dorm, other people’s phone numbers were easy to figure out (i.e. the next room over would be one number less). So when I woke up for my final at 7:30. I called her room and woke her up. I let it ring a few times and hung up when she answered. I left and walked over to my final. Just before I entered the exam room, I called one more time. Let ring a few times and then hung up.

  264. Contracts Killer*

    In a previous job, my grandboss had been my immediate supervisor for a long time. My new boss had only been promoted recently. When I was giving three weeks’ notice, I told grandboss first. He asked me not to tell my boss; he wanted to share the news with her himself because reasons. Cue one week before my last day, I check in with grandboss and he forgot to tell my boss I was leaving and told me to go tell her. I did, and she didn’t respond. And she didn’t speak to me the entire last week. And she didn’t go out with the rest of the section that took me to lunch. We are in the same professional circles and I run into her about once a year. She still doesn’t speak to me. It’s more than a decade later.

      1. Contracts Killer*

        Yep. I started by saying, sorry, Grandboss planned to tell you this and forgot…

  265. irene adler*

    Our small venture capital company was merged with another small company. We got a new CEO. He was a world class jerk.

    He hired a secretary who, for the most part, was very nice. But she had very little work to do. So she spent her time balancing her checkbook, making long distance calls (back when these were expensive to make) back east to her family, running errands-personal and professional, etc.

    In a venture capital company, when funds are tight, it was hard knowing she was well-paid but did little.

    This secretary had all kinds of trinkets on her desk and pinned to the felt on the wall next to her. Probably over a hundred.

    I took to moving them when she wasn’t around. Turned a couple of the pinned trinkets upside down. Switched a couple of figurines on her desk. Never damaged anything and certainly didn’t put anything in the way of her work space.

    Drove her nuts.

    She blamed the CEO. She thought it was some running gag he was playing on her.

    No one ever figured out it was me behind this.

  266. Eleanor Pigby*

    My Notorious RBG coffee mug (given to me by my mom post-election) went missing from the office kitchen one day and failed to turn up for a few days. I spotted it by chance during a meeting in the VP’s office when she moved her purse to the floor and my mug was inside of it (!). I politely called her out and she sheepishly handed it over with an embarrassed, “oh is that yours?”
    A couple weeks later when the same thing happened I waited a week and then sent an all staff email asking for the mug’s return, stating that it had sentimental value as it was a gift from my mother, with a picture of the mug attached. I immediately received a reply from the VP saying, “it wasn’t me!”
    Turns out the CEO had given it to a board member’s wife because she had apparently seen it in the office and liked it. My email shamed him into apologizing, although someone else ended up grabbing it at the next board meeting and returning it to me.
    I happily left that job a couple months later, mug in tow.

    1. CustServGirl*

      What the heck?!?! Just stealing people’s mugs like that?

      Thank goodness you moved on!

  267. SigneL*

    I worked in a lab. There were some MDs, some lab techs and a secretary. We brought our lunches and put them in the refrigerator in the break room. Someone started stealing food. One day, I caught one of the MDs stealing cookies out of the secretary’s lunch. Why? “Sue’s FAT!” She shouldn’t be eating cookies!”

    I couldn’t make this up.

  268. Matilda Jefferies*

    I once had a position as an internal consultant. My boss for some reason decided that because I was only going to be in our “home” office once a week, I didn’t need a security pass.

    He forgot to account for two things: one, that you also needed a pass to get OUT of the office, and two, that the washrooms were outside the secure area. (And three, that I was prepared to respond to his pettiness with more pettiness!) So, I made sure to ask him every time I needed to go through those doors. Coming in first thing in the morning, in and out for 1-2 washroom breaks, in and out for lunch, and out at the end of the day – every time, I asked him to come and open the door for me. I figured, it was his stupid decision to not give me a security pass, he could be the one to live with the consequences.

    Shockingly, it only took a day or two of this for him to decide that maybe I should have my own pass after all…

  269. Sally Forth*

    A manager at our small not for profit would often eat in the resource library that doubled as a meeting room. Sometimes she would bring her daughter to work & the daughter would do craft projects & make a huge mess. This meant staff would be scrambling for other meeting space, but the ED never said a word about the mess or the room being used as a daycare. The manager would often direct the receptionist (a revolving series of temps) to clean it up at the end of the day. This would include lunch containers, food spilled and glue and glitter all over the table and require a lot of scrubbing.

    Our board personnel committee used that room for a committee meeting before the regular board meeting. One night, supposedly because we were so busy doing board meeting set up in the other room, the receptionist “forgot” to clean the small meeting room. The first board member who walked in said, “What the HELL happened in here!?!” and the receptionist sweetly said “Oh, that’s X’s daughter’s playroom. Sorry, I haven’t had time to clean it up the way X likes yet. I usually bill an extra 15 minutes to do it after my regular work day.”

  270. AB.*

    My coworkers also have a tendency to not read their emails and request the same thing many times. I usually respond by sending them screenshots of the item (that they should have been able to look up themselves!) and/or my initial response as an attachment.

    Well lately we’ve had an issue with miscommunication and improper requests. It’s been escalated to the VP level, who can now see the entire history of emails that were skipped over. If only things were done right the first time!

  271. Roy G. Biv*

    The VP at my OldJob was passive aggressive to the extreme. As in, we’re in the Midwest, and he amazed us with his fluency in passive aggressive behavior. One of his favorite tricks was to fire an employee, and then send an email praising that person’s performance on the job, and how we will miss Employee X, and wish him well in his new endeavors. Naturally, this was regarded as Employee X has resigned, and is going to a fabulous new job. And we fellow employees would descend upon Employee X’s office, only to find, no, there is no new job, VP fired Employee X.

    If an employee resigned, VP sent a tersely-worded message that sounded like the employee had been fired. Hushed conversations ensued – oh, what’s that? Employee Y resigned, and is starting cool new job in two weeks? Not fired? VP just HATED to have people quit before he had a chance to fire them.

    So when I resigned, I wrote a farewell email, addressed it to the whole team, CC’d VP, but did not send it. Went to VP’s office, tendered my resignation verbally and in writing. Went back to my desk and hit “send” on the farewell email. Within a minute I heard VP yell “F*ck!” in his office. He was so ticked that I got the jump on the messaging, but he still sent his tersely-worded message that made people question if I had been fired.

    I miss a few things about that job, but I don’t miss that guy.

    2. MMB*

      Rainbow! I love it. (Realized what a bizarre non sequitur this sounds like. User’s name = colors of the rainbow.)

  272. 1234*

    I had a heard a story about a Vegas showgirl who showed up in court wearing the showgirl outfit because some government agency claimed that she could not deduct her uniform on her taxes as a work expense as an independent contractor. (From what I understand and have been told by some accountants, you can only deduct clothes you absolutely cannot wear outside of work, so black pants you purchased for work for example, couldn’t be deducted) She asked them “Where ELSE did you think I could wear this?!”

    She won that one.

    2. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      LMFAO, I adore this woman. Seriously, it’s a COSTUME and not generic multi-use outfit.

  273. Krista*

    I had a coworker who was in the same level as me, supervisory-wise. She was one of those people who was nice when it suited her, but not when it didn’t (For posterity, she once told me after a traumatic miscarriage that I’d “get over it” and since I was young, I’d have time to have more – not the nicest).
    One day, I got sick with a pretty bad cold during the day and told her I was going home. She chastised me and told me that she “wouldn’t let me leave” with just the sniffles (mainly because if I left, she’d have to cover supervision, instead of browsing Pinterest). Sooooooo, in my sickness-addled, pissed off state, I got very petty, waited until she left her desk for a few minutes, and licked her mouse, keyboard and phone receiver (yes. I did that). The next day, she started getting sick (the same symptoms I’d had the day before) and said she was going home – so I reiterated her message to me the previous day verbatim and then watched her sulk back to her office.
    I have never done anything like this ever again, as no one has ever pushed me like she did.

    3. Jennifer Juniper*

      Umm…..your co-worker could have been immune-compromised or had a family member who was. You would have been responsible for that person’s hospitalization or death if something bad had happened.

      1. Valkyrie*

        As someone with immunocompromised family members, I actively avoid people who are sick. If I had a coworker with a cold, I’d let them leave asap so as to not risk taking that home to my family. If the coworker did have immunocompromised family, they would have known the risks of being around sick people and let Krista go home! (also as someone who has had some pretty bad fevers in my time, there’s a level of brain melt where everything just ceases to be real)

  274. Kate, short for Bob*

    Oh dear. This was me… Working for a tiny IT company back in the 90s, pretty badly run, very much a ‘we think of you all as family’ kind of place.

    Someone had the bright idea to start a monthly newsletter – why I don’t know. It was small enough we were all in each other’s offices all the time anyway. So certain of the staff wrote small pieces of fiction, and poetry, and someone wrote a serial drama based on Noah’s Ark and making parallels to office life from it and at this memory I’m now cringing so hard you could stick coal between my toes and get a diamond out.

    So with a colleague/friend we wrote another newsletter. Only 4 sides instead of 8, but covering all the usual bases including the Ark serial. And announcing the winner of the ‘definitions competition’ as the entry defining marketing as ‘the daily procuring of fresh ingredients for a nice dinner’ – because that was pretty much all the marketing manager seemed to do.

    And we snuck in when the office was closed and put a copy in everyone’s pigeonhole ready for Monday morning.

    It got a little bit explosive for a while – especially when some people laughed while others were furious, but we never told, and no one could ever prove it was us.

    And now that memory’s cheered me right up :-)

  275. Sales Geek*

    I had a 3rd line manager who, for some reason unknown to us, would forward *every* corporate spam to her direct reports (about 3 units of 12-14 people). I worked for a very large company who had executives at the top who felt that sending email to the troops constituted doing their job. Most of it was useless and we were getting 80-90 of these a *day* plus each (and more) would be forwarded to us all every night when our 3rd line got home. It was killing our productivity since we had to start each morning by deleting these emails…we couldn’t just write a filter that would delete them since she did occasionally send out something important that could affect us.

    We asked formally, in person, and by email to please stop this but she felt that it was a valuable service “in case we missed something important.”

    Finally, my 1st line manager got busy one Saturday morning and send every one of these forwarded emails back to my 3rd line with a one line commentary to the effect that “we already get these from corporate.” I think he forwarded somewhere close to 500 of these emails.

    But after that it stopped…:-)

    Don’t get me wrong, this 3rd line was a pretty decent manager who was fair with raises and got us training when there was no budget for it, etc. But she just didn’t understand the notion of mailing lists.

  276. Tbone 91*

    I was a security guard for about 2 1/2 years at a high rise building in downtown Columbus, Ohio. This building had several different tenants/companies there but they all shared the same outdoor smoking area.

    My shift was 3pm to 11pm so by the time I got there in the afternoon there would be quite the collection of cigarette butts in the ashtray. I’d get a small pail of water and pour it over the stubbed out cigs. We had a really bad problem with vagrants coming by every day and going thru the ashtray to find used butts that still had tobacco. They’d just dump out trash cans everywhere looking for uneaten food, used cigarette butts, hitting up tenants for spare change, etc.

    Nobody told me to do it, there wasn’t anything in our SOP that required us to soak the cigarette butts, I just thought it up on my own just to keep the vagrants from coming around. Less drama equals less paperwork.

    1. The Supreme Troll*

      We have to sometimes think creatively in private security. Good job on that one!

  277. ooo*

    The guy who sat next to me at my old newspaper job was not a bad person or obnoxious or anything, but he could be kind of whiny and a nervous Nellie — just often overwrought about stuff that most of us recognized as Not a Big Deal, and inclined to complain about life circumstances in a way that gave you the impression he could change things if he actually wanted to make the effort. I say this to make clear why he seemed like the perfect victim for a very mild practical joke, and why that reasoning backfired on me.

    This was around 2002, when the internet was still kind of new and many companies weren’t hardcore about IT security if they didn’t have to be. We worked evenings, and he got off before me, so one night I hopped on his computer and changed his default browser homepage. The standard default homepage was our newspaper’s website; I ran the URL through a site called “the Pornolizer,” which would take any URL you gave it and create a replica of that page, but with naughty words substituted for much of the original text. (This was, like, the height of online comedy back then.) I figured he’d see it and be shocked and freak out, and then we’d have a good laugh, so I changed the URL, went home for the night, and promptly forgot about it.

    Next day, I came in and I could tell something was wrong. His terrible boss was staring daggers at me. My wonderful boss said, “Um, you need to go talk to [Editor-in-Chief].”

    The editor-in-chief, who was (fortunately) also wonderful, brought me into a conference room, and it was then that I realized I was In Trouble. At this point I had still totally forgotten about the pornolizing, but EIC quickly brought me up to speed.

    What had happened was: My colleague did, as planned, open his browser and was shocked and freaked out. But things took a turn after that, because I had not counted on his or his terrible boss’s complete lack of understanding about how online worked. (There’s probably something instructive to be gleaned here about the decline of journalism in the face of the internet, but we’ll save that for another time.) Basically, even though my colleague’s computer was the only one that showed the pornolized homepage, and even though a glance at the location bar would have shown that the URL was not http://www.ournewspaper.com but, like, http://www.pornolize.com?=ournewspaper.com, and even though not a single reader had contacted us to complain about naughty words in their news, my colleague and, more importantly, his terrible boss were immediately convinced that someone had hacked the paper’s website.

    So they called our corporate offices, who got to the bottom of things pretty quickly. But because corporate was now involved, and because I had technically violated our IT policy, the EIC had to do the meeting with me and write me up.

    Nobody was mad at me (except for the colleague’s terrible boss, who I think still thought I had hacked the site and then just weaseled out of being punished for it?), but it was a good lesson in people’s varying degrees of comfort with technology and in how even harmless practical jokes can go awry in corporate America.

  278. yes, I did*

    Back in the mid 90’s I was working for a large international financial services/insurance company. My manager, a high level executive, was having his position eliminated, and as his only employee, mine was as well. I had been there about 4 years at the time. I had a lot of specialty software (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) installed on my computer. I proceeded to not only delete everything off my computer, I did a low level format, leaving IT with a completely blank hard drive.

    I was rehired a month later for a different department and got a new computer.

  279. Close Bracket*

    The person who staged a coup to get get my job duties and then stole my last remaining duty for shits and giggles even though it was explicitly to remain mine was pretty effing petty. I sure wish somebody would just throw my mug away and call it a day.

  280. srboyd*

    A director at my work was mad that he hadn’t been invited to the fantasy football league run by one of the partners. He made a fake email address and sent a company-wide email from an “anonymous” employee, (lets say he used the name Jimbo) complaining that everyone should have been invited because they used company wi-fi to set up their teams. Someone found out it was Director based on the IP address (I don’t know why they tried so hard to find this out, I guess pettiness was running on both sides). The partner sent an email in response that made it clear to everyone but Director that he was sorry to hear that some employees were left out and all would be included next year. The next year all employees were indeed invited to compete for the Jimbo trophy, named in the fake disgruntled employee’s honor.

  281. AnonAcademic*

    Ok, this one wasn’t intentional but I still feel bad. A former coworker of mine used to store tons of personal items into our cramped shared cube space (think multiple full grocery bags of random stuff) and then disappear to work from home for weeks at a time. I complained a few times after a bag spilled over and her stuff was all over the floor creating a fire hazard, but she never cleaned it up and I eventually had to (didn’t want to die in a fire to make a point!).

    One time, she brought in a beautiful and expensive flower. It was right next to a file cabinet with a heavy door that would close on its own from its weight. I grabbed something from the cabinet and swung the door closed while turning around, and I didn’t noticed the door had closed on part of the plant, majorly damaging it. My coworker came in shortly after and immediately noticed, and while I apologized when I realized what happened and offered to replace the plant, I’m pretty sure she thought I killed her plant out of spite.

    I guess in an unconscious Freudian sense I am a petty, plant-murdering weirdo!

  282. Jo*

    When we did a secret Santa at our workplace, the colleague I had to get a present for was my rather annoying manager, who was obsessed with sales targets even though customer service and sorting out customer queries etc was the main aim of the job. We had a £5 budget as it was just a small gift we were getting. I saw a tin of sweets for £5 in my local supermarket and was going to get them for him, but saw a jar of the same sweets for £4 so decided to be stingy and got him those instead.

  283. SAHM*

    I was an admin assistant at a very toxic small company that was the boss/owner, two head scientists (I’m just going to call them R and S), two jr scientists and me. During my (short) time there, one of the head scientists(S) who had been with the company for over ten years turned in her two weeks. She was moving out of state for a better job.

    Let me back up a bit and say that the boss/owner and S, whose quitting, were always buddy buddy, grew up in China, always having private conversations in Chinese in front of everyone (no one else spoke Chinese). So after S turned in her two weeks Boss Lady stopped talking to her. Literally. Never said a word to her. Always went to talk to R (which was suuuuuuuper awkward because both R&S shared an office), and have R ask S questions.

    On her last day with us, Boss Lady brings in a gift for S. She’s super smiles, gushing over this gift, etc. and S opens gift in front of R and boss lady. It’s a clock. S is less than enthused by the clock. After Boss Lady leaves R asks S why she’s upset about getting such a nice clock. S tells R to google what giving a clock means to a Chinese person bc S couldn’t even talk about it.

    If, like me, you had no idea what giving a clock to a Chinese person means it’s incredibly bad luck, like “counting down the minutes to your death” sort of bad wishes. Which, as R pointed out to me, Boss Lady can’t pretend she doesn’t know the meaning of since both S and Boss Lady grew up in China.

    What really blows my mind is that part of the reason this company was still afloat after the recession was that during the recession Boss Lady told everyone she wasn’t paying them for the summer but would instead pay them at the end of summer (3 whole MONTHS of no pay) and they could accept it or quit. Boss Lady loves to brag about how everyone “came together” and she “paid them all back” at the end of summer. When I heard the story I was like, did she pay you interest? And nope. (I also thought it was hella illegal since we’re in CA, but that’s beside the point) So S went three months with NO PAY for this shitty little company during the recession and then Boss Lady had the balls to give her a death wish gift when S left.

  284. Lora*

    One place I worked that paid poorly unless you were in VERY senior management, had two apple trees in the front landscaping of the building. They got apples, which inevitably fell on the pavement and had to be cleaned up by the landscaping company. Nothing got sprayed at all (the site managers were too cheap to pay for insecticides) so I asked the site managers if I could pick the apples and take them home instead, rather than have them make a mushy wasp-infested mess, and the site managers, chuckling about the foolish hippie girl’s request, assured me that the apples were completely inedible but if I wanted them they didn’t care. I picked two bushels – they were quite good apples, actually, a baking variety, made great applesauce and pie filling. I made two apple pies and brought them in to work as a thank-you, and people were nice, took slices, said thank you, etc. One of the site managers came down to the break area where I had set out the pies with a note that the fruit was from the front yard, took a tiny piece, and immediately went back to his office without saying a word.

    Three months later the trees had been cut down. They didn’t even replace them with another kind of tree, just left the stumps.

    1. BadWolf*

      I…don’t understand? Why would they cut down the trees? Did they think you were going to start a lucrative pie business using free company apples???

    2. Seeking Second Childhood*

      Did that guy work in Connecticut in the 90s? Because I had same experience, different fruit. Choke-cherry trees vary wildly and there was one at the back of the parking lot that had cherries as sweet as a grocery store. I was even trying to graft a cutting from it, and they cut it down. Not the ones on either side either.

  285. UnNamed*

    My first child was due on 10/1. I mentioned to my coworkers that I hoped she would stay in there a couple extra days so that I would not have to come back from maternity leave right before Christmas. She accommodated that request and I was back right before New Years.

    Apparently it was super horrible that I had taken off on both Christmas and Thanksgiving on the same year. When I got back on 12/28, they had already both booked off the days around the following Memorial Day, Labor Day, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. Since we were a team of 3 and needed one person in the office, and all PTO was a first come first serve approval, I was not able to take off any time around any holiday for the next year.

    It wasn’t a huge deal to not get those days off. I might not have even noticed, if they hadn’t welcomed me back by telling me they did it on purpose since I had “intentionally” left them to figure out both Christmas and Thanksgiving while I was on maternity leave as if I could actually control when she was born. What’s funny is that I had offered to come in over Thanksgiving so they could take time off, but was told by management not to worry about it and to stay home and heal.

    Sweet ladies, those two. Glad I don’t work with them any more.

  286. Lepidoptera*

    I sit outside the office of a VP who is every terrible white boomer stereotype you can imagine. He loudly watches Sean Hannity all day, practices golf putting in his office, rants about having to travel to deal with “dirty Mexicans”, I could go on.

    I was being really lazy about my long-term goal to become bilingual in Spanish, but being around this guy has lit a fire under my ass. I now spend every break on Duolingo, and my cubicle neighbor is fluent and happy to practice with me during low-stakes conversations. VP is hearing more and more Spanish as the months go by.

    3. Just Employed Here*

      Learning a language *at* someone — perfect! It’s the sweet spot combining petty and useful. I can recommend Lingvist once you’re done (or bored) with Duolingo.

  287. gertrude*

    I was the Executive Assistant to the President of a manufacturing company and one of the VPs was one of my lunch/coffee buddies. Said buddy once made a point of telling me that he was looking for work elsewhere and that he’d had a job offer, and that I should not, no matter what, tell the president. It was clear that he assumed I actually would go running right to the president who would then presumably do everything he could to keep this guy on staff. After we came back from grabbing coffee, he reiterated very pointedly that I should *not* say anything to the president, while all but winking at me. I felt manipulated and so irritated by this maneuver that I pointedly didn’t say anything to the Pres, and this guy just kind of floundered while waiting to hear, “No, stop! Don’t go!” When he finally mentioned to the Pres that he’d had another offer, he did it in a sort of calculating way that also backfired, and he ended up leaving and having to job hunt.

  288. vampire physicist*

    I chickened out at the end but: I left my former job to go to grad school, so I knew I was planning to leave a good 8 months or so before I actually left. Around the same time as I was sending out my applications, I was assigned to a new client, and one of the other internal people on this client was the most condescending ass I’d met in a while. He particularly delighted in correcting me on internal policies…despite the fact that we were on different teams and our company had terrible cross-team communication/alignment of policy so his team’s policies were completely unavailable to me. He’d also been on this client team longer but had less tenure at the company, and as you might have guessed, he was a man and I’m a woman.
    I got “stop mansplaining” cards printed and had intended to leave one in his inbox the day I left but I decided to take the high road. The cards were a big hit with my friends though.

  289. JustHereToRead*

    Forever ago at my first summer job one of my coworkers ate my lunch out of the staff fridge. To retaliate, my manager and I duct-taped her (aluminium foil-wrapped) sandwich and the fridge shut, then waited to see her reaction.

  290. Sally Forth*

    My sister is a nurse in a unionized environment. She is up to 6 weeks vacation & overtime lieu days and can usually take them whenever she wants because she is so high up the seniority list. Her unit, though, has an unwritten policy that the senior nurses only take one week at a time in summer and try to cover over spring break and Christmas so parents with kids in school have a chance for vacation with kids. Most of them have worked together in the unit for 20 plus years and benefited from the policy when their kids were young. The new nurses without kids also try to avoid school holidays.

    They did the vacation calendar with everyone sticking to the unspoken rule. Then it came to a married couple with mid-range seniority who had just transferred in. They each took 4 weeks so they didn’t need to worry about childcare all summer. This meant most of the staff below them were locked out of July and August except for single days here and there. When people protested, the couple quoted the personnel regs and said they were entitled to take it in a chunk. They even said they would go to to HR.

    My sister accidentally lost the vacation calendar file and they had to start over. The senior nurses all took their time so it locked out the married couple from summer, Christmas, or spring break time.

    The couple was furious. The senior nurses asked if they’d like start again and give everyone a fair chance or stick to the union rules.

    1. Middle School Teacher*

      Sometimes the spirit of the law is more important than the letter.

  291. Imaginary Number*

    This was back when I was a staff officer in the military. I had to turn a hard copy of a set of slides to my boss every week, which he would then turn into his boss, who then turned them into our commander, who used them to brief our CG (Commanding General.) It was a ridiculous chain of minor wordsmithing that involved far more people than it needed to.

    I turned the slides in early to my boss one week and he promptly forgot about them. He came rushing into my office demanding them at the last minute because our Brigade Commander was looking for them and I was able to tell him that I thought they were still sitting on his desk from several days before. He even acknowledged that he had, in fact, received them earlier in the week.

    A few minutes later I was in the hallway and I overheard him giving the slides to our boss saying that “Sorry these are late. CPT Imaginary Number just gave these to me.” It was such a stupid and unnecessary lie. He wasn’t even that late, but he still felt the need to throw me under the bus to save face.

  292. Lil'*

    I had a client who kept spelling my name wrong by adding an extra letter…..again and again…so I replied to his next email by also typing his name wrong, by adding an extra letter. He started spelling my name correctly after that :)

    2. The Hamster's Revenge*

      Nobody ever spells my name correctly, despite it being in the email address. I usually sign my own name with whatever random fat-fingered misspelling that happens because no one knows how to spell it anyway.

    3. TurquoiseCow*

      Oh man, I should do this. I have a very simple name with a number of alternate spellings, and most people decide to spell it with the more common, longer spelling. It annoys me when a) we’ve worked together for a while or known each other for years and you still don’t know how to spell my name and b) it’s in my email address! The email comes over with my spelling and it’s clearly shown as from: Cow and then you write back “Hi Kau” or something. WTF.

    4. nnn*

      Someone once did this to me! If I was your client, I thought it was hilarious!

      (Misspelling her name wasn’t intentional – it’s just she had a name I’d never encountered before that was one letter off from a name that’s common in my culture, so my brain parsed it incorrectly)

    5. Ey-not-Cy*

      I have also done this. It was to a sales person who didn’t bother to read my email signature. It still bothers me so much that I made this my handle on this site when I first started posting. It is amazing when you misspell their name, that things change. I did not buy the thing from said person. Too many other issues, but the several emails with incorrect name spelling was definitely the final no.

  293. Hummus*

    Wow, good timing. I work as the cantor (I lead the congregation in singing) at a church. My job involves teaching the congregation a refrain, then singing it with them and singing a verse alone. I have had a lot of boundary issues with the pianist over the years, and I recently started pushing back. This involves me not accepting rides to the train station from him. He has been hassling me about this ever since I stopped riding with him.

    This past Sunday, before the service, when I told him again I would not be taking a ride, he said, “Why are you rejecting me?” and also, “Do you know what the consequences of this are?” Apparently, the consequence is that he stops playing the piano whenever I am singing solo. As in, we have accompaniment for the congregation, but it drops out when it’s just me.

    Maybe this is a bit niche to picture, but I assure you it is petty AF. It is also such a ridiculous thing for a 70 year old man to do that I have to laugh. And, I’m a good enough musician that I still sounded fine without him, so joke’s on him.

    1. Pipe Organ Guy*

      Truly unprofessional! Such a childish thing to do, especially for a 70-year-old!
      For some reason, this makes me think of something a couple of years back. A highly-regarded organist (at least in some quarters) had been engaged well in advance for a summer concert series. Two days before the concert, he decreed that the organ at the church where he was to play was just too out of tune, and pulled out. (He had already done that with another concert series, at another church.) My husband, who’s on the board of directors of this series, had told me the story. I said that I had thought of a possibility: most of the solo pieces this person was to play were pieces I’ve played too. Might they be interested in that solution? They were indeed. I spent two days of heavy-duty practicing, and the decision was made to not have the organ in the stuff with orchestra (convention and historicity require it, but….). The concert went off, with only one change in the scheduled music. And the organ wasn’t much out of tune at all.
      Yep, we have some interesting personalities in the music world!

  294. NONNYMOOSE*

    Actually, leaving this Glassdoor review:

    Advice to Management

    Work with each other to smooth inter-departmental processes. Consistency is key. Please read your emails.

  295. Money Pettiness*

    I worked at the front desk for a college, and we occasionally handled small amounts of cash for transcript requests. The $ was kept in a locked box (with the key right next to it- very secure!) at one of the front desks, and my boss emptied it monthly to give to accounting. There was a starting amount of $40 in it, so we could give change. One day, I came in, and boss lady is freaking out because there was only $36 and one of us workers must have stolen $4! I don’t know what really happened, but it was way overblown for $4 and her calling us dishonest. Then, she kept the cash box in her office, so whenever we had a transaction, we had to go to her office for change. That lasted about a month before she was sick of it. Ugh, so glad I’m not there anymore.

  296. Lalaith*

    Oooh, I used to work with this woman… well, she was just generally lazy, incompetent, and terribly unpleasant to be around. Like, I was about to call her a witch but I don’t want to insult witches. She was in a supervisory position and would lord it over anyone under her (in the hierarchy, she didn’t actually manage anyone). There were a couple of college-age guys working there, and she would order them to go buy her snacks at a nearby store. There was no reason she couldn’t go. If they were busy with customers or something, she would sit there and screech at them to go get her snacks until they could go. And she would constantly walk off with our pens. The petty thing I would do was to sneak over to her desk when she wasn’t there, and steal them back! I also tied one to my pen cup with a string of rubber bands, so she couldn’t make off with it.

    I’ve tried to block out most of my interactions with her, but there’s one I hold onto as the prime example of This Lady Sucks. One day I sprained my ankle and had to call out, but I came in the next day, even though I was still in pain and hobbling (this was at a bank – I was a teller, so I could sit down most of the time). She and I opened together, and it was just the two of us there for a while. At some point, she had a customer at her desk, and I had one at the teller window, and I needed her to sign something for me to be able to complete my customer’s transaction. So I called over to her to come sign it please. And she wouldn’t. “I’m with a customer,” she said snidely. (Yeah? So am I, lady!) She was well aware that I had a sprained ankle… and she made me walk out to her desk to get her signature. There was no reason she couldn’t excuse herself from her customer for a minute. She just didn’t want to.

    I’ve never been happier to leave a job than when I left there.

  297. Tasha*

    Twice I quit jobs within two months after having new leadership installed (well, quickly found new positions then resigned), because I didn’t want to work with them. Petty or not? Both times I knew I was a valuable piece of the transition plan and I felt like I was giving them the finger by leaving quickly, although I never said anything snarky. Oh and my husband did this once.

    Once I opened my annual review meeting by announcing that I had found a new job. My boss and I actually got on well in that case and he wasn’t the reason for the job change. But we weren’t often in the office at the same time that month so I kind of had to do it that way. But in retrospect, it was kind of mean.

    1. Tina Belcher's Less Cool Sister*

      Last year I gave notice to my boss the day before a HUGE annual goal-setting meeting with his boss and grand-boss. I had to call him on a day off to do it…he took the call on car speakerphone, in front of his wife and kids.

      It wasn’t intentional and I feel really bad about it, but I couldn’t go into the meeting and tell my boss, grand-boss, and great-grand-boss all about my plans and goals for the year in the morning and then tell my boss “just kidding” in the afternoon.

  298. queenbeemimi*

    I once worked at an internship where I was totally wasted and given truly mind-numbing nothingness to do all day. There was another intern everybody loved and I felt very superfluous to the entire organization by dint of not being Lauren. I had even inherited the desk of a previous employee, complete with a lifetime supply of paper clips. Whenever I was so bored that it threatened to bubble over and destroy me, I would take one of the government-supplied paper clips, unbend it completely, and throw it in the trash. It was just a way to grab control of my life and waste .5 minutes so I didn’t lose my mind.

  299. See You Anon*

    At my first job in an office, I was admin support for a Director and their team of analysts. One day, there was a special off-site meeting, which the Director was hosting and chairing, that included senior management from all over the country. Normally, the Director would bring some of their analysts to the meeting, so they could act as support in case any of the senior management had questions on the files. For whatever reason, the Director chose to only bring 1 analyst (Kim), and told the other one (Alex) that they wouldn’t be attending the meeting. Alex had assumed that they would be going, and was extremely upset – they thought they were being left out intentionally (in my opinion, this wasn’t the case – I think the Director just wanted to keep the number of people in the room to a minimum, as there were a lot of people already).

    Anyway, Alex had developed a document for the meeting, and I had been told by the Director to print copies for all the participants, and take a taxi over to the meeting site after lunch. I had everything printed in the morning, stacked on my desk, and was ready to go. When Alex saw me leaving, they asked if the copies were for the meeting. I said yes, and they grabbed the stack out of my hands, saying “I need to make a change”.

    The edit? They added a footer to the document, which read “DOCUMENT DEVELOPPED BY ALEX SMITH” in 14-pt font.

    This change took 10 minutes to complete, and then they sent me the document to print. I had to re-print an extra 25 copies of a 6-page document. Our printer was also really fussy, so that added to the whole episode.

    This meant that I was 30 minutes late delivering the copies, and all I could say to the Director was “Alex edited the footer”.

  300. Still Mad*

    Ugh, I thought I was over this particular incident, but just found out I’m still mad. The short version is my practicum supervisor refused to sign off on my hours at his site, but signed the other student’s hours because I wouldn’t let his bad behavior go and left his site early. It really didn’t matter long-term that he never signed off because my practicum director did, but still.

    So, I knew he wasn’t going to be the best supervisor going into this because he’d previously dropped his practice to go to law school (my mom swears this is code for rehab since he was back in his practice a year later) the first time I applied to his site and didn’t tell me. A classmate who was doing her postgraduate hours there called me as soon as he told her. She didn’t think he would tell me himself. She was right.

    Anyway, I ended up at his site the following year and things were okay for the first half of the semester. I was seeing tons of clients, really finding my voice as a psychologist, but not getting real supervision and very sporadic feedback. (He once told me to give a suicidal client homework without specifying what or how to develop useful homework for them and refused to advise me further. Fortunately, I had a good seminar leader and the client did a ton of their own work to get through it. Proud of that guy.)

    Then one day I got to the office, let myself in with the key, and found nobody was there. I thought supervisor was running late, so I texted him. No reply, first client shows up. Now, we aren’t supposed to see clients without a supervisor on site who is licensed at the level of our training, doctoral (psychologist) in this case. I told the client this and she elected to cancel instead of waiting. I changed my calendar to reflect the in-person cancellation, contacted my seminar leader and prac director, informed my supervisor that he needed to cancel with my clients, and packed up to go. That’s when he comes back with, “I’m in my office.” I checked, he wasn’t. “I’m next door.” The only person next door was a person who had no idea who I was, that I was there, and was not a psychologist. She wasn’t even staying for the day. “I’m downstairs.” Directly downstairs was under construction. I highly doubt he was there. I reiterated that we need a licensed supervisor on-site and that I was leaving. He replied that we would be meeting to discuss this and my client retention the following week. Funny how my client retention was never a problem before now and also wasn’t a problem or something I could really control. It’s hard to make people keep coming when they get deployed or move out of state, you know?

    So, yeah. I chose to leave his site and move to a new one, which was an awesome training experience I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise because they weren’t ready to take students before I needed to change sites. Being considerate of my clients’ needs, I elected to finish out the semester at the terrible supervisor’s site while slowly transitioning to the new one and effectively gave almost two whole month’s notice.

    Supervisor responded by cutting all my supervision (a huge relief by that point) and booking me back to back intakes up to my last day. As I terminated with clients, I was getting more intakes. It was surreal. I’m still not sure what point he was trying to make.

    My last week came and I handed in my hours for him to sign. All he had to do was sign on the dotted line. He told me I could pick them up from him at his other site the following morning. I never had to go to his other site normally and it was a mild pain to get to by bus. I figured whatever, it’s almost over.

    I texted him when I was close and he shoots back how he doesn’t have it ready and I should come back later the same day. I was livid. I went to his office anyway and waited in the waiting room until he came out. Jerk wouldn’t respond to my texts anymore and I told him I was there. I waited maybe twenty minutes before he called me in to his office. I don’t remember how the conversation went at this point, but he was condescending and evasive, so I called it quits, left, and immediately contacted my prac director. He never signed the stupid hours and demanded he get to write an eval for me, which he also never did and I was promised wouldn’t have counted for anything if he had.

    Fun side note: this did not get him removed as a practicum site. It wasn’t until the following year when a student was jumped by a client, rescued by the other student there, and went to the ER for stitches that he got removed.

  301. nnn*

    The pettiest one I’ve done myself, also from fast food:

    We were allowed free drinks while working, as long as we brought our own reusable cup.

    Then one day management announced that we were only allowed one cup of free iced tea a day. We could have as much as we want of the other drinks, but only one cup of iced tea.

    My mother was a math teacher, and collected containers whose volume wasn’t readily apparent from their external appearance for use in some of her lessons.

    So from her collection, I borrowed a cup that held way more than it appeared to, and filled it with iced tea every single day.

    1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      I have such an axe to grind with the service industry and places that don’t give free meals/drinks to employees that this DELIGHTS me way too much. Ice Tea wars 4EVER.

    2. Tinybutfierce*

      I did a similar thing at the garbage coffee shop I worked at. The owners were AWFUL (and repeatedly did some outright illegal stuff like altering our timecards) and cheap, and despite being willing to give away free food to customers whenever their card systems went down (which was often, because cheap), they were as thrifty as possible with employees. We eventually were told we could only use one cup a shift for our free drinks, which were only supposed to be drip coffee. Whenever the owners weren’t around, I’d make myself the fanciest, most-ingredient-using drink I could using a new cup every time. They were utter bastards and I regret nothing.

  302. I Did That*

    Oh man. I’m so glad I was only young once. At one of my jobs, I was essentially forced out. The CEO and I just didn’t see eye to eye and we pushed each other’s buttons. Unfortunately for him, I was really good and brought in lots of money for the company and was well liked by others in the firm. But we just butted heads, and eventually he made life so miserable that we agreed on a date when I would leave. I was relieved to go, but upset that he hadn’t seen how great I was. The company had a suggestion box and all suggestions were read at the weekly executive management meeting. The last day I was in the office, I anonymously dropped a suggestion in the Suggestion Box (used a printer at home so it couldn’t be traced – I watch too many crime dramas), where I talked about how great I Did That was and how they were the only one in the whole company who ever took staff concerns seriously and what a loss it was for the company, etc etc. I ended it with the suggestion that, for the good of the company, the company bring I Did That back. I didn’t want to come back, but I also didn’t want the CEO to think it was a good decision to push me out. I was hoping having to read that note in the management meeting would embarrass the CEO. I have no reason to believe it did, but as I said, I was young and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  303. Auntie Social*

    We were having an arbitration in our office on a holiday—lots of lawyers in the conference room. I came in to get a lunch order because very few restaurants were open. When I came to the youngest attorney he went off on me about how he wasn’t going to be there past lunch, he had things to do, etc. I was surprised by his volume level but didn’t argue. I could see his senior partner noticed. Turns out they were there all day and when Jerkface later came to place an order, and I told him the last restaurant had closed just minutes before. A few months later my lawyer/dad died. The partner took me to lunch at an expensive place and brought Jerkface with him, which surprised me, and he and I talked about their time at the same law school. When the server came to take our orders and it was time for Jerkface to order, the partner put his hand up and said “He’s not eating, he’s just here to take notes”. He threw a legal pad at Jerkface and handed his flatware to the server, and we discussed the estate. At one point I asked, “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

  304. Hiring Mgr*

    One of the pettiest things I witnessed was around ten years ago, I was working for a pretty big co, about 5000 employees. Anyway, one day there’s company-wide email from the CFO with the subject line “Milk” Now this was a tech co that had nothing to do with milk or any food, etc type of products.

    The email went on to state that apparently the company was spending far too much money on milk for coffee, cereal, etc.. And that going forward there would be no more milk. This is from a $1B+ revenue company and extremely profitable…. it seemed like a petty cost cutting measure. Then again, this was from the same co that would think nothing of letting you take a $10K plus business class flight, but would go after you if you spent $1.50 on a bottle of water over your per diem

    1. Dramatic Squirrel*

      I worked for a law firm that had free coffee/tea and milk/creamer provided on every floor (6 floors). They then decided to save money by only providing drinks on every second floor. One of the senior partners spent an entire day sitting at the bottom of the stairs timing people to calculate how many billable hours were lost. Next step was to stop providing milk/creamer. At this point I emailed the managing partner to suggest they buy a cow since they could use it for milk and beef futures were doing well on the stock market. He took it well…Still no milk though.

  305. It's me*

    I used to work at Target and one night it is closing time and we have a lady (probably 40-50s) and her daughter come to check out before we close. The mom was purchasing a 6-pack of Mike’s Hard and Target’s policy is to ID everyone, no matter their age. These women were both obviously of age, but I asked the mom for her ID because ~policy~. Then she started in with an attitude, lady it is closing time I do not need your attitude. My manager, who CAN override the ID requirement, saw this and insisted she provide her ID. She didn’t have it on her, but said her daughter could show her ID. Target also has a policy that whoever is paying has to show their ID (all have to be of age obviously). So my manager watched me ring up the rest of her crap and walked away with the Mike’s

    1. Avatre*

      My impulse would be to install one of those programs that lets your keyboard make old-fashioned typewriter clackity-clack noises in response :D

  307. Archangel Gabriel*

    I work adjacent to veterinary medicine at a university. A colleague who is now retired once told me how she baptized her grandchild in the bathtub. She’s a practicing Catholic as am I but her grandchild’s parents are not. So she took it upon herself to baptize this kid in secret. She didn’t tell or ask the parents. The petty thing: I didn’t talk to this colleague for weeks.

    1. Angwyshaunce*

      I wouldn’t call your actions petty. This person showed that she was capable of an abhorrent abuse of trust.

  308. Auntie Social*

    My husband is an attorney and we met at a tea room in a department store for lunch. Behind us were two young men in suits and we could hear from their convo that they were lawyers. They were gloating about snaking existing clients from the firm and how dumb old senior partner would never know what happened–never mind that that partner’s 40 year reputation is what brought in clients. Hubs listened and got madder and madder, and we watched the two associates leave, sure that no one heard because “lawyers never eat here”. Hubs was on a committee with their senior partner so he called Bob’s cell and told him everything. The two plotters’ desks were cleaned out and passwords changed before they got back, their work already reassigned, and we got a nice thank you gift from Bob.

  309. Katherine*

    This isn’t “petty” in the strictest sense of the word, but it’s quasi-relevant and, in any case, pretty funny.

    In the mid- to late 1990’s I worked for a fast food burger restaurant franchise (not McDonald’s, but a direct competitor) that had a drive-thru. The building was old and the owner of our restaurant (who also owned almost every other location of our franchise in our state) was notorious for not keeping up with repairs and maintenance in the various locations.

    The drive thru till in my location was old and busted–it wouldn’t open up at the end of a transaction so that you could put in cash and get out change–so we would just leave the key in the lock on the till drawer and then you could just bang the lock/key with the heel of your hand to open the drawer to put in/take out cash. But almost all of us who worked the drive through would, at some point, forget to take the key with us when we walked away from our station during slow periods. And we would get in trouble for it every time (more on this in a minute). So this had been going on for several years by the time I started working there.

    Prior to my working there, though, one young man, who was so young and small he could fit through the drive through window, was working the closing shift and business was slow and it was late and he forgot to take the key out of the drawer when he walked away for a bit. And a customer in the drive through saw through the window that the key was still in the till so THEY reached in through the window (which was also old and busted and could be opened from the outside unless you locked it from the inside) and grabbed the cash tray from the drawer! The young man saw this happening and dove through the window trying to get the cash tray back from the customer-turned-petty-thief! Unfortunately I don’t know if the young man got the cash tray back or whatever happened to the customer or what. (On a side note, I should look up some of my old coworkers from back then and find out!)

    So back to getting in trouble for leaving the key in the drawer.

    The manager, who had also been on shift the night of the cash tray attempted theft, would warn all the new employees that he would take your cash tray out of the till and hide it from you if he ever saw the key in the drawer while you weren’t standing right there next to it. And he did! He’d hide it on top of the microwave, in the freezer, under the desk in the manager’s office, in the stockroom, anywhere! And you’d have no idea it was gone until you went to open up the drawer to make change on a transaction for a drive through customer who was sitting right there! And then you’d have to go find the tray (the manager wouldn’t tell you where it was) to finish your transaction!

    1. Trek*

      We had a DM that would find drawers unlocked and she would take money out of them. That night she would call the employee and let them know that money was missing from their drawer. She always turned it in but made them sweat it out overnight so they wouldn’t do it again.

  310. Bear Shark*

    Worked in a small call center at an old job. Most of the employees on the phones were female, including me. At one point a friend of mine was the only male employee. He and I took great delight when a customer would call and insist on speaking with a man:

    Customer: “I need to speak to a man.”
    Bear: “I’m sure I can help you, but if you can hold I’ll transfer you to a male employee as soon as one is free.”

    They’d have to wait on hold until Friend was done with his current call.
    Friend: Picks up and listens to customer and then will say “I’m actually not qualified to help with that, let me transfer you to one of our experts.”

    Transfers call back to me, where customer has to wait again since I’ve picked up another call while this is happening.
    Bear: in sweetest voice possible “Thanks for holding, how can I help you.”
    Best was if the customer would rage hang up at that point and try calling back in and end up getting one of us after waiting through the queue again.

  311. aurora borealis*

    I anonymously bought an extremely toxic co-worker a cactus and placed it on his desk. But I withheld the note that said “you’re not just a prick, you’re the whole frickin cactus” But I still experienced satisfaction out of seeing it in his work space daily.

    1. it's-a-me*

      I read this as ‘I bought an extremely toxic cactus and placed it on his desk’ and thought that was a bit worse than petty, glad I just misread!

  312. Rosie The Rager*

    Purse moving led to resignation letter

    Recently, I reached out the my predecessor, Piper, and learned about how and why she left the position. My supervisor, Missy, informed me that she accepted a role with another company. However, this proved to be false.

    Piper informed me that she left the company because Missy moved her purse from a chair to a dog-hair covered floor. This was in retaliation for Piper’s refusal to hang the purse in a closet. Piper said she felt it was inappropriate and made her feel violated; therefore, she gave her two weeks’ notice, but Missy declined to let her work the duration and forbade her from returning to the property under any circumstances.

    Does that not sound terribly petty, especially given that Missy is 50 and Piper is 24?

    1. Observer*

      Piper sounds like a piece of work. I don’t think I can blame Missy too hard for not letting her work out the two weeks. Who needs the drama?

  313. a*

    So many stories…

    The guy who was our trainer for years retired and sent a system-wide email insulting pretty much EVERYONE he had ever trained – some of them specifically by name.

    The woman who replaced him retired and deleted all her files so any subsequent trainers would have to start from scratch (our discipline has been doing essentially the same thing for 100+ years, meaning that a new trainer would only have to add a new reference or two to be completely up to date. It was incredibly passive-aggressive).

    My husband and I worked together, and after a series of incidents, he finally quit. When he was trying to get his certification from our discipline’s international organization, my supervisor sent an email to the organization with unspecified accusations of bad character. Since my husband needed that certification for his new job, I went outside the chain of command to our great-great-great-great-grandboss (we’re a state agency – I went to the guy who answers to the governor) to report this nonsense and threaten to sue. (Sometime after that, I was interviewed by one of the criminal investigator’s regarding a craigslist ad that had my supervisor’s phone number. I have *no idea* who could possibly have done that. I mean, ip addresses are all fine and good, but anyone can hack wifi, right?)

    That was 12 years ago – I continue to essentially refuse to speak to that supervisor unless operational needs demand it. He’s also not allowed to supervise me ever again. He’s supposed to retire this year. I hope it happens.

    One of my coworkers used to sit at my desk to chat with other coworkers on days that I wasn’t there. She would then shove my chair under my desk so it was difficult to get it back out. I put a note on my desk lamp, that only people SITTING AT MY DESK could see that said “Please do not jam my chair under my desk.” My supervisor made me take it down because “someone might get offended.”

    Our (retired) grandboss told a coworker that she had to bring in cupcakes for my birthday, even though I specifically told everyone that I don’t celebrate my birthday and I always take the day off to avoid anyone forcing the issue, or face discipline.

    Coworkers took my husband’s Sprout (of Green Giant fame) figurine and put a lanyard around its neck and hung it from his desk lamp.

    I was removed from a committee, which was supposed to be comprised of people who would be outspoken and provide ideas for future paths, because I was “too argumentative.” Um….

    I could go on all day.

  314. sara*

    I worked somewhere at least 3-4 people had to work in our department every single day, even weekends and holidays etc. Our boss decided that our scheduling shouldn’t follow seniority, and that we’d rotate around having a “weekend” that included a saturday or sunday and a weekend that didn’t. All this is pretty standard in that industry, but was still the source of So.Much.Drama.

    Coworker A had mainly tasks that didn’t need to be done every day, more like 3-4 days a week (or less). When it was her turn to have weekdays off, she would refuse to change the schedule of these tasks, forcing the rest of us to do them for her, but then also refuse to do tasks for other coworkers, even though those tasks were ones that needed to be done 6 or 7 days a week (so would always fall on their days off).

    And then all the tears (yes, actually) when we’d call her on it, or ask her to adjust her schedule…

  315. IrishEm*

    I once had a coworker get me and two others into potentially job-losing trouble, trouble which had been caught on CCTV and management was aware of, and when I addressed it with management the coworker accused *me* of “tattling”. So, she put me (and two others) in a position where we could lose our jobs and somehow it was my fault.

    In another job there was a neighbour to our unit who was super possessive of his parking spaces… to the extent that he literally bubble wrapped a car that was in one of “his” spots (in a public car park after closing hours of his unit). A level of petty to which I can only aspire.

    1. My Bubbles*

      I can’t help but wonder if he bought the bubble wrap just for that car or had some laying around…

  316. Self Reporting*

    I do a lot of playing dumb at my current job; mostly it is a survival mechanism, because there are certain things that it has become known that I know how to do but are not really my job, and I get peppered with requests to do them. It does not help that my boss has literally refused multiple requests to hammer out real job assignments among our team because “we should just all pitch in and help” (fine and dandy, but we all have different titles and get paid different amounts, I don’t want to be stuck doing stuff way above my pay grade.)
    However, the most petty thing I have done is when I first moved to this location; it was my first time with my own phone line. I am a fairly smart person, I know that it takes a little action to set up the password on my voicemail, but nobody TOLD me to (in fact, there was very little onboarding at all, and I spent my first week getting yelled at for random stuff like keeping the wrong kind of lunchbox in the fridge or parking in a double-secret reserved space.) My boss also never actually assigns work; about a year into this job she mentioned that someone had told her he couldn’t leave me a voicemail and I responded “Huh!” I was not given any instructions to follow up.
    (I am easily accessible by email, I’m at my desk the majority of the time, and I work exclusively with other employees, not suppliers or customers, so not having voicemail wasn’t really costing me or the company anything.)

    1. Jaid*

      My unit used to have regular ringing phones on our desks, but when we moved to another part of the city, we were given VOIP phones that only sent calls to voicemail. When we asked for our phones back, our department head asked why we were working so hard.

      I haven’t picked up a phone since. My job is fine with letters.

    2. just a random teacher*

      I once just…never found out how to use voicemail at one of my teaching jobs. I was hired late (during the summer) for a job where I’d be teaching a new-to-me style of curriculum and in which both of the previous-year’s [my subject] teachers had quit at the end of the year the past two years running (so my new fellow teacher and I were the third year in a row of an entirely new department), so I was too swamped to deal with getting voicemail set up while trying to get my classroom put together (people always ransack classrooms when a teacher leaves, and when an entire department leaves that means there’s no institutional knowledge about what [subject area] stuff the school actually owns, and where it might be if you were looking for it). Somehow it was just never a priority (I also had no idea who I was supposed to ask), and no complaint about me either not returning messages or not having a mailbox set up ever surfaced in the two years I held that job.

      Weirdly, that’s been the only teaching job I’ve had where I actually had my own phone line and (presumably) voice mail box rather than having a share an outside line with other teachers with an intercom or walkie/talkie set-up for in-building use.

    3. ArtsNerd*

      This is excellent.

      At OldJob I was flooded with calls, and 99.9% of them were unnecessary time sucks and I much prefer email. So my outgoing voice mail message was a very long, drawn out invitation to leave me an email at [address], spelled [a-d-d-r-e-s-s, that’s a-d-d-r-e-s-s] and of course if you leave me a voice message i’ll get back to you as soon as I can! If you’d like to skip this message in the future, press # .

      Cut down on my voice mails by about 85%. There was only one time I was horrified that someone had to sit through the whole thing but when I called her back she laughed really hard when I told her it was intentional.

  317. Engineer Girl*

    Our company was a big competitor with another satellite company. That company launched a satellite and the deployment failed. They lost the satellite.
    Some people in my company took a picture of the satellite, pasted it on a milk carton, and sent it to the other company.

  318. Petty Teapot Manufacturer*

    I worked in a small dept, where my manager had the philosophy that if you tell people to work 50 hours you get more work for the same pay. I objected multiple times to this policy – so happy I left that very toxic job. Anyways, manager brought in his brother to do work similar to mine and working with me. Brother was to be a low salary intern, as brother didn’t have the degree to qualify for the full job. Brother started late and took 3 hour lunches to eat and go to the gym and very obviously was not making the same number of teapots as I was.

    So obviously, manager handled this by promoting brother intern to staff paid the same as people that had completed degree. So I started doing just a little more work than brother intern. At one point manager said it seemed like I was making fewer teapots than I had before. I said that I thought I was doing well, I had the highest teapot production on the team. Unfortunately he thwarted my petty plan by admitting that brother wasn’t making enough teapots and I had to do better. Note that brother was not forced to do better.

  320. Grenda*

    I had a new boss (Pacifica) come on board and, as part of that transition, grandboss asked me to take on some new responsibilities that had previously been held by my (former) boss. I said sure, but to allow me the capacity to do that, I wanted to carve out four of my direct reports into a separate team led by one of the four (Candy), who would still report directly to me.

    In the first meeting involving both Pacifica and Candy (to which, it must be noted, Pacifica had invited herself, she didn’t really need to be there), there was some disagreement about exactly which responsibilities Candy’s newly formed team would be taking on. There was some back and forth, things got a little tense, I finally intervened and said I would check with another department who might be able to help us with some of the tasks that Candy felt didn’t logically fall under her group’s responsibilities. It wasn’t a great way to start things off for Candy’s new role, but at least it was done.

    Until three days later, when I had a regularly scheduled 1:1 with Pacifica, and she informed me that immediately following that meeting, she had gone to HR and insisted that they pull the paperwork to finalize Candy’s promotion and raise, because Candy “can’t be rewarded for that kind of behavior.” I responded that Candy wasn’t being rewarded for that kind of behavior, she was being promoted due to having been an exemplary, innovative employee for the past 18 months. Pacifica was having none of that response.

    The promotion finally went through three months later, after Pacifica felt Candy had “proved herself…” but suffice it to say, both Candy and I are currently actively interviewing.

  321. Red5*

    One of my coworkers in a previous job (Cersi) waged a long, and pretty impressive, one-sided war of mean-girl actions against me at work (ignoring me, getting up and walking out of meetings I was leading while I was speaking, refusing to give me information I needed, mocking me to others behind my back, you get the idea). She’d been waging this war for some time when I was offered a coveted special assignment and completed it successfully. Cersi was pretty bitter about me getting the assignment and went on and on about how she should have been given the opportunity instead.

    A few months later, another similar special assignment came up. Cersi was out of the office, so my boss offered it to me again. I took it. Cersi was livid, and even some of my other coworkers told me I should have declined and suggested that boss give the opportunity to Cersi since I’d been given the previous opportunity.

    The funny part was, the thought had crossed my mind that maybe I should decline so Cersi could have the opportunity even before the other coworkers suggested it. Then I decided, screw that. Keep in mind this whole time I was trying so hard to find solutions to our horrible working relationship…all unsuccessfully, of course, because it was all on her. And finally, I was just…DONE. I remember laughing at my other coworkers and saying, “Do you really think Cersi would give me the same consideration?”

    So, yeah, I took the special assignment because I wanted it, and because I knew it’d piss Cersi off. That is the most petty thing I’ve ever done at work, and 10+ years later I have no regrets.

  322. Don't Mess With The Library Assistant*

    The pettiest thing I’ve done at the library I work at is still something I am still surprised at myself for doing. I’m an assistant and one of the duties I have to do is be at the lobby desk, answer service-related questions, give directions, transfer phone calls, etc. You end up getting pleasant people or you end up interacting with people that think that they can look down on you.

    It’s usually the patrons that give you a hard time, but I was completely taken off-guard when, one day, one of bookstore volunteers gave me an attitude.

    One of my tasks is to check in and out the key to a bookstore volunteer. The volunteers are supposed to arrive 30-45 minutes early, check out the key, unlock the door, and prep the displays and setting up the book sales outside before completely opening officially. When they close the bookstore, they are the ones to lock it. My job is only to check in/out the key.

    Well, one day, this unsmiling volunteer came to check out the key. She said barely anything to me when I checked it out. She came back a few minutes later and had a tantrum about having found out that the door was already left unlocked (I’m guessing another volunteer thought they locked it completely, but didn’t; we’ve got difficult doors to lock here.) I let her know that I would email administration about it and she walked away without another word.

    Well, I already had a rough morning and her feeling like she could push me around because she thought that whatever my position is, she can get away with being rude really grinded up my gears. As if the Gods of Great Timing were smiling down upon me, after that interaction, two different groups of people came in with many amounts of book donations. Ordinarily, I would send them to the back of the building where the loading dock was. Instead, I let them know that the lovely volunteer inside was setting up and that she would be happy to take them in.

    Three phone calls came in after that. They all had questions about the bookstore. Now usually I’d answer them myself, especially if the volunteer was tied up. Instead, I transferred all three phone calls to the bookstore. And, in my experience, bookstore-related questions tend to take3-5 minutes long.

    The volunteer ended up opening the bookstore 15 minutes later than usual. From then on, when she checked out the key, she was always polite with me.

  323. Bagthief*

    At my last job with ToxicBoss I was vastly underpaid, has essentially zero benefits and was doing the work of 3 people. At one point I noticed that in one of the supply cabinets there was one of those huge Costco boxes of garbage bags. They were never used as we only had one full sized garbage can in the office and the building cleaners provided their own bags.

    I finally got fed up after 2.5 years and quit, my boss was horrible to me about it and even short-changed my PTO payout. You better believe that on my last day I snagged a roll of 100 garbage bags. It lasted me a year and I felt vindicated every time I used one.

  324. DCGirl*

    Oh, so many stories….

    At one of my college jobs, in the back office of a savings and loan, my boss and her three employees (including me) shared one big room. She was unhappy that she didn’t have her own office at this job, so to indicate her status she decreed that she was the only one in the department who was allowed to have any personal items on her desk. So hers had pictures of her husband and kids, a small potted plant, a Precious Moments figurine…. Our were totally bare except for our staples and tape dispensers. It just seemed so incredibly petty to my 19-year old self.

  325. The Hamster's Revenge*

    I college I submitted a term paper and got it back with a 90%. I don’t use Oxford commas so my instructor had gone through and made my paper bleed for it. He marked up every instance where he thought a comma was “missing” and randomly decided that it added up to 10% of my paper’s grade. Everything else was so on-point it was literally the only thing he could find wrong with it. The guy next to me whose paper was 3 pages short and practically written in crayon got a 70%.

    1. TANSTAAFL*

      Too bad you didn’t appeal the grade on the basis that you follow the AP Stylebook.

      1. StaceyIzMe*

        AP English.. when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and we wrote short papers by hand… and I kept getting papers back with 80 or 90, but no comments on any deficits. I finally asked my prof and found out he was marking me down 10 points per occurrence for having the handwritten hyphen at the incorrect height on the line when I split a word. I think he reconsidered since I took the award for that semester’s “best”, but still…

  326. Fibchopkin*

    When I was enlisted in the Army (seems like a million years ago now), I served for about two years in a unit with THE WORST company supply sergeant (aka S4 or quartermaster, depending on your branch of service) ever. This guy was an E5 (Enlisted grade 5: Air Force – Staff Sergeant​ (SSG); Army/Marines – Sergeant​ (SGT); Navy/Coast Guard – Petty Officer Second Class​ (PO2)), which means he was a low-level Non-Commissioned Officer – the equivalent to maybe an assistant manager in a civilian organization. He really thought he was a big-shot though; liked to tell everyone how he “had the power to make our lives heaven or hell during a deployment” and solicited low-level bribes for the best, least broken equipment. It was mostly harmless, like “Buy me a beer and I’ll sign you out that OE254 (antenna) that still has straight, unbroken legs,” but since he was an obnoxious, misogynistic asshole, it came off as annoying rather than jovial. I was the only woman in my company (about 50 soldiers) and there were only 5 women in the whole battalion (about 250 soldiers) and this guy was a special kind of tool to anyone who lacked a penis. He used to tell me at least once per week that he “didn’t trust anything that could bleed for 5 days and not die,” then laugh at his own tired “joke”. He genuinely thought this was a clever, funny thing to say. He finally broke the camel’s back when he announced, loudly, one morning after a mandatory sexual harassment briefing, “I’m sick of working around females (again, he only worked around 1 -me- and not very frequently). They complain about everything. I can’t even fart without offending someone anymore.” Noone knew where this comment came from. The mandatory briefings happen every quarter, in every unit in the entire army, whether there are any women in the unit or not, and have never, to my knowledge, addressed farting or any other similar bodily function. None of the training I attended with this jerk ever did; they were exactly what you might expect: how not to create a hostile work environment, what constitutes sexual harassment, etc. This guy just went on a tangent though. He ranted about how the army was trying to demasculinize men and kept referring back to how he “couldn’t even fart.”

    So, for the next 18 months, the guy’s subordinate and my good buddy unlocked the supply cage (the guy’s “office”/warehouse area) every single morning after PT and we went in and farted multiple times. The supply sergeant never noticed beyond occasionally commenting on a weird smell, but I found it immensely satisfying.

  327. Insurance Drone*

    I work handling patient billing and insurance claims at a large medical facility. In order to encourage HIPAA compliance, each “team” in the building gets randomly spot-checked for things like locked cabinets, wearing our IDs, and keeping our workstations locked if we’re not at our desk. There’s one guy on my team who regularly wandered away from his desk without securing his files or locking his workstation and we got docked for it at least half a dozen times. I started changing the wallpaper and screensaver on his computer to the words “LOCK YOUR DAMN WORKSTATION, [NAME]” whenever he left for more than three or four minutes. When it kept happening (and he was so disgruntled every time, but nothing changed!) I changed his password to “LOCKYOURDAMNWORKSTATION[NAME]” He had to have IT come and get him back into his computer, admitting in the process that he left it unlocked. He hasn’t done that since, so I think I win.

  328. Madame Secretary*

    There are few people in my office who walk away from a jammed stapler or a jammed copier, leaving the problem for someone to fix. Irks me to no end. On a few occasions I have taken various staplers home to my handyman husband to fix. One day, completely fed up after finding the stapler jammed AGAIN, I went on YouTube and found a video on how to un-jam a stapler and circulated it via email to everyone in my office, with a note saying “Since a few of you don’t know how to un-jam a stapler, you might find this video useful.” You could hear the chuckles ripple throughout the office. It was awesome. It’s the ones who didn’t laugh or otherwise that I assume to be the culprits.

    1. BadWolf*

      The restroom nearest to me has autoflush toilets with no override button (at least not that I can find). I did figure out that you could force a flush by holding your hand in front of the sensor for 10 seconds.

      After a week of frequently finding non-flushed toilets. I left a post-it on the mirror with the instructions above. Hoping that the non-flushing was really a problem with “it flushed too soon and I don’t know how to flush again.”

      The post-it didn’t last through the morning…but haven’t found an unflushed toilet for a little while..

  329. RandomU...*

    I’ll add mine… we had a guy who was in charge of IT/Corp security in our office, so that translated into everything from badging in, locks on laptops, wearing badges, etc.

    For some reason that I can’t explain, I hate wearing ID badges. He would get on my case about it if he saw me without it. He was the type who would take an unlocked laptop to the boss and make the owner retrieve it. He would do the same thing with badges, so if you left your badge on your desk he’d confiscate it. But I found out he would not go into your personal property to take it if he saw it, such as desk drawers or jacket pockets. So for a week I would lay the badge right on the top of my open purse in plain view.

    He was on to me though, so pushed through a new rule that you had have your badge with you at all times.

    Ok… mr smarty pants. From then on, I would carry my badge with me. He would jump around corners, challenge me in meetings, yell across the office all to see if he could catch me without my badge. I carried that damn thing for the next 2 years we worked together. On his last day, he shook my hand and conceded the badge war to me. HAHA Victory was mine that day!

    1. Essess*

      I have to say, I’m actually on the side of the security guy here. Wearing a security badge is pretty important. And leaving unlocked laptops around is also a major issue. I can see that he wouldn’t go into your purse to take it because then he would be in legal trouble for stealing from your personal property, while taking it while it is sitting out on company property is legally okay.

      1. Fibchopkin*

        Agree. Your story was cute Random, but you were kinda the petty jerk in it, imo, not the security guy who just seemed to be good at his job.

        1. Cathie from Canada*

          Apropos of this story, I once knew a man who was the safety officer at a potash mine. He told me sadly one day that he had had to fire a worker who just would not wear a safety helmet — the worker KNEW how important it was, and had been warned and warned, but he kept acting like safety rules were just a joke. When he finally was fired, he just couldn’t believe it, and then he promised to change. But it was just too little, too late.

  330. Lauren*

    I worked in accounts payable and one of our vendors couldn’t supply us with his product unless he had current purchase orders from us. HIS vendors wouldn’t supply him with goods because he had burned them too often. For some stupid reason he always waited until the very last second to ask me for a set of purchase orders. He was also extremely annoying. If you didn’t answer his email within 30 seconds of him sending it he sent multiple emails. He also once went to my boss and accused me of not spending enough time on his requests and taking too long to answer him. He sent a request for purchase orders. I saw it come in. I literally finished the small task I was doing (30 seconds tops) and turned back to my computer to do the purchase orders (which would take me 5 minutes to complete). There were two more emails. Urgent! Urgent!!! I need them NOW! Are you there? Urgent!!! Nope, nope, nope, nope. I closed my email program and did everything at my job BUT his purchase orders. Sent them late (he was in a different time zone so after business hours the next day) the next afternoon. He complained to me and asked why they took so long. I told him I had other more important things to do. I did eventually get in trouble for this but I didn’t care. He was such a jerk.

    1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      You got in trouble for him being an unreliable dillweed who wanted you to jump at his oh-so-important tasks despite the fact he’s just one of how many vendors of yours? I’m angry at the last part because that’s not the correct response. I would fire this vendor immediately, did he supply something that was unobtainable by any other source or something, WTF?!

      This is why we have a 48-72hr response time window for requests like that. Wait. Your. Turn.

  331. Scientician*

    In a lab I worked in, there was one grad student who was a ridiculously petty prima dona. A few highlights:

    – He once refused to acknowledge the existence of one of the other students for approximately a year, because the second student objected when the first student unilaterally declared he was going to use 3/4 of a shared resource for a several week duration, and the second student said that would interfere with several other people meeting their deadlines. He wouldn’t respond when the second student said anything, and would pointedly greet and say goodnight to everyone else, even while they were in the middle of a conversation with the student he was ignoring. During that same time period, in presentations he would acknowledge by name every single person he overlapped with in the lab other than that second student.

    – He gave a third student the silent treatment for a few weeks when in response to the first student complaining that someone else had a lot of work done by an undergrad assistant, the third student asked how that was different from the first student getting a lot of work done by the lab manager who also did some technician duties when people wanted help.

    – He had a blowup with a fourth student when she rejected his interest. This resulted in passive-aggressive notes and emails to the entire lab whenever he decided the fourth student did something wrong, even when the people allegedly impacted by these actions didn’t mind.

    – He attempted to diagnose several different members of the lab with mental disorders, which he explained to them over email. Note that we were not a psychology or neuroscience lab, and he had no actual training in those fields.

    The professor in charge of the lab was largely unaware of these things; most of the students didn’t fundamentally need to work together to get their projects done so they chose not to bring these things up, and the professor traveled a lot and thus didn’t observe a lot of the daily interactions.

  332. JerzyGurl*

    At the age of 60+, I was laid off from a long-time job during a reorganization, at the same time the effects of the recession doubled down in my region and legislation shifted employers’ attention away from the kind of work I had been doing. After 10 months of job hunting during which I learned how pervasive age discrimination can be, I took a short-term contract- to-hire job doing work I had done earlier in my career at pretty good money but no benefits at all. I was supposed to be there while a project was being completed but it dragged on. Meanwhile, I kept up the job search. The contract-to-hire turned out to be a ruse and I was trapped in a job where I was not even paid for holidays and treated like I did not exist. I made repeated requests to the contracting company for pay for holidays and a few days off but was ignored.

    I couldn’t quit since my state would not pay unemployment and I needed to keep a roof over my head. The project was ending and I was told that I would be kept on through the holidays so that the regulars could use their vacation time before it expired 0n 12/31.They evenhad me training a replacement with no knowledge of the job at all from an internal hire. At that point, I was offered and accepted another job to start mid-December. On December 1, when the new job was solidly confirmed, I walked into the manager’s office and told her that it was my last day without stating a reason. The look on her face was priceless as my “replacement” was no where near trained. Later on the director called me in and tried to convince me to stay. I told her I was tired of being treated like the furniture. The contracting company returned my call from three weeks earlier and begged me to stay. I thought that I would be escorted out since I had full access to HR and payroll systems but I stayed until my regular time, picked up my purse and coat, put my access card on my desk and left. No one said goodbye. I enjoyed my two weeks of vacation and hoped that I screwed up their holiday plans royally.

  333. Kat in VA*

    Our CEO was in town visiting from headquarters. He’s a very nice man, but very shy and kind of awkward (but super engaged once on stage or with upper leadership). I had him installed in our executive conference room, checked if he wanted water or a snack from my snack bowl that I’d seen him timidly rummaging in earlier, “If there’s anything else you need, Mr. CEO, I’m right here, let me know.”

    About ten minutes later, he comes out and after some verbal fumbling, asks if he can please please borrow an iPhone cable as he’s forgotten his and launches into this avalanche of apologies and reasons and justifications.

    Like, DUDE – I have an iPhone cable, here you go, happy to help, is there anything else you need?

    Well, he does the all-hands presentation that he’s in town for, and in the flurry, leaves with my cable. To be fair, he was rushed out the door and I’m sure he completely forgot.

    I made a joke about how our CEO came to visit and all I got was a stolen iPhone cable. I ordered another cable off Amazon, but the more expensive 6 foot braided kind…and rose gold.

    I also paid for it with my corporate purchasing card.

    Not petty as it really wasn’t a big deal, but still funny (and ok, a little petty)

  334. CatCat*

    Oh, I just remembered a good one. It was sooooo awkward for me and a colleague.

    So I went out to lunch with Cercei, Daenerys, and Gendry. While at lunch together in the restaurant right before our orders came, Cercei and Daenerys got into a heated, personal argument. They then refused to talk to each other while we were eating, but would talk separately to Gendry and I while they ignored one another.

    Gendry and I agreed that it was the most awkward meal either of us had ever experienced in our lives.

  335. Ihmmy*

    A much earlier up story about parking reminded me of this one.

    I was having a somewhat crummy day and decided to treat myself to lunch out, and when I came back my parking spot (with business name, not personal name branded quite visibly) was taken by two teenagers clearly making out. I drove around and used visitor/customer parking… and walked over to give them (polite) heck over using a clearly marked business spot.

    Yes, I have been a curmudgeonly old woman since age 5. I was in my mid 20s when I did this.

  336. lnelson in Tysons*

    Don’t know if this was petty or not.
    Painters were hired to, well, paint the office. They wanted to get an early start. The Office Manager and I were on a downward spiral, mainly due to the fact that she didn’t want to do her job. And she assume that I would basically pick up after her. Accept deliveries, meet contractors, etc. Example, she would order supplies and then not be in the office to sign for them.
    Back to the painters and their early start. Now most morning I did arrive early at the office (like 7am). She sends me an email basically telling me that she is scheduling the painters to come in. Understands that as I take public transportation I probably can’t get here at 6am, but can I remind her when I do get in so that she can inform the painters when they can arrive. My response was that I was not going to be in the office that day and couldn’t do it. Which was true. I had a vacation planed and certainly wasn’t going to give it up to meet her painters. Later her knickers were all in a twist as she didn’t get brownie point by coming in the office to meet the painters. Sorry dear, you are the office manager. Manager the office. If she had asked and I was going to be in the office, 90% sure I would have said fine.
    Then I was feeling more pissed off than petty. SVP asked me who was responsible for doing the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. I answered everyone was supposed to be doing their own. No one was assigned to be the kitchen maid. After his rebuttal to that comment. I said “I am hoping on the bandwagon with all the men in the office (I was at the time the only female) and waiting for the magic fairies to take care of it.”
    For the next several days every time the SVP walked by me, he mentioned that the dishes were still there. At one point, I mentioned to the CFO that the SVP was laying the groundwork for me to start a sexual harassment sue (other things were happening in the office with this guy so it wasn’t just the dish duty issue). A mediation session soon followed.

  337. Autumnal*

    I was being given “key leadership” opportunities at work and the admin had sort of built a plan around my being able
    to fill gaps and provide supervision, but without an actual leadership role.

    All of this was fine, as I was expecting to get a pay raise at my end of year review. In that job you never got the document ahead of time and they wouldn’t even let you see it during the actual meeting. Admin held on to it, talked until just before the end of the meeting and then let you have the document, which included you raise, as you hustled out the door.

    At my meeting both of my managers spent 45 minutes talking about how well I was doing, how pleased they were to have me take on leadership, etc. They noted I was getting a 10% raise and that it was a rare and large bump..blah, blah. They heavily stressed how big the raise was and how my work was stellar.

    I finally get the document AND…I’ve gotten a 2.5% raise. I tell my managers. They let me know they’ll “look into it.” It took them several days and reminders but they finally tell me “nope 2.5% is right, so sorry!” They have no answer as to why they spent 45 minutes singing my praises and focusing on this “very large” raise.

    I was SO mad. I had quietly interviewed for a new job and got it. I took the extra trainings (and pay) my job offered until I had to give notice. I resigned at the last allowable moment, which happened to be both 2 weeks before the busy season and while my immediate manager was on vacation.

    1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

      Curious to know if they relented and countered with the original 10 percent increase… generally , in my industry (IS/IT) they will “fix the mistake” if faced with a resignation.

    2. I'm that person*

      Not giving you the review paperwork is such a crappy move. Where I work they give you the review (which contains the salary adjustment) and then give you 10 minutes to read it before coming into the meeting room to discuss it with you.

  338. Dawn F*

    I used to work at a “nonpublic” alternative school for boys with emotional disabilities. Like every workplace kitchen ever, ours was perpetually a mess. People would cook food and never wash the dishes.

    From time to time, the director would get angry at the state of the kitchen and would remove all of the pans and utensils.

    It was super fun to spend half the day working with high-needs kids in emotional crisis, look forward to that frozen mac and cheese in your lunch and a little quiet time to yourself to eat it, and then have no spoon to eat it with and so spend half your break running around trying to find one. (Especially when you’re not one of the ones leaving the mess …)

  339. LongLongSummer*

    Here’s some doctor pettiness to add to the thread!

    An acquaintance of mine started a pediatric practice with a fellow doctor friend of hers. After a few years, the two doctors had a falling out, and my acquaintance decided to split off and start a separate practice. In the documents outlining the clinic’s partnership, they’d agreed that in case of a split like this, the departing doctor was entitled to bring her patient records with. So my acquaintance requested the patient documents from her former partner, who hemmed and hawed and then sent her… A SINGLE MASSIVE PDF. Printed out of the system in the most useless format possible. So she had to hire her teenage daughter to spend the whole summer transcribing patient records into her new system.

  340. designbot*

    When I was the sole graphic designer in a teapot user research group, it was my job to create books and presentations based on information our researchers brought back from interviews, secondary research, observational assignments, etc. I had great feedback about how I really owned the narrative of the reports, and I really revolutionized this company’s deliverables. The pettiest most annoying detail of my job is that I was the de facto editor of the reports—our researchers had different backgrounds, different native languages, different levels of education, etc. and this was an important step that helped everything sound like it came out of one office. Also none of them understood typography to save their lives, although the project manager for the group claimed she’d taken a typography course “so I’m a graphic designer too!” Anyway one day we got into it on hyphens vs. em dashes and whether an em dash should or should not have spaces around it. I lost this battle, and to this day cannot show an otherwise excellent, professionally produced book in my samples because the titles are all formatted like Topic – Interesting Details Here
    For those who don’t see what’s wrong with that, a decent typographer would never use the space/hyphen/space convention in this situation. It calls for at worst an em dash or at best a colon or line break.

      1. Not this time*

        I worked for someone who hated M dashes. He made us all use space-N dash-space instead of M dash, he would use hyphens where the rest of the world used N dash.

        I loved when he partnered with a company that understood typography and tried to force them to match our stylebook. They said lol, nah and he was pissed for days.

    2. detaill--orieted*

      I’m with you on the em-dashes — we have three kinds of dashes for a reason, goshdarn it.

      But for spacing around the em-dash, I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule, and it can depend on the typeface. I like spaces, the _New Yorker_ does not, and, if I recall correctly, _Words Into Type_ wants a “thin space”, good luck with that.

  341. Violet*

    I once worked at the service desk of a discount store. Customers who wanted to exchange an item would drop the old one off at the desk, go get the new one, and then come stand by the counter. We’d finish their exchange as soon as we wrapped up with the current customer.

    That had always worked well, but management decided to change the policy one year right at the height of after-Christmas returns. When customers dropped off the old item, they were supposed to go get their new item and return to the back of the line, causing them wait in line twice.

    Nobody wanted to spring that policy on customers after they’d already stood in line for several minutes, so we kept letting them do it the old way. We’d tell them about the new policy just so they’d know, and they were always grateful to us for bending the rules.

    But then came “that” customer. When her turn came, she marched angrily to the desk, slammed her item down, and screamed in my face, “And don’t tell me I have to go to the back of the line, because I’m not doing it!” I gave her a sympathetic look and said, “Yeah, I don’t like that policy, either. But management won’t budge. I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could do, but that’s the new rule.” Watching her take her new item to back of a long line and inch her way forward for the second time is one of my fondest memories. The best part was that I got to use the store’s rules to extract my revenge.

  342. Drew*

    tl, dr: Prof gets annoyed that his entire life’s research can’t be printed instantaneously on the lab’s busiest night.

    When I was an undergrad, I worked in various campus computer labs, helping people if they were having trouble logging in, rebooting crashed terminals, and so on. But mostly, I was the printer jockey.

    We had these three monster line printers — instead of dot-matrix or laser, they had letters stamped into a metal belt, over and over, and the belt got pressed into giant ink rollers to make the letters on the page, like typewriters crossed with Gojira. They were loud and they were not fast and they were prone to breaking down and I had to change the paper and flip the rollers every so often, which was a particularly unpleasant operation, but I got to sit at a desk with a terminal and browse Usenet for hours on end, so I wasn’t complaining.

    One semester, I pulled the Friday night closing shift at a lab where a bunch of students were taking a class that required them to submit work by midnight every Friday. No Usenet for me on Friday nights that term! But it still wasn’t strenuous work, just kept me on my toes, and I got to know my regulars pretty well.

    Cue the Friday that all three printers starting chattering about 9:00, nonstop. Out of curiosity, I pulled up the print server and realized that some prof had decided Friday night was the perfect time to send ALL of his project data to the printers. Dozens of files. Dozens of BIG files. And my regulars’ homework was choked up behind all his crap.

    As I’m talking to them, Entitled Prof comes into the lab, blows past all these poor kids just trying to pass their courses, and demands his printouts. I just waved at the three printers: “They’re still coming out. It’s going to be a little while.” He got really huffy and said he’d be back in half an hour, then stormed out before I could explain that we were looking at more like two or three hours.

    So I decided to be petty. I could control each printer’s settings from my print server, so I set one of them not to pass any files over a certain fairly small size — but more than enough for all of the homework that was still accumulating. As soon as it finished with the prof’s current file, it started spitting out all the small files from the queue.

    At some point in the next half hour, one of the printers ran out of paper. I was busy handing out small print jobs to grateful undergrads, so it was still sitting there when Entitled Prof came back to the lab.

    Prof, pointing at third printer: Oh, is that the last of my files?
    Me, handing printouts to other people as fast as I can take them off the printer: Not by a long shot.
    Prof: Why isn’t that printer running?
    Me: Out of paper.
    Prof: You need to put more paper in!
    Me: Yep.
    Prof: Well?!
    Me: Can’t right now. Too busy helping other people on a deadline.

    The prof stood there, fuming, until there happened to be a lull in the printing.

    Prof: OK, now can you change the paper?
    Me, putting on a pair of latex gloves: Sure thing, but I have to flip the roller first.
    Prof: Oh, come ON.
    Me: It’s lab policy that they should be flipped after two hours of activity (this was true but widely ignored because it was a GIANT pain in the butt).
    Prof: Can’t you at least turn on this other printer? [pointing to the now-idle one]
    Me: It’s throttled down to allow smaller jobs to print without being stuck behind huge jobs. All these people have assignments due tonight.
    Prof: [leaves in a huff]

    I will omit the conversation I had when Prof returned a second time, about 11:30, when I told him that there was no way his jobs would be finished by midnight and so I had paused them with a note to the Monday morning opening lab tech to restart the queues. I wasn’t getting paid OT and I sure as hell didn’t have the authority to extend our operating hours so some dickwad professor could get his giant printouts. But I did make sure all my people got their homework printed before their deadline.

    Prof called my boss to complain, but I had already given her my side of things and she told me I should have throttled TWO printers.

      2. Not too long at all*

        I usually skip long ones, but this one was SO good, I kept reading! (I’m even married to a professor.)

  343. LuJessMin*

    Couple of things:

    I worked with one accountant who told me something I had done the same way every month from the day I started was wrong. He exploded when I told him I wasn’t changing anything because it wasn’t wrong. Boss had to get involved, accountant never apologized. He was a neat freak and after he left for the day I would go into his office and move things around. I don’t know if he ever knew it was me.

    Second, my group had been told we were moving to another floor with less room for storage, so I spent weeks sending past invoices to archives. When I was laid off a few months later, I didn’t leave them the archive reports so they couldn’t find them later if someone needed a copy (someone always needed a copy).

  344. Normally a Lurker*

    At my oldjob, we had a marketing closet that had all of the things the marketing team needed. And it was always overfilled. (I worked on the Marketing Team).

    One day, a firm wide email went out that basically said “Hey, if you aren’t on the marketing team, you have 2 days to get your stuff out of the marketing closet. We are cleaning and organizing it”

    2 days go by. Me and another Jr team member are put in charge of cleaning and organizing. We found a couple of Etsy make-up bags filled with, what looked to be, unused samples.

    We asked our boss what to do with them. She rolled her eyes and said “that’s XY for totally different department. It’s not supposed to be in here. It’s literally why the company wide email went out. Their fault. Get rid of it.”

    So we did (donated it to a homeless shelter near us).

    Fast forward 3 weeks to when XY went into the marketing closet to get it, couldn’t find it, and went blazing to the Jr Member of the team yelling at her about “WHERE ARE MY THINGS”. Jr Member starts crying (it was abusive yelling), boss hands me the corprate card and says “Go buy Jr Member some coffee. Should take you at least a half hour”.

    As I was leaving, Boss was telling XY – why was it in the marketing closet? Did you get the email saying we were cleaning it out? What did you expect? As we were leaving.

    XY got in serious trouble from HR for making Jr Member cry, esp bc it was in public view of everyone. XY *tried* to get us in trouble as well for throwing out her stuff. Instead, HR was like – na, this one is on you. Stop using the Marketing closet.

    Then HR changed the locks on the closet and XY did not get one.

    So like, not the pettiest, and Boss def had our back, but like, pretty petty to just say “get rid of it” instead of “give it to XY”

    1. Observer*

      Eh, I think your boss got it right – I’d be willing to bet that if you had brought it to they would have been rude as anything and told you to leave it there.

    2. JessB*

      I LOVE that you donated it! And your Boss really had your back, that’s so awesome!

  345. Narise*

    I worked in an office that regularly bought in temps and then hired them at a later date if they worked out. We had one temp that was not working out and didn’t understand office norms, let’s call her Jane. Another coworker, Sansa, was a pain to everyone and always playing games. For three months everyone knew and whispered about Sansa’s legal trouble for her actions at her prior job. Sansa treated Jane worse then anybody and went out of her way to be rude and petty. Finally details about the charges made it into the newspaper. One day in front of our boss and several people Jane asks Sansa about the charges and if she thinks she’ll be arrested. Sansa just tried to push it off like it was nothing and no big deal but it was very stunned silence for everyone else who knew but wouldn’t ask about the charges.

  346. ladycrim*

    A co-worker tried to file a grievance against me for not inviting her to my wedding.

    1. Narise*

      What kind of grievance do you file for not being invited to a wedding? And if they come and don’t bring a present can you file a grievance of your own?

    3. Avatre*

      Did she also curse your firstborn to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall into an enchanted sleep for 100 years?

  347. many bells down*

    I was 16, so I can probably be forgiven for this but: my first job was at a dog groomer. I was a “bather/brusher”, along with my friend from school “Joe” and another girl slightly older “Meg.” Meg decided she was our manager since she was older and would try to give us stuff to do that she didn’t want to. So one day Joe and I put her name on the list of dogs to be bathed. It was 3 hours before she realized that the number of dogs in the shop didn’t match the list and the “Meg” on there wasn’t someone’s poodle. We all denied responsibility.

  348. Krabby*

    The most petty thing I have ever witnessed was when we hired a very senior marketing contractor to come in and shape up our creative department, let’s call him Dave. Dave came highly recommended by a VP, but he was terrible.

    Dave made all of the existing problems in the team worse (he planned a team building event on a weekend where the most valued member was away and then he told the guy he did it on purpose to “check his ego”), and visibly slacked off at every turn. Logically, we terminated his contract, but out of goodwill from the VP who recommended him, we gave him two weeks to wrap up his projects and let him tell everyone he resigned.

    Everything seemed fine until a week after his last day, when the junior assistant from the creative team asked how she was going to be reimbursed for Dave’s goodbye lunch. We don’t do goodbye lunches. Turns out, he had taken the whole team out on his last day, wracked up an insane bill at the nicest restaurant in the area (~$1,500), and then pressured the most junior employee to pay for it all because, “I won’t be there anymore to submit the expenses.”

    There was no way we could refuse to reimburse the poor girl, and we couldn’t recoup the costs from him since he was already gone. I still fume over it.

    1. Essess*

      I would have quickly checked with a lawyer to see if you could withhold that amount from his last check (if not already given to him) and if he had been paid then submit him to small claims court for fraudulent charging.

      1. Krabby*

        Unfortunately he had already been paid, and where I live, trying to get that amount of money back from someone would have cost us 3x over :(

    2. Observer*

      That’s not petty. That is trash behavior. Not as bad as the people sneaking alcohol into food, but close!

  349. Darrell*

    I hosted a radio show for many years. I was not an employee of the radio station, but was paid as an independent contractor. One year, the station gave everybody frozen turkeys for Thanksgiving. Two days after I got mine, the business manager came into the studio and told me I needed to return the turkey I had been given because I’m not an employee.

  350. Secret Farter*

    Worked as a law clerk at a small, high-stress firm. One of the associates was just The Worst. She was rude, extremely negative, and constantly patronizing to me (even though she was only a few years older than I was). On the days she worked from home, I would walk into her office and fart. Just fart right beside her desk chair. No one ever found out. It was glorious.

  351. nora*

    I left a toxic workplace recently. I got along okay with most folks and extremely well with a couple. There were 3 or 4 to whom I genuinely wish nothing but bad things. They were all close friends who were cruel and vindictive to coworkers, volunteers, and clients (at an agency serving people experiencing acute trauma, so, cool). They made me, my clients, and the interns I supervised miserable and they reveled in it.

    So when I finally escaped, I went out and bought the brightest, prettiest, most colorful thank-you cards I could find. I took the time to write lovely, thoughtful, individual notes into each one. I used shiny red envelopes. I put them in everyone’s mailboxes right before the staff meeting my second-to-last day, where everyone would see who got a card and who didn’t, and when I knew everyone would open them during the meeting. And I deliberately left out those 3 or 4 people. Including the agency’s CEO.

    It was the pettiest thing I’ve ever done and I’ve never been prouder of myself.

    1. Tasha*

      I recently left a job and on my last day, when I sent out my farewell email, I deliberately omitted two people who were nice to my face but sabotaged me when they could. Petty but I still laugh to myself about it.

  352. dz*

    I worked at a restaurant that provided employees with a shift meal and unlimited fountain beverages during your shift–nice perks that are common but not standard. At one point the owner did ask that we not drink the bottles of Orangina, as it was more expensive than the other beverages. This raging jerk line cook who thought he was worth his weight in gold (he wasn’t) took offense to this reasonable request and made a point of flagrantly drinking several Oranginas over the next few weeks while complaining loudly about how he was unappreciated, and even poured one down the drain. Wish I could say there were consequences, but the manager/owner just wasn’t up for a fight.

  353. Pennalynn Lott*

    I worked at a Round Table Pizza restaurant when I was 16. I hated my boss, who was quick to anger and literally YELLED at us over the slightest thing. I signaled my intent to quit by ordering a pizza for delivery from a competitor (Cybelle’s) and having the delivery driver enter our restaurants calling out, “Pizza delivery for Pennalynn! Cybelle’s pizza delivery for Pennalynn!” To the amusement of the lunchtime crowd, I waved him over to the order counter (where I was), paid him, and headed upstairs to the employee break room to eat. Bully Boss was hot on my heels, looking like he was about to explode, screaming incoherently. I had to eat my pizza on the bus ride home. :-)

      1. Jen in Oregon*

        I laughed so hard at this my husband actually came downstairs to make sure I was okay.

  354. austriak*

    At my last employer, I was in the same department for a couple years before accepting a position in a different department. I switched departments because it was a promotion and I needed to get away from my old manager who just kept on piling more and more work on me because I would get it done right and timely.

    After switching, I would get emails from my old manager asking me to do things for her. I would do it to be nice and I knew that they were under staffed. After a little while, I got tired of it so I reached out to IT and had them remove my access to certain systems that I no longer had a need for but was using regularly to help my old department. When my old manager reached out to me to ask me to do something for her, I told her that I wasn’t able to because my access rights were taken away by IT since I moved departments.

  355. Anax*

    A previous workplace generated a lot of legal paperwork, which was numbered sequentially in the computer system – 2019-1, 2019-2, etc.

    Apparently, the higher-ups would fight about who should get the prized “draft 1” for the year, to the point where administrative staff started publishing dummy drafts just to take up that slot. It was easier than dealing with the whining about how “having THIS for draft 1 will send the wrong message about us as an organization!”

    No, the drafts weren’t public.

    1. nora*

      The paperwork in the system I work in is numbered similarly, and I have to admit, I’m tickled when something I enter ends up with a cool number (20-5678, etc), but I have almost no control over it, alas.

  356. DBA*

    I’m a MS Access database developer. I once had a coworker annoy me by arguing about a db design (sorry, your 8 hours of Access 1 training do not trump my 7+ years of experience). I decided to have a little fun with the guy.
    I wrote a function that, when this guy opened the database, generated a random number between 1000 and 7200000 (1 second to 2 hours) and applied it to a timer on the main form. Once the timer ran out, the database would close.

    I only publish compiled databases, so no one had access to the code. And of course, my un-compiled copy did not have this function in it. Sometimes he could get everything done before the timer went off, sometimes it took him all day.

    Of course, no one else ever had the issue, and no one ever figured out what had happened.

  357. Pesty Finesty*

    When I worked in an office in a very small department, the boss and his EA had worked together for literally decades (and, seemingly, hated each other). She was supposed to be in every day to do standard EA stuff (answer phones etc.) but would “work from home” as often as possible. It wasn’t actually a job she could DO from home, but the boss would for some reason not say anything. Instead, he told my colleague and me that WE had to answer the phones, handle visitors, etc., which was definitely not part of our jobs, and then he’d get upset with US if her tasks didn’t get handled or if our own work was delayed because we were covering for her.

    The petty part: I started keeping attendance stats on her. After four months, her average attendance rate was 54.8%.

  358. Moray all the Way*

    As an undergrad, I worked as a writing tutor. All the tutors were incredibly loyal to our director, who had been in the position for about 15 years. When we learned that she was being edged out by a new “assistant” director (who conveniently had all the same job duties as the director), another tutor and I drafted a session proposal about “management styles” for one of the largest academic conferences in our field.
    It was accepted, so we anonymously surveyed all our coworkers about their experiences with the new boss, and then we flew to another state (on the university’s dime!) to essentially complain about our tutoring center’s internal drama in front of all the other directors and tutors from across the country.
    We accomplished NOTHING, but it was so damn satisfying. Especially seeing the reactions of all the other directors who attended that session expecting to actually learn something.

  359. allthewords*

    I work in a small, close-knit office where it’s not uncommon for people to have offsite meetings or work from home every now and then. I have one coworker with whom I’ve had a particularly contentious relationship. He consistently pushes off responsibility, has a habit of taking credit for work that I have done and has made several sexist comments to me. One Friday, I asked our mutual boss, while in earshot of most of our office, if that coworker in fact worked on Fridays because he hadn’t been in the office on a Friday in a month and didn’t respond to emails/ slack messages on Fridays. I actually knew where he was that day and that he had a legitimate reason to be out, but I was feeling catty and wanted everyone else to pick up on the pattern of his absences. He was in the office the next Friday.

  360. Drunk at Work*

    I had an admin once show up to an event, where her presence wasn’t requested, highly intoxicated. She interacted with students who were highly concerned about the fact that she was spitting Cheez-Its in their face and flirting with the Police Officers on duty. I reported her to her supervisor the following morning as did the Chief of Police and two other higher level employees. The following day she cornered me and said I was trying to “sabotage her” and the item she needed to deliver to my office got thrown at me. She ended up changing departments but it was a year of essentially taking on all administrative duties myself so I wouldn’t have to interact with her for fear of having something thrown at me again.

    1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      Holy…woah. The Chief of Police even reported it and she didn’t get fired, I’m completely at a loss here.

      A former friend of my mom showed up “day after” still drunk for work and was canned so quickly.

  361. Blue Dog*

    My wife was hired on to be the first ever office manager for a new company. She was told on her first day to make a list of everything she needed: desk, chair, file cabinets, supplies, everything. She ordered a couple thousand dollars worth of new stuff. Her list went for approval and everything was approved except a 50 cent staple remover. She was perplexed.

    They ordered again in a week and she placed an order and, at the end, added a staple remover. It was approved and she threw it in her desk drawer. The next week she placed her order and got another staple remover. This went on for two years. When she left her replacement asked, “Why do you have 100 staple removers in that one drawer?” She just shrugged and said she didn’t know why they kept sending those to her.

    That, my friends, is gangster!

    1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      LOL wait, am I reading this right? She just started adding a staple remover to every order afterwards and ended up with a drawer full because they didn’t approve the first one?

      This sounds like something I’d pull, I adore it.

      It reminds me of decades ago when I learned that my manager was such a stickler for reading receipts submitted for reimbursements that she read the location of the gas stations I went to on a business trip. I had gone south of the main office and had made the brutal error of gassing up at a station that was probably ten miles south of the office before my return, just because it was convenient and I thought to to do it. She refused to pay for it. So I knew from then on that I’d drive on vapors if I had to to get to a station that was not outside her random self imposed radius. [She was not quite Guacamole Bob but she was dangerously close]

    2. Blue Dog*

      Yes. She kept tacking one on to every order as her silent passive-aggressive protest. It was next-level evil-genius stuff.

  362. PurplePen*

    I worked in IT back in the mid-90s, when computers in the office were still relatively new technology (I’m talking Windows 3.1 days), and we had this one user who drove the whole department crazy. He was constantly reporting that our software didn’t work properly, when the problem was his inability to follow instructions. After one particularly egregious round of his complaining to the higher-ups about the software, we set up a series of customized “error messages” that would pop up in response to normal actions. The final one in the series said something to the effect of “Fatal User Error: All data will be erased.”

    It was a petty thing to do, but we thought it would be funny. It backfired though, because he started sobbing, thinking he’d destroyed the entire company’s computer system. That’s when I learned not to do petty things anymore.

  363. The Man, Becky Lynch*

    I just remembered one from when I was finishing my time at the toxic waste-dump previously.

    There was this worthless task that I was given, despite already having 60hrs of work to do a week of adjusting inventory. These inventory adjustments equated to a couple of dollars each most of the time. We’re essentially talking about tracking thumb tacks and paperclips kind of things, that’s how cheap these inventory items were. Instead of just chucking it back into the bin and doing quarterly counts or counts when something was ordered but shown as ‘zero’ to confirm.

    So I had a stack of the sheets to enter and it was the last couple of days of my torture. So I was cleaning up my area trying to make it look like less of a disaster for the poor soul that took over for me. I grabbed them along with a few other assorted meaningless tasks that wouldn’t be completed by anyone else since nobody was going to be trained on that tiny task anyways and shredded the whole stack of nonsense.

  364. Tea Earl Grey. Hot.*

    There have been some mighty shenanigans ever since they brought the the new uberboss of my division, Dolores, on board. (We all had to interview for jobs we’ve had for multiple years for the purpose of “restructuring.” She kept saying what a “fun journey” the whole thing was. Seemed genuinely confused that no one else saw it that way.)

    Anyway, my bit of pettiness is not something I have done, but something I don’t have the stones to do. When someone else was running the department, we had quarterly calls where information was occasionally delivered to us. Half of them were cancelled and they were usually over in 20 min. But Dolores now wants us all to pitch in and host a call and give a presentation on literally anything just so we can make sure “we have this time together.” (I don’t even work in the same time zone as these people). I really, really want to do my presentation about how unnecessary meetings hamper productivity, but I need my job.

    2. Snub Nose*

      We all had to interview for jobs we’ve had for multiple years for the purpose of “restructuring.”

      This happened at a friend’s company! They all had to take personality tests too, but they knew ahead of time that no one would be fired for their personality test answers, so several people filled in only column A or otherwise gave obvious fake answers in protest.

  365. Anon4This*

    I stole someone’s chair once. The person in question was incredibly rude to one of the nicest people in my office and generally made it pretty clear that she thought she was simply a higher-class person than any of we peons she’d been stuck working with.

    My very nice coworker’s chair broke one night when we were in the office late, so I just stole the rude person’s and put it at her desk. (They were the same model, and nothing was asset tagged at that time.) I didn’t even leave the rude person the broken chair – they came in the next day to find they had no chair. Even better, there wasn’t one immediately available to give her, so she ended up with a significantly less comfortable guest chair for the day while they located and purchased a replacement.

    Her commentary on the situation ranged from how low-class the person who stole her chair was to what she would do if she ever found out who took it. I think she’d been so nasty to so many people that there were too many candidates for her to sort out who actually removed it.

  366. Former Young Lady*

    When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I worked front-of-house at a professional theatre. The staff all generally got along except for (oh, let’s call her) “Brandi,” a somewhat-older shift supervisor who clearly couldn’t stand the rest of us. Brandi’s pettiness manifested in various ways: she’d show up an hour late and completely drunk; she’d refuse to collaborate on tasks like stuffing playbills or counting inventory, which made them take twice as long; she had a host of backhanded compliments and put-downs ready to lob at anyone who dared show up in a good mood.

    We came up with a game whereby each of us would choose one, two, or three-syllable words, and only speak to/around her in words of that syllabic meter, for the duration of the shift. She could sense that something was extremely weird about the way we were all talking, and the nerdy smirks surely drove her nuts, but she never could put a finger on it.

    If you’re out there, Brandi: I’m now the age you were back then. I’ve grown up a little, and I hope you have, too!

  367. Anon?*

    I used to work in fundraising as a grant writer (context – young 20-something woman). The Executive Director asked me to pick up her coffee from Starbucks a couple of times, which was fine. What wasn’t so fine was when she got angry one time when I messed up one of the details in her order and “punished” me by having our front desk admin get the Starbucks the next few times.

    1. Bunny Girl*

      Wow what a punishment. I’d screw up forever. The only time I get anyone’s coffee is if I’m already going there myself and I’ll offer to pick up for another person or two on the way out the door.

      Personally I never understand anyone who won’t go get their own coffee. I take every chance I get to get up and stretch.

    2. Holy Carp*

      When I was a young Army officer at my first posting many years ago, I was given the task of making coffee for the office. The coffeemaker at the time was a giant coffee urn (think 30+ cups) with a metal basket that held the coffee grounds. I filled the basket all the way to the top with grounds. I was never required to make coffee again.

  368. LNCPG*

    I had emailed a coworker several times with an urgent request, and no action was being taken. When she finally replied, this was what I got back in response…

    “Please note that if you are sending something to me which requires a response, please add my name in the “To” box as the “cc” box is for carbon copy and normally does not have an action item associated with it. I have all cc’d items going to a box which is not priority and want to make sure I don’t miss something important.

    Here is a snipit from email best practices.

    TO – email/contact of the person you want to send the mail/message to.
    CC – email/contact of all people to whom you want to send an exact advisory copy of the mail/message with no expectation of a reply.
    BCC – email/contact of all people to whom you want to send the copy of the mail/message, without others knowing to whom it has been sent.”

  369. oona*

    Oh man I’m late but I have a petty one I did. I worked for an extremely particular lawyer who made me adjust the kerning (spacing between letters) on certain words. It was a pain in the butt and made no difference to the readability as far as I was concerned. He wanted the kerning on a particular word to be set at 1.5. I would randomly change it to either 1.4 or 1.6 throughout the document. He never noticed.

    1. Arianrhod*

      Not exactly petty, but the legal assistant where I worked as a paralegal would go through my letters and other final drafts in Word and add double spaces between sentences (FYI, this is something left over from typewriters, and you don’t have to do it in modern word processors–they know to make the spacing between sentences bigger than the spacing between words).

      Although, probably it was petty when I would remove the double spacing from older documents I had to access, or ones I pulled as templates. It didn’t make a difference in the end, as she had to send them out and so would re-add them before printing them, but I felt petty doing it.

  370. wihewatr*

    Not sure this counts, it was something I did at my previous dentist’s office years ago. On the front desk was a sign-in clipboard (first, last, address, city, state). Someone apparently thought the patients needed guidance filling it out, so the first “patient” was “George Bush, 123 Main St, Washington, DC”. I crossed out “123 Main St” & wrote in the most well known street address ever. If you’re going to explain how to fill out a sign in sheet, at least get the damn address correct.

  371. fake name for the cheesecake story*

    I had a micromanager once who was always telling me to decide on how I wanted to do a task and then berate me for not following his directions on how to do it. I knew he loved cheesecake so I brought in a frozen Sara Lee one on day. He wanted to slice it up right then and there to eat and I just calmly said no, the directions said to wait for it to defrost x amount of minutes first and shouldn’t we always follow the directions? It was defrosted after lunch time but he had worn a trail in the carpet going up to the frozen cheesecake and reading and rereading the directions by then.

  372. Barbara*

    I once worked in a deli at a grocery store. Anytime we opened lunch meat to slice, we had to wrap it and write the date on it before we put it back in the cooler. EVERY Time. This was so inconvenient when we had a certain kind on sale and would be constantly having to unwrap it and rewrap it again. We had a manager who was a prick and would constantly check the cooler. I started writing the date (month and day) in Roman numerals just to tick him off. It worked.

  373. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

    A long time ago I used to work in an office full of snitches. Now, we might mention something in passing, and at least two members of the snitch club would pass along the info/gossip in a “stoolie session”. SO …ooo ….ooo

    We decided to start feeding the “pipelines to the almighty” bad information. Remember, someone who is using people in that fashion will only exploit the snakes, until their info is bad, then they have no further use for them.

    So … yeah, the snitcheroos lost their influence (and favorable treatment).

  374. Llama Face!*

    When I was young I worked in the office of a small local transport company. I was the only woman there aside from the owner’s wife. The guys who worked there had a nudie calendar up. It wasn’t the kind of office (or decade) where I could complain about it and get any resolution. So I used black marker and turned all the pics into extremely hirsute-bodied bearded ladies. Pretty sure it ruined the effect. ;)

    1. nonegiven*

      When we were kids, our dad was working in another state. He’d drive home on the weekends, then drive back, where he was sharing a dinky old trailer with another guy. When the guy went on vacation, we drove up there and stayed with dad for 2 weeks. I was about 10 and was pretty insulted by the other guy’s titty calendar. I took a black marker and gave her a bikini. Dad said I shouldn’t have done that but I was proud, anyway.

    2. elspeth*

      Had the same problem. Worked in a car dealership repair office in the late 80’s. The guys thought it was funny to have me surrounded by various beer brand spokesmodels in little to no clothing. It was all fun and games until I put up a Playgirl calendar.I was told to take it down because it made the guys uncomfortable. I said I would if they took their’s down. No deal. Went to the owner of the dealership. Next day the only calendars allowed were of kittens or puppies.

    3. Holy Carp*

      I had a similar experience. My boss had hung up on the wall by his desk a long pinup of a young woman in a skimpy bikini, in an office full of mostly women. One day when he was out, I spent a good long time cutting shapes out of black and white construction paper. When he returned, the picture was of a nun in full habit. He *did* take the hint with good grace and even let it be.

  375. High School Admin*

    I had a teacher that worked for me who was constantly on her cell phone during class rather than teaching. It wasn’t academic use and her class was always out of control.
    After numerous warnings and two written directives, I had IT disable the wireless router in her room. It didn’t deter her immediately; that came when she realized she wasn’t on the wireless, but on data and had a giant overage charge.

    She tried to get the school to pay it, and I refused. She claimed it was “academic” but I had IT produce a print out of all of the sites she had been visiting when on the district network. She resigned.

  376. Combinatorialist*

    When I was in graduate school, I had an internship where most of the other interns were undergrads. The company was trying to make us seem hip and cool and so had all sorts of toys in the intern space (a Wii, fooseball, nerf guns, etc). For some reason, the nerf guns weren’t fun enough — some of the interns found PVC pipes that they would use as blow darts they would use with the nerf darts. These would make very loud wooshy sounds ALL THE TIME and the darts would hurt and the people weren’t particularly great at aim. I was not amused.

    So every time a dart came within range of my desk, I stuck it in my desk drawer when no one was watching. By the end of the summer, the nerf noise was much diminished, and people were wondering where the darts had gone. I hid them when I left.

  377. nnn*

    Just remembered another one, very petty indeed:

    The evening security guard was a hard-ass about everyone having to sign out if they leave after 6 pm. He said it was so they could keep track of who is and isn’t in the building. But that was ridiculous, because we didn’t have to sign in when we entered the building.

    So I always signed out illegibly.

  378. That Californian*

    This is from school, but that was “work” at the time. I took a class called Controlling Processes (Anthropology), about the ways in which cultures and institutions control their members. I actually agreed with the professor about a lot of her stances, but I thought her approach discouraged free exchange of ideas and was doing the ideas she espoused a disservice–so I wrote my final paper on the class and specifically how she ran it as a controlling process.
    Looking back, I’d bet she got at least one of those papers every time she taught the class, but I thought I was Terribly Rebellious and Original.

  379. Combinatorialist*

    When I was in middle school, the school had a policy that a parent had to sign our planners. My dad got this job and felt it was totally inane that we had to do it (I was a very good student). So he would sign it in a different way each day: tiny, huge, upside down, mirrored, in a circle. The teachers were amused at his small rebellion.

    We also had standardized dress and so had to wear like khaki pants and a polo. I got tired of this and so started wearing crazy socks. The next year they changed the dress code to specify sock colors. I decided to continue wearing the crazy socks and also changed all the buttons on my polos to novelty buttons. Which was highly satisfying and also taught me the very useful skill of being able to fix buttons.

    1. Pear*

      I love this! And bonus – you learned to sew on a button. A useful skill I didn’t master until I was way older than middle school.

  380. Kimberly*

    I taught a Title I school, with low socio eco students. We went to a district-wide science competition.
    The teachers from the rich schools in the district
    1. Called our kids thieves and gang bangers in their hearing
    2. defended their kids when we stopped them from taking our kids’ snacks
    3. Defended their kids when they tried to take my Ipads (from a grant program) saying they were district property and it was their kids turn to use them
    4. Tried to take our pizzas (ordered from the organizing HS students) because they should have been served first since their kids paid for them and we used TItle I money (The orders were in reverse alph order the poorest schools happen to start with R, S, T
    5. Told us that we shouldn’t be allowed to participate in two different grant programs in the district because we had Title 1 money
    6. Left their area a complete mess, told their kids loudly it was the custodians’ jobs to throw away trash and made fun of our kids who followed directions, cleaning off the tables, stacked their chairs – and unprompted borrowed brooms to sweep up some mess on the floor.

    Top it all off our bilingual 4th-grade teacher sent kids without telling the team before, we had no contact information, and she gave them the wrong pick up time like 4 hours late.

    I go to the district person in charge and ask if she can access the gradebook program to get these kids phone numbers/back up numbers. She says no because she doesn’t have that access. So I ask if I have her permission to “hack” into their teacher’s gradebook.
    She gives me written permission and she and I go into the library alone. I explain out of the kids hearing, that the password for every single teacher in the district was – wait for it password! Some idiot refused to allow tech to have us change it. While I’m logging in I tell her about 1-6 – and she has already seen the mess.

    The results
    1. we got hold of the parents and the kids got picked up
    2. The next Monday we had orders to change our passwords on the gradebook program. (The person in charge of training our campus asked me how the HELL did you get them to do that. We have been fighting for 2 years and who knows how many HS kids have changed grades. She knew it happened because of something happening at the competition. I’m a known trouble maker and I was there so I had to have something to do with it)
    3. The bilingual teacher got written up
    4. The two schools with the awful teachers got disqualified and the teachers got written up. Don’t feel too sorry for the kids. This only happened after every judge was contacted and asked about behavior, every judge not associated with those two schools had complaints about the kids. Stuff like demanding they go first, racist language, and just being horrible.
    5. The Maintenance/Custodial department threw my school’s team an ice cream party
    6. The Science Department also threw the team and ice cream party (we had them on separate days)

    1. That Californian*

      Wow, that rage-inducing post turn an abrupt turn to delightful with the student/maintenance/custodial ice cream party.

  381. The Bill Murray Disagreement*

    When I worked for the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Boss (who is also a bully), I had started to notice that this boss would move stuff around on my desk (which was adjacent to boss’ desk). I kept a bag of clementines on the top of my filing cabinet; at the beginning of the next day they’d been moved into the storage bin attached to my desk. My coffee cup would get moved around. Small knickknacks my husband brought me back from his overseas travels would get shoved to one side of my desk.

    My boss would routinely complain that my desk was ‘messy’ (it wasn’t: I had an orchid, 2 framed photos, a Delft tray, and the aforementioned coffee mug — and I always put my papers away at the end of every day because I used to work for a large company with a clean-desk policy). When I started casually mentioning that things on my desk were getting moved around, boss would say it was the cleaning staff. (That was ridiculous too because the cleaning staff was subcontracted and wouldn’t dare touch anything *on* desks for fear of losing their low-paying jobs!)

    Around the time I realized I needed to GTFO of that place, boss hung a photo of a scantily clad athleisure model (because in addition to being a dirtbag and a bully, this boss also really liked to stare at people they found sexually attractive and comment about these photos to anyone who came by).

    Boss couldn’t stand anything being off-center or crooked, so every evening when I left, I’d push the corner of the photo down a fraction of an inch. Each morning, I’d see the boss adjust the photo, push the pin in harder, adjust the pin, etc. Finally boss added two pins (one in each corner) but that didn’t deter me. I would adjust one pin down a fraction of an inch and make sure I put it right back in its pinhole.

    It actually had a double benefit: not only was it deeply satisfying (on a level that shocks me, frankly!) it also kept the boss occupied so they could not screw with the stuff on my desk.

  382. Definitely not the person you know or worked with*

    I used to work for the performing arts center at a major urban, well-funded university. Despite being part of the bigger organization, it operated totally on its own in many ways. Which is why it was my job to maintain the web hosting and domain registration and such as the one marketing staff member.

    After a leadership transition and org chart reshuffling, it devolved into a nightmare work environment that I may or may not be writing a screenplay about. Anyway, I drove myself to illness keeping things running and setting up succession plans and documenting things once I gave notice, since I was the only person who had access to most of our accounts and information.

    FOUR YEARS after I resigned, my old comrade-in-arms (who in no way worked in marketing or office support or any of that kind of stuff) emailed to ask me…. how to get their web site back. The domain registration expired and someone else had parked on it.

    So of course I did some forensic work to remember who we used as a registrant and sent her the most likely email address she should use to request a username/password reset.

    And I, uh, put a bid on the domain name myself.

  383. HR Stoolie*

    Many years ago I was working the galley aboard a commercial vessel. Rule was that crew did not take food out of the kitchen area, leftovers went to a public fridge.

    One day I was making Cheesecakes for dinner desert and as I was cleaning I noticed the leftover scrambled eggs had almost the same color as the cheesecake filling. I put the eggs in the industrial mixer and smoothed it up as much as possible, pressed the eggs into a pie pan, and sprinkled with chocolate bits.

    That night the crew was served real cheesecake and the ol’ egg pie pan was left inside the kitchen where it should have remained unmolested.

    Unfortunately I didn’t see this in person but a fellow crewman said he was walking along the rail and loudly heard “WTF is this…!” and saw a a healthy sized wedge tossed overboard.

  384. whistle*

    I have a coworker who I must have offended in another life. I have never really interacted with her, but she clearly does not like me. How do I know? If I am in someone’s office with the door open, and she walks by, she will close the door without saying a word. She does not do this to anyone else as far as I know.

  385. Bulbasaur*

    Shortly after I started at my new job, I broke my pen and needed to get another one. I went to what I thought was the stationery cupboard, but couldn’t open it, so I decided to ask the admin at the front desk for help. I had been warned about her, but hadn’t had occasion to talk to her yet.

    The conversation went something like this.

    ME: Hi.
    ADMIN: (stares at me)
    ME: Can you let me know where I can find a spare pen? Mine is broken.
    ADMIN: They’re in the stationery cupboard. I keep it locked.
    ME: Oh? Why?
    ADMIN: Are you kidding? People would steal it all. If I left it open it would be empty in days.
    ME: Really?
    ADMIN: (stares at me)
    ME: Well, anyway, if I could just-
    ADMIN: I saw you trying to open it just now.

    I think I did eventually get her to open the cupboard and find me a pen. This particular employer was one of the institutional types with conflict-avoidant managers.

  386. Def need to be anon this time*

    I had a coworker once tell our bosses that I made a mistake that he clearly knew another coworker made. When I called him on it, he defended it by saying he and the other coworker both go to the same church, and I should just tolerate the bosses being mad at me as part of my punishment for not accepting Jesus…

    I—in return—signed his personal email account up for spam from Publisher’s Clearning House and a few other email subscribtions that are nortoiously hard to unsubscribe from. Then, I figured out his phone carrier. You see, if one knows the phone carrier and number, there’s an email address that can be used to send text messages via email. I’m sure you see where this is going. Dude was getting spammed in both his actual email and text messages. No, I did not get caught, and no I’m not sorry.

    2. Curmudgeon in California*

      Applause!

      “Oh, I accept Jesus. It’s his followers that Ican’t stand!”

  387. teehee*

    A petty BEC was playing nice with me hoping for a baby shower gift. During the work shower with lots of talk of the name and how she painted it on the nursery wall and had it embroidered on blankets and onsies, I commented that the baby name was oh-so-similar to my then last name. Just take off the first letter and change a vowel.

    She named the kid something completely different.

  388. No More Documentation!*

    Oh, I have one that happened recently…
    A guy at my work, Bob, was tasked to do an annoying documentation task. It’s not something anyone really wants to do because it doesn’t help anyone meet dates and it’s not something anyone really reads, but it’s deliverable to the customer so we have to do it. Usually what happens is someone finishes it up a week from the final delivery because no one cares about it other than checking the ‘delivered to customer’ box.
    Anyway, management tells Bob to do it, he doesn’t (because he rightfully thinks no one really cares). But at some point some VP has the misguided idea that if this documentation isn’t done, we don’t have a design, and are just throwing together random stuff and calling it a teapot. Our managers try to dissuade them of this notion, but can’t. So it becomes a high-priority thing statused in weekly meetings that our managers were getting asked about regularly.
    Did Bob do it? Hahaha nope. He gives vague non-answers when asked about status and argues about exactly what they mean when they say ‘done’ but whatever, it wasn’t my team’s place to hound him about it.
    The deadline gets closer and closer until finally the manager says point-blank these are due next week and are you going to be able to get done? Bob splutters a bit and eventually says well it’s my team’s responsibility to do them. News to us! We protest a bit and proceed not to do them either, because we have deadlines we’re struggling to meet and adding a useless documentation task onto it was not something we planned on.
    Anyway time passes, our direct manager starts more or less begging/bribing us to do them, even just to show progress on some of them. Well, okay, I pick the easiest one and do it. It takes me about an afternoon. I put it up for review, add my team lead, my boss, and Bob, and went home for the day.
    In the morning I come in and find out from my team lead and my manager that Bob called both of them, my scrum master, and my dotted line team lead in an effort to complain to them how I didn’t do it right. There’s no comments on the actual review, mind, he just wanted to get them to tell me to redo it. Chief among his complaints are how it’s not the standard format (the ‘standard’ being a folder full of old documentation the first four I checked having four different layouts, and my manager had told us that she would be happy to format documents in the right way if we just wrote all the information) and how all the information in the document didn’t make sense (he actually had no idea what the thing was that was being documented, so my team lead told him, yes, all the information was right). No one was sympathetic to him. At no point did he ever talk to me about this. I can’t really recall him ever speaking to me after this, but whatever, I never exactly liked talking to him, so I just didn’t care.
    The petty revenge actually came from my team lead. Since Bob complained *so much* about the wrong format, he decided to submit his document as a PowerPoint with the most obnoxious animations he could come up with. I don’t think Bob talks to him any more, either.

  389. JJL*

    I used to bartend at a small town club and most nights it wasn’t busy enough to be on your feet all the time, so I would pull up a bar stool behind the register to sit at when all my cleaning was done but I couldn’t close because we still had patrons drinking. I could still be seen and was only 2 steps away from the beer taps whenever someone needed a refill.
    One of the social club volunteers didn’t like the optics of me sitting down – I’d heard them grumbling about it a couple of times, but the bar manager and club president were ok with it.
    One day I came in to open up and couldn’t find my bar stool anywhere it would normally be. The Social club had closed the night before and I thought I was just being paranoid thinking that someone has actually gotten rid of it just so that I couldn’t sit down behind the bar, until I eventually found it stuffed in the back of the storage area at the other end of the building.
    I just pulled it out and put it back behind the bar, and never heard another word about it (so clearly there was no legit reason for it to be taken away).

  390. nêhiyaw ayahkwêw*

    I worked as a retail manager for a while when I was younger, I had one employee that ended up needing a lot of… coaching, to put it mildly.

    One day we had a conversation about whether or not it was acceptable to walk out of the store suddenly and not return for many hours. (It was not.)

    This angered her enough that she immediately went to the washroom, emptied her bowels and. left. it. there.

    No flushing. Just a nice fresh poo.

    She then went back to work, staring at me every time I neared the bathroom.

  391. pooka*

    Old office job. Supplies near the copy machine kept being taken by folks. So the staff tied everything down. Of course one of the items was a pair of scissors. My coworker calmly walked up, looked everyone in the eye while cutting the string attaching the scissors to the desk.

  392. Auntie Social*

    On Broadway many stars will, as the play/musical runs, will take a matinee off or a Wednesday night off, in part to allow their understudy to have more stage time (you like your understudy, you recall being one yourself, etc.). BUT–there’s a female star who is verrry proud of never taking time off, with a “they’re here to see MEEE” attitude. So her understudy is patient but a friend of hers, a swing, is less so. One evening the star is brought Thai food instead of her usual meal. And, Thai food being Thai food. . . the understudy gets the nod. There was a LOT of flushing coming from the star’s dressing room, with loud comments in the star’s distinctive voice—“Corn?! When did I have CORN??”

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Corn allergy could do it, and those little baby corns aren’t recognized by people who’ve never seen it. Plus cornstarch thickeners.
        But that would mean intentionally giving someone something they’re allergic to and I I HOPE they didn’t do that!

        1. Robottt*

          But that wasn’t the comment. The comment was “Thai food being Thai food,” which just comes off problematic as if there is something wrong with Thai food in general.

    2. Massmatt*

      “Thai food being Thai food”? What in the world does this mean?

      I have eaten Thai Hundreds of times and never gotten sick.

  393. Bulbasaur*

    This one was kind of justified, but I still think of it as petty.

    I had been working at a client site for about a year when they decided to replace their system for managing access requests. The security model for their systems was immense and poorly understood, and we were providing a number of specialized services for them that required a particular and extensive set of permissions. The old system worked, sort of, but we still had a document on how to request all the access for new team members that ran to three pages.

    There were rumblings for some time in advance that the replacement project was in trouble and might need to be delayed. They ended up releasing it on time, but it was clearly woefully incomplete and lacked half the functionality of the old one. The client nonetheless went all-in, decommissioned the old system and required everything to go through the new one instead. Coincidentally around this time we added a new person to the team and I was asked to manage the access request process for them. My informal suggestion that we could do a copy of permissions from an existing team member was rejected – the new system was the system of record, and I had to use that for everything.

    So I did. I walked through the old guide document line by line, and every time I found something that wasn’t possible in the new system I would phone the support line and play dumb (“I can’t seem to figure out how to…”) Every time I did that I would log a ticket and document everything. After I had a number of these I went back to my account manager with a summary, informed him that it was going to take more time, and asked him to get approval to bill the hours. The client had no choice but to approve them, since they had to be able to handle new starters and their access team was still insisting this was the only way it could be done.

    I continued with this until I had dozens of support calls and a small novel worth of descriptions of how “system needs to do X but instead does Y/doesn’t recognize X as valid/etc.” and then got together with my account manager to book a meeting with the system owner. We summarized all the problems, defects and missing functions and asked when we could expect them to be resolved, if there was any other means by which we could get the new starter’s access sorted, and what we should tell our sponsor (a senior manager at the client) about it all.

    We heard nothing for a few weeks, while our client sponsor continued to ratchet up the pressure. Eventually we got a tentative query back about whether we could do it by cloning an existing user’s access. I sent a sanctimonious reply back quoting all their own arguments, stating that we needed a long term solution that would work equally well for future cases and not just a short term workaround, and that if the system was to be the system of record then it needed to be capable of meeting the needs of the business. The three of us (me, account manager, client sponsor) then got together and agreed a timetable on which we would allow ourselves to be reluctantly persuaded to use the clone approach – after sufficient expenditure of political capital on the part of the system owner, of course.

  394. Retailanon*

    I purposefully don’t say thank you or have a good day to customers that annoy me. I purposefully don’t apply manual discounts. We have a rewards card that doesn’t ever round up, and while I usually round up for it, if someone annoys me, I don’t if they annoy me. Or I’ll forget to ask if they have rewards cards. (though 99/100 when I forget discounts or rewards cards it’s an actual accident).

    1. it's-a-me*

      Oh that reminds me of my petty thing! When I’m emailing someone I’m neutral to or I like, they get ‘Good morning/afternoon’, but if I don’t like them, they get ‘Hi’

      The ones who truly displease me (our useless AF IT team…) get no greeting at all, just ‘_____ isn’t working’

  395. TQI*

    At a former workplace, after a particularly unpopular executive decision, someone figured out that they could use the communal scanner to anonymously email the CEO a A4 sheet covered in tiny, hand-doodled penises.

  396. Claire*

    At a previous job, I worked in an office where around a dozen people were responsible for the incoming call queue, and it was open from 8am to 8pm. Because of the volume of calls, and the people staggered on early starts and late finishes, they could never have a proper meeting with everyone, so when two of this crew (let’s call them Cate and Ned) became engaged, Cate brought in a bottle of sparkling wine that she hoped to use to share a toast with the team when they made their very quick announcement in between calls. However, somewhere between the morning when she arrived and the afternoon when they made the announcement, the bottle of wine was stolen out of the office fridge. A plaintive email yielded nothing, so they made their announcement without wine. However, from then on, Cate made a point of helping herself to things that were left in the kitchen – on several occasions it appeared that a plate of dougnuts or cakes had been prepared for a meeting, and Cate would take the whole plate and distribute it among her team. We worked on the same floor as the most senior person in the organisation, and I imagine that the food was often for their meetings, and I’m not sure if anything was ever said. It was kind of breathtaking, to be honest!

  397. TL -*

    I’m a masters student and my grad school department is always short on forks – we have a fully stocked kitchen, 60-ish people in the department (20-40 in regularly), and ~2-5 forks.

    So one day, in fit of frustration, I wrote out a Petition4MoreForks and had everyone in the department, including one of the professors, sign it. I made copies, and posted it in the kitchen alongside a parody study on “disappearing teaspoons in a graduate department” (you can find it online.) And I chatted to the person in charge of ordering, like a responsible adult.

    Two things resulted. 1) TPTB* decided that we should indeed have at least 10 forks in the kitchen, so they ordered 8 more forks. Spoiler alert: less than 2 months later we only had 2 forks.
    2) A PhD** student – who I had zero prior relationship with – came and found me the next day, and sat me down to lectured me about professionalism. She literally pulled the petition out of her notebook and laid it down in front of me while asking me if I was responsible for it (I think she was expecting me to lie about it? She seemed a bit started when I said, “Yup, that’s mine.”)
    My strong negative reaction – I told her she was being condescending, I had no problem with my behavior, and we’d just have to agree to disagree, and ended the conversation – SHOCKED her. It wasn’t my best moment, but I regret nothing.

    *TPTB were also really upset that many people chose to work from home instead of at the department.
    **she has a lot less professional experience that I do – as in, she’s never held a professional-type job and I’ve been working in academia for 8 years at this point. I still hold a grudge.

  398. Liz*

    I was almost petty once, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. My first job out of college, I somehow ended up doing not one but two full time jobs. I was stressed, miserable etc. and I’m sure my performance suffered too. One task I had, and hated, was to gather sales figures for books (I worked in publishing) weekly, to be added to a giant marketing report. From binders and manually inputting it into my computer. It took the better part of 3 days, and there was one shared floppy disk I put my info into, then handed it off to someone else, who added their part. As far as I was aware, there was one copy, and no backup.

    Eventually I was let go and as I was gathering my stuff, I had possession of the floppy and I was so tempted to take it with me! They all would have been so screwed but in the end, I left it.

    My coworkers, who were upset I had been let go, helped me pack up my workspace. They were petty because when I got the boxes, they had been sent fed ex overnight, and they had taken and packed pretty much anything not nailed down. Oops. Including my awesome tape gun, which I still have!

    Karma got them because my “replacement”
    , who started Monday (I was let go the previous Friday) walked out in Tuesday when handed the report and told to “figure it out”

  399. Story Hospital*

    I knew someone who was working for a SUPER toxic awful place. They moved across the country to my city with an agreement that they could continue working remotely. I helped them find a new job right away. The people at their awful workplace were very disrespectful and didn’t think they could do anything right.

    A couple of months after they quit, they got a notice of a certified letter waiting for them at the post office. They were terrified that it was a legal or collections notice, so I went with them to pick it up, as emotional support. It was a letter from toxic!job, basically saying, “We have realized that we have no idea how to do most of the things you did, please call us to explain it all, help!”

    “I guess I should call them,” they said.

    “Nah,” I said, “there’s a perfectly good recycling bin right here.”

    We left the post office. The letter remained behind in the bin, shredded into little pieces.

  400. nekosan*

    We used to get donuts, bagels, and muffins at the office on Fridays. Someone would always just tear the top off a muffin and leave the bottom behind to eventually get thrown away.

    One Friday I made a tiny flag out of a toothpick and post-it note that simply said “Seriously?” and stuck it in the sad, lonely bit of muffin bottom.

    From that day forwards, no muffins were ever beheaded.

  401. Pear*

    Bob and Wendy were the department heads at one of my previous jobs. They reported to the CEO, and we reported to either Bob or Wendy.

    We had a communal fridge for all of us in the office. Bob liked to drink a lot of a particular brand of soda. I mean at least six perhaps seven 12 ounce cans A DAY. So he would buy several cases of soda, which he would laboriously empty and line the entire shelves – several of them – with this soda every Monday.

    It bothered all of us somewhat, enough so that all of us had at some time or another casually mentioned to the CEO that we would like CEO to rein in Bob’s taking over three quarters of the refrigerator. It was casually suggested that Bob only put a case of soda (12 cans) at a time. But the CEO didn’t do much about it.

    None of us went to Wendy about it, partly because we figured she and Bob were on the same level and partly because she was not a woman who suffered fools gladly and we thought it a petty sort of rant. After all, SHE had never gone to the CEO about it.

    One Tuesday, Bob was out of the office. That night after we all left, Wendy opened EVERY SINGLE CAN and took a sip from each. So instead of four or five cases of soda, we had 60 or so opened cans of soda, all lined up perfectly.

    We arrive back at work on Wednesday. Bob has an epic level screaming hissy fit. We were all accused of doing it. Wendy calmly walks into the CEO’s office and tells the CEO, “I solved the refrigerator problem for you.”

    Bob dumped all the soda out into the sink, one by one, sobbing over it. The smell was overwhelming for the rest of the day.

    The following Monday, he bought his several cases of soda to work. Instead of lining our refrigerator with it, however, he dumped nearly all of the cans into Wendy’s open convertible in the parking lot, and reserved one to pour over her head.

    The cops were called. Both of them were escorted from the building and the CEO became a working manager for the next couple of months until he found two other people to replace them.

    1. it's-a-me*

      Wendy is awesome, Bob is a jerk-face, and I hope Wendy got a lovely settlement from the whole affair.

  402. Ridickerous*

    I work where artwork from small children gets hung up daily (not art projects-coloring sheets [so many coloring sheets] and the occasional macaroni project).

    A former coworker, Petyr, on days when he was irritated by one of the managers (Joffrey) , would take a coloring sheet, scribble all over it with a crayon as hard as he could, write Joffrey’s name on it and hang it with the other kid pictures.
    (Neither Peryr nor Joffrey works there now, but I may have colored and hung up a Joffrey picture when I was in a mood recently)

  403. nora*

    Two jobs ago I was underpaid, overstressed, doing the work of 3-5 people, etc. My fiance (now husband) was unemployed at the time and we were trying to get by on one very tiny salary while also planning our wedding.

    So when I saved a client from over $10,000 in credit card fraud, and she sent me a giant fruit basket, and my boss said I couldn’t keep it, I offered to donate it to a food pantry I knew of, with some clients who were very deserving. That food pantry was mine. The clients were my fiance and me. I’m probably going to hell but it was the first fresh produce we’d had in weeks at that point. I was careful never to take any of it back to work. No one ever found out.

  404. Anonandon*

    I had a coworker who would get mad at someone and use her admin rights to lock them out of the critical databases they needed to do their jobs. Then they would come ask her to restore access and she would act like it was some kind of inexplicable accident.

    Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention… We were in Iraq. So not being able to do your job was kind of a big deal.

  405. Pettynonymy*

    Didn’t happen to me but I still fume thinking about it. Manager at Old Job was very tight with three of her reports. One time they all went out and got matching desk plants. Manager was terrible at looking after hers and after a few months it started to turn yellow. She went round the office trying to give it to someone who would “take better care of it” but no one wanted it. So she abandoned it in the break room to die. Eventually one of the junior analysts who was not in Manager’s clique rescued the plant and tried to nurse it back to health, but it was too far gone and she threw it out. Manager immediately noticed the plant’s absence the same day and went around making remarks about how some people can’t take care of things properly.

    The next day Manager wrote the junior analyst up. This analyst was on the spectrum and occasionally displayed stimming behaviour, mostly shaking one foot or tapping her fingers when she was concentrating on something. Manager was aware of this and never said anything previously. But the day after she threw the dead plant out, Manager wrote her up for “distracting people” because she started shaking her foot during a presentation. Pettiest thing I ever saw considering that Manager had abandoned the plant to begin with.

  406. Andy*

    Oh, I just thought of one! I work in a support team, so a fair bit of our work is based on support tickets raised to us to investigate and resolve (think IT, but more for a specific set of systems). I’m the newest member in the role, but with several years experience within the same company. Another coworker, Bernie, started about a month before, his first role within this company (ie, no prior knowledge of the company culture).
    Upon learning that for performance management (including raises) we should be aiming to action 25% of all tickets that are assigned to our team, Bernie started obsessively dividing up all the tickets, ensuring people only pick them up on their turn, to the point that if a high urgency one came in, and the next person in line was away or at lunch, he would try to leave it for them.
    Another team member spoke to him about this, letting him know that people will pick up tickets as their workload allows (we do other tasks besides the tickets). Ever since this talk, his obsession has done a complete 180, and, in order to get at least 25% of the tickets, not only will he pick up as many tickets as possible, we have also busted him creating tickets on behalf of users who have the most minor of problems, and also seeing tickets come in from users with the note “Bernie will take care of this.”
    Bernie also insisted that this other team member was hoarding all the tickets, so other team member ran a report and printed out some lovely colourful pie charts… and you’ll never guess who had the biggest slice of pie! Bernie was incredibly pissed when the evidence was presented.

    We’re not sure what the obsession is. Sure, it’s good to have a goal to aim for in order to get a good annual review and raise, but so many other factors in this role are also taken into account!

    1. TechWorker*

      To be honest it sounds like not a great thing to aim for in the first place – or at least it’s fine if everyone ignores it but if people explicitly aim for it then you get Bernies… given I’m sure tickets can vary widely in difficulty/how long they take, I can see people being motivated to try to only pick up quick easy ones rather than you know, doing their job :p

      1. Andy*

        To clarify, it’s not a hard and fast rule. If you’re working on a big project, for instance, then you’ll naturally be picking up less tickets, and they’ll take this into account in your performance review. We have a manager who is fair in these kinds of assessments, and it’s easy to see how each team member is going because it’s a pretty small team (four first-level support people, the manager, and a couple other people in different roles within the team). It’s more a thing in place because the company needs to have some kind of measurement for progress and the ticketing system is easy to track it.

        You might be asking, “why hasn’t she done anything about the ticket nazi?” None of us have actually complained about it. Bernie’s okay outside of this quirk, and it’s more something we just roll our eyes about because we don’t actually see it negatively impacting our annual reviews.

  407. VM*

    I’m not sure if this is petty but we have a “tragedy of the commons” type of situation at work with dishes. It has gotten so bad that people will leave dishes in the sink in the evenings and I guess they think the “sink fairy” takes care of them in the morning. I got so tired of it that if I have to touch gross dishes in the sink to rinse out the coffee carafe or refill the water container, I throw the dishes in the trash can.

    1. Andy*

      This reminds me of when I was growing up, my brother kept leaving cups and plates in my bedroom if we were hanging in there. I got sick of taking them to the kitchen for him, and started walking much further to his own bedroom to leave them in there. Once or twice I even tucked a cup into his bed for him.

  408. Push It*

    A coworker had an assigned parking spot next to the flower bed so only one side of her car was exposed. When parking reassigned she was so upset about having her assigned parking spot moved that she had to go home early. The next day she came to work parked in her new spot, then proceeded to affix foam bumpers down each side of her car. She did this every. single. day.

  409. ForkMath*

    Forks are an ongoing drama at our school.
    People will send out emails asking for whereabouts of missing forks, accuse other departments of stealing forks, etc. Our math department now has a hanging calculator caddy on the wall and assigned numbers and forks and you are only allowed to use your own numbered fork.

  410. Me heh heh*

    I’m very late to the party on this, haha. I’ve been reading and enjoying these stories all evening!

    Bullyboss at OldExjob drove everybody crazy. Nobody liked him. Part of my job was to send out finish samples (we made wooden widgets) and sales literature to customers and outside sales reps from the large international conglomerate who owned us, which I will call Stark Industries.

    Usually these requests came through our territory sales rep, but if they were out, BB had to handle it. I think he thought he shouldn’t have to because he was the sales manager and thus, above all actual work. He was the most glaring example of the Peter Principle I’ve ever worked with.

    BB would copy me on his replies to people re samples/literature and not include the inside rep. This implied that I was in sales and part of the loop (nope). Or, he would get an email to send something out and not forward it to me. Then the customer or Stark rep would call in and ask about it. He never threw me under the bus, and it’s a good thing, because I would have hit him over the head with a large widget.

    He particularly did it to one inside rep, who actually was the best at customer service (I’ll call him Rudy). Rudy had a ton of quotes every day and also a very serious medical condition that took him out of the office at diagnosis for many weeks. (He actually almost died.) When Rudy was gone, BB was supposed to handle his customers, but he would walk away from his phone when I transferred calls. He was all pissy the entire time Rudy was on medical leave because he didn’t want to do anything. He wouldn’t even answer his own calls. He bullied Rudy so much I practically had PTSD just from listening to it.

    The last straw was when BB forwarded me an email from a Stark rep who was replacing another one. It was in Rudy’s territory, in Alabama. The rep asked BB to send her contact info for whoever she was supposed to order samples from.

    BB copied the Stark rep when he forwarded it to me, and left Rudy out of the loop, thus implying that I was the contact. I knew what he was doing–he was setting Rudy up so he could get him in trouble. I had had enough.

    I emailed the Stark rep back, left BB off the correspondence, and copied Rudy. Like this:

    pepperpotts@starkindustries.com
    CC: rudys@oldexjob.com

    Hi Pepper,

    I’m not sure why BB didn’t send this to me sooner, but I will get your samples and literature out right away.

    Your inside sales rep is Rudy Smith. His phone number is 123-555-1212, and you can reach him via email at rudys@oldexjob.com. Contact him for any quotes or product questions. If you need samples or literature, you can tell Rudy and he’ll forward it to me, or you can email me directly at myname@oldexjob.com and I will let him know what I sent. Please feel free to email me if you have any issues with the shipment.

    Thank you, and we look forward to working with you!

    Sincerely,

    My name

    Every time BB tried to pull this crap, I would undercut him by punting it back to Rudy. I never felt guilty about enjoying the petty because the customer / rep was taken care of, and BB could never yell at Rudy for not doing it. Heh heh.

    PS– After I got laid off, a coworker I was friends with on Facebook told me that BB had been fired in the Stark Industries restructuring purge. Not laid off, like me; FIRED. I would have given anything to be the Wasp on the wall for that conversation!

  411. mountainshadows299*

    Current pettiness is going on in my office actually… And it involves a door. There is a lady on my team whose job is basically entirely separate from anything the rest of our team does. She just got stuck on our team because she’s literally the only person in our entire company who does what she does. She is also one of the most extroverted people ever. When we moved to our new building, most of my team got an office with two doors- one to the main cubicle area, and one to the adjoining office. Our work is sensitive and requires confidentiality and mutual teamwork, so while we still are open plan in the sense that we all work in the same office, we can at least close the doors if needed to chat about work stuff. Our supervisor has made it plainly clear that we can close our doors if we have confidential information to discuss.

    For awhile, there was not room to move said lady into adjoining office because our supervisors were in there, but she finally did. That’s when WW3 began- Fight for the open door. Said extroverted lady constantly has people in her office from other departments, and is fond of work gossip. One of the people she regularly invites in has one of the most unique, grating, LOUD laughs I’ve ever heard in my life. So one day, we’re all in our office working quietly, and the extrovert has the loud laugher in her office, laughing loudly. I reason to myself, what will be my best option here? Be the killer of fun and poke my head in and ask them to keep it down or simply close the door between us without interrupting their conversation? I choose option B- close the door. Upon my closing the door, one of my coworkers looked at me and said, “Thank you, I was considering doing that myself.” Little did I know, this act would cause all hell to break loose. After this happened, extrovert all of a sudden started acting very rudely towards me, and one day soon afterwards, when all of us in our office were talking/laughing (we can be loud too), she pokes her head in, looks squarely at me, makes a comment about how loud we are all being and slams the door behind her. I’m taken aback, but honestly, it’s really not in my nature to apologize to people who are mad at me when I’ve done nothing wrong, so I let her be mad, figuring that she’d cool off and realize she was being silly and that will be the end of it. Nope… She was out of the office for personal reasons for awhile, and upon her return, my colleagues have on two other occasions at this point, done the same thing that I did- closed the adjoining door when the loud laugher was in her office, and she, in return, has reacted the same way she did previously- come in, made a rude comment, and slammed the door. (To be fair, one of my colleagues, when he closed the door, apparently looked right at extrovert and glared at her, so I’m positive that didn’t help the situation). Comments have been made about loud laugher, the extrovert, and our team, and it’s all PURE RIDICULOUSNESS. Recently our supervisor actually addressed it in a team meeting lightly, and not in a way that really fixed anything. The extrovert apparently still seems to think that I’m the cause of the problem, as she cornered me in the bathroom, and made a statement about the team meeting, and then came over and whispered in my ear “I’m just tired of all the rudeness.” (I’m presuming she thought I was being rude, but truthfully, since the first time I closed the door the only thing I’ve done is refused to apologize for closing the door).

    The mind boggles…

    1. WonderingHowIGotIntoThis*

      We have a loud laugher in our open office. Except it’s more of a cackle. It sounds so *false*. And*nothing* is that funny!

      I just put my headphones on

  412. Petty cash*

    We were doing a project with someone who could be considered a celebrity in their field. Celebrity and his three or four assistants were all overly demanding of our entire staff and generally rude and very unpleasant to deal with. Unfortunately I had to give them each a cash per diem of several hundred dollars, on multiple occasions. I contemplated paying their per diems in all singles, but then rationalized that $100 bills would be harder to spend in New York (where they were). If they wanted to buy a coffee or a sandwich from a deli, who would break a $100?

  413. Programmer’s Wife*

    My husband worked as a .NET programmer for an awful, incompetent boss and with a lot of horrifically incompetent people at a big insurance company, his first job out of college in the early 2000’s. At the time, he worked on a piece of internal software. A combination of boredom and understandable frustration led him to make a little animation of a stick figure that would pop out from behind the company logo at the top of the screen, put a gun to its head, and shoot itself. He tied it only to the login credentials of a particularly awful manager. And set the frequency at which it occurred upon login to random. They never figured out he had anything to do with it.

  414. Pizza Boi*

    Two stories:

    One. I came out as transgender while managing a pizza shop in a conservative state. Lot of bad reactions. My tires got slashed, among other things. But my favorite was the guy who was blasting conservative talk radio, and I told him we had a no talk radio rule (which was true! Shared kitchens are not the place for talk radio!) and he responded by screaming at me, throwing food on the ground, and freaking out. I asked him to compose himself and when he wouldn’t I fired him (he had more than one outbreak like this). As he was walking out the door, he turned and yelled, “Sorry you’ll never have a dick!” At me. I said, “I’ve got plenty and they’re all dishwasher safe.” My staff fucking lost it. A little TMI but in the heat of the moment, immensely satisfying.

    Second story was one I heard about. In the middle of dinner rush at a super busy restaurant, this guy was so mad he got in a huge fight with a server. He decided he was done with that job so he waited for a bunch of orders to come in, quietly walked to the expo line, and took all the paper tickets in the kitchen with him while he walked out on the job. Basically shut the kitchen completely down for the night while everyone scrambled to reprint everything and figure out where all the food went.

    1. FD*

      Sorry you’ll never have a dick!” At me. I said, “I’ve got plenty and they’re all dishwasher safe.”

      Niiiiice comeback.

  415. Glengarry*

    At my old company there was a woman at another organisation that I would cross paths with a few times a year. For some reason she really didn’t like me and was very obvious about it, but because I didn’t see her that often and didn’t have to work directly with her I couldn’t be arsed to try and understand the issue.

    One day I was sitting opposite her at a committee meeting and noticed that the middle buttons on her blouse had come undone and her grey, ratty bra was on show. I discreetly caught her attention and tried to let her know what was going on using hand gestures and mouthing the words, but she kept irritably saying “what?!”, what?!” quite rudely, and then very loudly and slowly said to me “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say to me!”.

    So even more loudly and more slowly I said “Your blouse has come undone and we can see your bra”. To this day I still smile to myself when I remember her face right at that moment.

  416. Avatre*

    I had a manager scream at me over the phone for daring to call in sick on the second of the two sick days I took THE ENTIRE TIME I WORKED THERE. (Our department was short-staffed, but that was not my fault. Also, we handled food and I was genuinely not capable of staying on my feet for eight hours that day.)

    I got off the phone, cried, shut the phone off and took a nap. 6 PM that night, turned it back on, had a voicemail from the store director checking on me. Horrible Manager had, evidently, complained. Did I mention this was the second of the only two sick days I took in three years? Talk about petty…

    Store Director had already left for the day by then, and luckily I had in fact gone to the doctor a couple days prior, on my day off, and had a sick note. I made several copies on my home printer, held onto the original, and gave copies to Horrible Manager and Assistant Store Director the next day (it was SD’s day off and ASD knew me better anyhow). I probably gave one to SD too later, I forget. I started job hunting, obviously.

    Horrible Manager found out she was being transferred a couple months later, and proceded to feelings-vomit all over the bakery department on our long-awaited new closing employee’s first day. I managed to pull the (understandably slightly alarmed) new girl aside when HM stepped out for a few minutes to be like, “I am so sorry, I swear it’s not normally this dramatic!”

  417. Anononon*

    My favourite is petty public email spats. These are rare in my office as most people would sort out disagreement before emailing the whole company… but still. The best so far was when an admin had carefully arranged a Christmas event for a Thursday, and encouraged everyone to wear Christmas jumpers. There was also a longstanding charity event on the next day, which someone else used to collect donations for. It basically lead to a public fight over whether Christmas jumpers should be worn on Thursday or Friday. (Idk guys how about we go with both?!)

  418. cierta*

    The coffee machine at work has a default volume setting, eg a standard cup of coffee could be 150ml, 250ml, 176ml etc. It is pretty trivial to turn the dial to change the volume you get after you’ve pressed the ‘coffee’ button, but if the default is right for your cup you don’t have to. Someone geeky read the manual, and went ‘oh, look, this is how you change the default volume!’ Cue about two weeks of bitter _completely unmentioned_ feud where the coffee machine default would bounce between at least two people slogging it out for _their_ cupsize to be the one true standard cupsize. Which took a reasonable amount of effort – it was much harder to reset the default every time than just to turn the dial!

    Eventually everyone got bored and it settled back down to the original standard cup size as the default.

  419. Thomas Earl*

    Back at a toxic dysfunctional workplace, I was fired on the day before the annual profit-sharing bonuses were awarded. Which was quite petty in and of itself. This led me to continue my health insurance under COBRA and then I went and had two surgeries that I had been putting off. I had already met my deductible for the year. One of the surgeries was for a minor workplace injury, but the other one was to deal with a chronic health problem. The surgery for the chronic health problem was surprisingly beneficial and I wish I had done it years earlier. I was so underpaid, that the cost of the surgeries ended up being approximately 3 times my annual salary. Anyway, I hope it drove up their health insurance premiums for the next year.

  420. Media Monkey*

    my old boss uninvited me to her wedding for no reason at all – does that count? almost everyone else in the office went, and the person she invited instead of me was a friend of both of ours.

  421. Seeking Second Childhood*

    Hot off the presses….
    This morning, the cafeteria napkin dispenser is off the wall, sitting on a table. The Molly bolts are actually ripped out of the wall — a strong cement wall that had been an exterior wall before the cafeteria expansion.
    Fact: That the overnight contracted custodians haven’t been filling the napkin dispensers as they’re supposed to.
    Fact: Yesterday the head of HR needed napkins and when 2 dispensers were empty she asked the cashier and found the past history… yes, the head of HR is the one who coordinates the custodians.
    Fact: The overnight custodial supervisor is known to have a temper.
    Speculation is running rampant!

  422. NotSoCrazy Feline Female*

    I manage a small, completely open office of about 12 employees. One of them, Toots, is a complete drama llama. A few months ago, three of us had a conversation about cake and ice cream; specifically, red velvet.

    The next day, Toots brought in three pint-sized containers of red velvet ice cream, one for each of us in the conversation. We tried it, deemed it okay but not great, and thanked her for the gift. Into the freezer the cartons went, labelled with our names. Over the new few weeks, I’d eat a spoonful or two directly from the carton when I had a sweet tooth or needed cold, instant stress relief.

    I had a PIP discussion with Toots. She was Very Unhappy and went home right after, banging around in the kitchen to let her displeasure be known. Once she was gone, I went for my ice cream. It was gone. She’d taken it! There was less than half remaining.

    The following week, another employee came to me to say that Toots had bragged to them about “getting back at [me]” and that i’d “know it when I saw it.” Well, I guess she really showed me! *eyeroll*

  423. Bow Ties Are Cool*

    I worked as a developer (programmer) at a place I’ll call EvilCorp for 5 years during the recession. About 3 years in, EvilCorp decided to “offshore” my job, and the only new job I could find was one with EvilCorp, in a department that was more than usually dysfunctional, even for them. After 2 years, my job was once again “offshored”, along with those of my two coworkers, and we were given 3 months notice of this and told that our final month would be spent mostly training our offshore replacements in, because who doesn’t want to do that? One of the other two was gone withing a month, and I secured a job offer from HumaneAndReasonableCorp within 6 weeks, and was able to hand in my 2 week notice such that I would be leaving just before I was scheduled to start training in my replacements.

    During that time, I was just asked to answer trouble tickets and implement bug fixes. I was not asked to document anything, or write out procedures, or anything like that. Obviously, my job was so simple they didn’t need anything to replace me, a developer with 20 years experience. So since I had a fair bit of free time during those two weeks, I went back through all my code and removed every last one of the helpful comments I’d put in to make it easier to maintain. Didn’t touch the code itself, everything still worked perfectly.

    After I left, I sent my remaining coworker (who had just secured a job offer and would be gone shortly) a social media message telling him what I had done. He did the same with his code. 18 months later, EvilCorp ended up hiring EIGHT people, here, to take over from the offshore group and clean up the mess that had ensued. The VP who got himself a fat bonus for saving all that money on our salaries ended up being “made redundant”, too.

  424. iglwif*

    Waaaaay back in the mid-1990s I worked in an office where everyone had their own dial-up modem. I had 2 email addresses I had to check (for 2 different customers I supported), and of course whenever I was checking email, I couldn’t be picking up the phone!

    My supervisor, who sat at the desk next to mine, could hear my modem do its thing every time I went online, and she chastised me for tying up my phone line so often. I tried to explain that I got a lot of emails and had 2 separate inboxes to check, plus I had to look up a lot of stuff on the Internet, but she was adamant that I needed to leave the phone line clear for when people called me. I was very young and terrified of conflict and of “getting in trouble” but I was pretty sure I was prioritizing my communication channels correctly.

    Finally I figured out that you can turn the volume on a dial-up modem all the way down. So I did that, and from then on my email checks and online research were silent and my supervisor got off my case.

  425. Betty Scott*

    Every year my boss has bought us pizza on a specific long, very busy day where we work extra hard on her passion project. This year 2 of my coworkers who are also close friends of hers weren’t available for lunch. She decided not to get pizza at all, even though the other five of us were here and some working a 14 hour shift. Then when I passed her in the hall she asked me to get her lunch while I was out on my break.

  426. tinybitbyte*

    Off the top of my head, I have a minor one and one pretty jerky that I’m really not proud of.

    We use slack for chatting at work. I have one person who instead of saying good morning or starting off with what she needs, will just type my name and wait for an answer, sometimes for an hour it’s just “tinybitbyte.” Like I’m supposed to guess what she wants, or ask, and respond. I’ve started responding to her typing out my name with her name, like some weird power struggle.

    The not so proud of one, I was in a toxic office with some pretty crappy people, not that is a good excuse. Another floor was having their office painted and one person complained of fragrance sensitivity and was moved into our office, temporarily while the painting was occurring. She was a nightmare. Day one, she brought two office cartfuls of stuff to the desk, papers, knickknacks, food, one of those air misters, blankets, lamps. She used cardboard boxes to cover the top of her cubicle, presumably to reduce overhead light, but not in a way that impacted only her, but in a way where sides of box were encroaching on other cube-mates air space. She would eavesdrop to everything and comment on everything, even things we were working on/projects that she knew nothing about and could not know anything about. She would comment on the food or snacks we were eating. Make comments that some of the food affected her fragrance sensitivity, and I’m talking cheese-its, not fish or cooked broccoli. After getting sidetracked for the umpteenth time in one day, I had enough. The next morning, very early, I used lemon scented essential oil and spread it around the whole entire office – on the carpets, the cube walls. The office smelled like someone dipped it in lemony cupcake batter. Noxious coworker complained, but everyone honestly could say they didn’t know what the smell was or what happened. She moved offices again thankfully and the lemon smell was gone before the weekend hit.

  427. Midge*

    Used to work with a negative, downright mean person who was the source of a lot of pettiness. I didn’t realize how much spending 8 hours a day in a room with her affected my mental health until I wasn’t working with her anymore.

    She was the kind of person who would seek out ways to cause trouble for other people, or poke at people to annoy them or provoke them. She was not a religious person, but one day decided that she was going to upset the pot by getting all bent out of shape because some other people in the office were ordering chicken for lunch on Good Friday. She actually made a formal complaint with our manager, because she was so offended that some other people were talking about eating meat on Good Friday in her presence. It was so ridiculous and laughable that another co-worker and I would make sure at least one of us was at least covertly eating chicken at lunch on Good Friday for as long as we worked with her. I haven’t worked with her for years, and still make sure I eat chicken on Good Friday while mentally flipping her off.

    I *should have* made complaints about her eating sandwiches on leavened bread during Passover. That moment when you think of the perfect petty comeback a decade too late.

  428. Jonaessa*

    I usually keep a stockpile of snacks in my office. I’m okay with others coming in to grab something here and there, but everyone knows that they are not to take the last item. My office bestie took my last Dr Pepper while I was on vacation. When she left to go on vacation, I put up post-it notes with the identity of “A” from “Pretty Little Liars” along with how he/she was able to pull it off. My office bestie was two seasons behind since she didn’t have cable. She never took the last item again.

  429. Supervisor of the Bottle Bin*

    I was granted permission to use one of our office meeting spaces for an evening event run by a non-profit organization for which I am on the Board of Directors. I know that some people in my office can be huge neat freaks and sticklers for details, so I made sure that we cleaned up thoroughly after the event, and I stayed afterward to be certain that every single thing was spotless and back in its original location. I’d gone so far as to take pictures of the space before the event started, so that I could compare afterward and make sure I’d exactly replicated the pre-event state.
    In the morning I got a talking-to anyway: it seems that the bartender for the event used our office’s bottle and can recycling container for the empties from the event, and when she left she helpfully (she thought) took the entire bag with her and put a fresh bag in our now-empty bin. Unbeknownst to her our office donates our bottle and can refunds to a rotating roster of causes – and she had inadvertently “stolen” the handful of soda cans that were already in the bin prior to the event. My estimate is that the missing cans couldn’t have added up to more than $2, and I immediately apologized for this and offered a $5 donation from my own pocket to the cause-of-the-month. Nevertheless someone typed up and taped a scolding note to the recycling bin, all in caps of course, advising us to “supervise guest’s use of this bin”.

  430. Petty Peeing*

    For about a year, my department worked in a temporary office space because our new permanent office space was still under construction. The temporary space was an office suite that could be used by about 150 people, but my small department plus two others added up to only about 30 people total. There were a lot of empty desks and offices.

    During this time, I realized that every time (EVERY SINGLE TIME) I went to the restroom, another woman was always using the restroom at the same time, which, okay, is not that unusual for multi-stall restrooms in shared office spaces. But did I mention it was the same woman, every single time? Then, one time we were in the restroom, washing our hands, she told me that thought it was creepy to walk past a long row of empty offices to get to the restroom, so that whenever she saw me stand up and head toward the restroom, she would jump up and also go to the restroom so she wouldn’t be alone.

    This made me irrationally annoyed. Sometimes other people are using a restroom at the same time, but I appreciate the times when I am the sole occupant of the restroom. It’s like a bonus mental break from the workday, I can sit here and use the restroom and be alone with my thoughts for five minutes! My job involves a lot of talking and interaction, maybe that’s a factor.

    So, I could have been direct and told her that I didn’t want a bathroom buddy. Or, I could have focused on the fact it was a temporary arrangement and eventually it would end when we moved into our new offices. Instead, if I saw her answer her phone, or engage with a client, I would dash off to the restroom and pee blissfully in peace, ALONE.

  431. Tbone 91*

    I just remembered something I did when I had work study job at a small State University in southern Ohio working at the fitness center front desk. We controlled access to the gym, answered phones, checked out equipment, washed towels, enforced rules(googles in racquetball court, etc.). I was a Sports Mgt. major so this was right up my alley for job experience anyways.

    Usually it was a pretty laid back job, we just dealt with students, faculty and staff most of the time. Except when it was High school swimming team season. Swim teams from all over the area in southern Ohio would descend upon the aquatic center every Saturday morning for 4 to 6 hours. The teams themselves were pretty easy to get along with, the student athletes and their coaches were no problem, it was the parents and their other little kids who were the nightmare to deal with. The parents would just let their other kids just run all over the place like it was a freaking playground, there’d be 8 year old kids climbing all over the treadmills like they were at a jungle gym, laying on the free weight benches practically getting ready to smash their own throats trying to bench press weights they had no business even looking at, kids peeing on the rocks in the sauna cuz they thought it was funny. It was like ‘Lord of the Flies’ and ‘Groundhog Day’ combined every freaking Saturday. This was a college, not a day care center. I was usually hungover as hell every weekend too, so that didn’t help.

    The thing that really pissed me off was the parents who brought in their kids acted like they owned the place since their kids schools paid the University rental fees to reserve the pool every Saturday during swim season. These parents had a really bad sense of entitlement, like the college students and staff were ‘beneath’ them.

    One Saturday half way thru the season some of the parents took it upon themselves to bring in a couple tables and set up their own for profit snack stand right in the middle of our atrium. They didn’t ask anybody who worked there if they could do it, they just waltzed right in like they owned the place and did it. I asked my boss who was a few years older than me if they ran it by him to set up their own fundraiser in our building and he said they didn’t ask him anything. I knew he was tired of dealing with them too, as was his predecessor.

    I knew Aramark had concession rights for the whole campus. They had the contract for the dining hall, catering and the concession stands all over campus. I knew this since my Fraternity had argued with them when we had a rush event on campus and Aramark got mad at us for not buying pizzas thru them.

    Here’s how I got back at the parents; I dropped off a little anonymous letter to Aramark’s manager since I knew they wouldn’t like a group of parents just coming in like that without asking permission first. I informed Aramark of the parent run snack stand and told them I knew they had exclusive rights all over campus, tried to make it look like I was looking out for their business interests, lol. Honestly I couldn’t give a rats ass about Aramark, I thought their cafeteria food sucked and their prices were too high. I just wanted them to bring the hammer down on these people.

    Aramark sent the them a nice little ‘cease and desist letter’. Next week and from them on, no more swim team parent run snack stands.

  432. M*

    Not something I did, but something my former supervisor at ToxicJob did.

    I’d been hired to run a program they’d been running for a few years – it was a charity, they delivered a range of low socio-economic support programs, the program in question was a skills training program for service recipients who’d been with their program for a long time. I started, and quickly discovered that while there’d been at least four people before me who’d been hired to run this program, only the most recent of them had made any attempt whatsoever to write and document session plans for the program – and the one who’d tried had only created plans for the first five sessions, then saved the plan for the first lesson as the plan for each of the subsequent sessions in the database. Which meant I was basically starting from scratch – the program was a trainwreck, all the delivery staff were used to just basically winging it, and the time they were budgeting for me to run it was so far below what was required to get it up to an acceptable minimum standard that it wasn’t even funny.

    Anyway, long story short, I made it happen. They rewarded me by not renewing my contract – which wasn’t a total surprise: they were not particularly impressed with my refusal to turn a blind eye to a range of terrible practices they had that were really, really bad for the service recipients. They then hired one of the service recipients who’d been very involved in the program (we’ll call him Jon) to run it – which, I should say for fairness’ sake: kudos, he was great.

    Four months after he started, Jon runs into one of my other former colleagues (we’ll call him Sam) at an event. And he’s really happy to run into Sam, because he wants to ask: there don’t seem to be any lesson plans for the program! He’s been having to make them from scratch! He’s very bemused, because he knows I always had folders with plans for the program delivery staff, and just doesn’t think that I’d have run the whole program without them!

    Yup, best Sam, Jon and I can work out, Toxic Manager went into the database after I’d left and buried all the lesson plans. Jon did find them eventually – though obviously, he’d been running the program on a shoestring and a prayer for a while by that point, so doubt it helped much. To this day, it still bemuses me – I was gone and I was certainly never going to use any of the managers there as a reference, so I have no idea what she thought it would achieve except hurting the program participants.

  433. zolk*

    There is a supply cabinet just outside my office and for some reason people leave the doors of it wide open (partially blocking the way out of my office) regularly. I taped two halves of a heart, one to each door, and a sign that said “unbreak my heart” to try and nudge them to close it. No luck. Eventually someone took it down. The doors remain open all the time and it’s up to me to close them in order to exit my office.

    Also: I am very allergic to perfume and one coworker wears A LOT of it. I spoke to her to let her know I am allergic and that it was impacting my ability to breathe (I even had to take a half day once because it was so bad). Her response? “Oh! I know we work in a scent free environment – I’ll change perfumes!”

    Eventually I asked her again in front of other people because she’s very conscious of her social standing. She agreed to stop, but only after asking another colleague to smell her from arms length.

  434. byebiscus*

    My old job used to have stacks of toilet paper rolls for us to refill stalls if they ran out before the night crew came. No one ever did, and I forgot to check once. I waited quite a bit for another person to come in and save me. So I made a youtube tutorial on how to refill the stalls and emailed it to everyone in the whole office.

  435. Sleepytime Tea*

    This happened to me. I was at an amazing job when we had a massive management exodus and the new people who came in quickly turned our team into Toxic Hell. My first experience with my new supervisor was him accidentally e-mailing me instead of the manager, saying that he was cancelling my pre-approved work from home effective immediately, which I was doing to care for my mother after surgery (she had knee replacement and didn’t need full time care or anything, but couldn’t walk and needed to be kept an eye on so she stayed with me so I could get her meals, make sure she didn’t fall, etc.).

    Anyways, after several months I put in my resignation and had an exit interview with HR. The HR rep was extremely concerned with several things I shared, and insisted that my director would want to know about them (oh he knew) and asked me to have a meeting with him and the director to share some of the things that were going on. I agreed. I went to that meeting, calmly shared the things the HR rep prompted me to and answered the director’s questions (which were accusatory and hostile). And how did that meeting end? He brought up I had been seen smoking a cigarette on the corner, and could have written me up, but didn’t (so really, they were exceedingly kind to me and flexible, apparently).

    They had instituted a new rule where they didn’t want anyone smoking in front of the building. I was leaving work and smoking at the corner waiting for the cross walk. After everything I shared, including how my supervisor had been refusing to comply with my FMLA accommodations, how they were enforcing an illegal PTO policy that the legal team as well as HR had reprimanded them for, and many other things, my director wanted to make sure that the last word was “we saw you smoking a legal substance further than the required state requirements on a public street off of work property.”

    Zero regrets leaving that place.

  436. Collingswood*

    This was in a rather toxic work environment, for context. New coworker joined our team, and after
    A couple of weeks made it clear that they had come from a very backstabby environment and had every intention of acting the same here. For example, making a mistake and then reaching out to management to tell them someone else made the mistake and would be fixing it. Unsurprisingly, we stopped inviting this person to group lunches. They complained that we were excluding them, and we felt pressured to invite them.

    The petty part: we’d send someone to their office to make sure they weren’t there, then we’d call or email an invite and take off when we didn’t hear back right away. Wasn’t the nicest thing to do, but they were not the nicest person, so I don’t feel that bad about it.

  437. Sleepytime Tea*

    Ok this is one I did, and I’m not entirely sure it’s petty or just strategic. Within my team we were in smaller groups that were assigned specific business areas to work with (I’m a teapot analyst). The two other people in my group were men – one (George) who was pretty blatantly sexist and the other (Bob)… I’m not sure if he was sexist or for some reason just didn’t trust my skill set, but the result was the same. I had constant issues with George specifically. He would hound me constantly about what I was doing, how I was doing it, whether or not he needed me to step in to do it (no). It became incredibly disruptive and I just wanted to get my work done!

    George worked from home two days a week. I started working from home two days a week also. I made sure those were the opposite days of his so that I would not have to be in the office at the same time as him as much as possible. Additionally, I moved desks to another part of the office. That might not seem like a big deal, but we were actually “charged” by IT every time they did a desk move, so I had to make up an excuse for why I needed to move to get it approved. I put as much space between myself and that man as humanly possible.

  438. Helen of T'ronna*

    I worked for years at a 24-hour veterinary clinic. One of the night staff would bring a bottle of soda and keep it in the staff room fridge to drink throughout her shift. She kept finding that someone else was drinking from it and eventually got so fed up that one night she laced it with hydrogen peroxide. She found the culprit.
    She was fired, and the general consensus was that while, yes, firing is a reasonable consequence for that, it’s hard to really blame her (after all, she did clearly label the bottle “[MINE] DO NOT DRINK”).

    1. PB*

      I… don’t find it that hard to blame her for poisoning someone. I mean, yes, stealing is wrong, but come on. That is an outsized response.

      1. Helen of T'ronna*

        I didn’t say that the general attitude was a healthy one. Which is a big part of why I don’t work in that field anymore.

      2. Seeking Second Childhood*

        My nested comment didn’t nest.
        Hydrogen peroxide is not poison. I had to gargle with it for a medical condition for a while. You can swallow it…you’ll wish you hadn’t , that’s all.

    2. Tan*

      Food thieves get everywhere and contaminating the food is often, sadly the only recourse to find the culprit (I’d be glad to hear how other people solved this issue). The most interesting contaminant story I’ve heard of was ground up sleeping pills in ~1/4 of her sandwich every other day (she knew /could eat around the problem if the food wasn’t stolen and didn’t do it everyday so the culprit couldn’t link his issue back to her food). A former co-worker did this (after I left that workplace for so, so many reasons) and she got away with it (or rather was never found out). I don’t feel bad for the culprit even though he didn’t knew what was happening to him and don’t think he ever figured it out (he’s not someone I get along with (and few people I know I know liked him much for many reasons)). He spent weeks feeling drowsy several afternoons a week including falling asleep in a long team meeting. Coworker stopped when a PIP and doctors appointments were made, culprit started bringing in fresh salads and going for long lunch walks as he thought fast food and lack of exercise was the problem. Basically former-coworker stopped the food thief but inadvertently “conditioned” him to take up a healthier lifestyle

  439. Ketchikan9*

    I had a worker submit an expense report for mileage reimbursement for her 1/2 mile drive to the post office and make. I offered money out of petty cash and she wanted a check for documentation purposes.

  440. Marcy*

    Ever since my office’s beloved cleaning lady retired, my colleagues have had trouble adjusting their habits to make up for her absence. For example, our cleaning lady would wash any dishes left in the sinks and put dry mugs and plates back in their cupboards — even though it was not in her job description. I keep my own personal mug, plate, and cutlery at my desk, but most people use the communal ones in the kitchens. In the weeks since she’s been gone, people keep leaving dirty things in the sink and cluttering the countertops with all the stuff they leave to dry and don’t put back in the cupboards. It makes me so irritated, sometimes I just want throw the sink items in the trash! A couple weeks ago I worked late on a Friday, only to find on my way out that there were several dirty mugs and plates left in the sink. I begrudgingly washed them, put them to dry on a separate table in an attempt to make a spectacle of it, and left a passive aggressive note (in large, bold font) telling people to wash their own things before leaving for the weekend.

    1. tinybitbyte*

      A commenter above threw things out. Guess that’s harder when it’s communal company stuff.

      I have once thrown out icky stinky stored in the gym locker until it was rigid and literally growing mold gym clothes. (I started by emptying the locker onto the bench & floor to highlight their funkiness). My guess is someone forgot them and then kept forgetting them.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Not work related but a former roommate left her dirty gym socks in our kitchen for a few days and when I finally got sick of it and picked them up to return them to her room, I thought, nah, she won’t miss these, and threw them out. I never did stuff like that and I’m pretty sure I never have again, but seriously, dirty socks in the kitchen? Come on!

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Also, in my defense, they were just cheapo cotton ankle socks that come six or 12 pairs to a pack, not fancy schmancy gym socks. I would not have thrown them out if they were good socks, I recognize the value in a good pair of socks.

  441. Thoreauvian*

    I had a boss who did just about everything Alison tells good bosses not to do.

    He played favorites.
    He brought his personal problems to work.
    He fought with his girlfriend on the phone, in the same room where at least a dozen people were working. Everyone could hear him clearly.
    He had a “golden” employee who could do nothing wrong.
    He had parties at his place and bragged about them incessantly in front of everyone. Some people from work were invited. Others were not. Yes, the uninvited got to hear about his marvelous parties that they weren’t going to attend.
    He was a guy’s guy. Not gay; just a man who definitely prefers the company of men. He loathed (and, I’m sure, still loathes) women.
    He singled out one employee and heaped abuse on her.

    Yes, I was “that” employee. Nothing I did was right; absolutely nothing. He would stand next to me and criticize every single thing I did, while I was doing it, then point at something else and say, “What’s that? What have you done there? That’s wrong!” Of course, then I would screw up because he was right there, invading my personal space, and I was already terribly nervous.

    If I asked a question, his response was “You should know this”, or “I don’t understand why you don’t know this. Golden Boy [his very favorite employee] knows it.”

    I should have reported him, because that’s bullying, but he actually had me convinced that this was all somehow my fault, and that he wouldn’t behave like that if I did my job better. Gradually, it dawned on me that he was also horrible to another of the female employees in our department, and nobody could say that there was anything wrong with her skills. Even if I had seen him for what he was, I don’t believe HR would have done anything. The HR department consisted of young women with little experience and less motivation, and staff turnover in that department was high. Furthermore, Boss was a very popular guy (with the men, anyway), and I’m sure that the other bullied employee was so intimidated by him that she wouldn’t have dared to join me in making a complaint.

    He was petty in just about every way, but this really stands out:

    One day, he told me that a guy he knew had been to my home town. Boss informed me that his friend hated, just HATED, my home town.

    I love my home town. Boss knows this full well.

    So, Boss went into loving detail about all the complaints his friend had made about the place where I was born and raised. Every single gripe was covered. He talked on and on, with the rest of the room in appalled silence.

    There was absolutely no reason for him to do it. He just loved having power over me.

    He’s a real bastard, and I hope his wife kicks his cheating ass to the curb.

  442. Snake in the Grass*

    We have pretty regular potluck morning teas, and the responsibility for them rotates between teams. One morning, when my team was responsible, a colleague from another team put out a bowl – full of packing chips that looked like puffed cassava chips. No one spotted this till morning tea had started, and people realised they weren’t edible, then she boasted about how clever she was to fool us all.

    I happened to have a box of assorted Cadbury Roses chocolates, unopened. I slit open the plastic cover, took out the chocolates and ate them all (with help from some colleagues), rewrapped the wrappers around little pebbles and bits of eraser, put the whole think back in the plastic cover and resealed it. I put in in her pigeonhole with a note that said ‘thanks for all you do’.

    She paraded that box around the break room very loudly. I never did see her face when she realised it wasn’t edible, but she’s never done anything that annoying again.

  443. Anonabrarian*

    I manage a tiny, rural-ish branch of a large public library system. Our location is so small and quiet that sometimes we’ve used our programming money to bring paid presenters to local schools or community centers instead of having them in our branch proper. It’s a good way to make connections with the community and it saves us from one of those sad programs where there’s one bewildered kid in front of a juggler that’s doing their best. But we don’t have the money to bring something to every school and org in the area.

    Well, there’s a school down the road that has a person, J, who plans school-wide events. The first time I met her, she basically said, “So what are we getting from you this year?” I made “hmm, we’re still deciding” noises. (I was literally three weeks into this gig at the time.) She came the branch by a few days later, again asking what her school was getting. I made noncommittal noises again. A week or so later, just as we’re working out how to spend some of our money, she called the branch to find out what they were getting from us. Like I said, I’d just started and I didn’t know what the relationship was with the manager prior to me, so who knew? Maybe they had promised something.

    But I felt downright steamrollered and resented it. So I selected a puppet show off the list of possibles, checked in with the performer, M, to see if she was available, and pointed her at the school to make the rest of the arrangements. Great show, bilingual (important in our area), culturally sensitive, and M is the most . . . let’s say artistic person I’ve ever met. A phone call with her can take up to half an hour to nail down any kind of details. It’s like talking to a hummingbird. Lovely person, but exhausting, and I knew that M would drive J right up the wall.

    Later I was talking with the person who I replaced, and mentioned this experience. She groaned and said, “yeaaaahhhhh . . . J did that to me too.” So clearly no promises were made. If I’m still here next year, that school’s not getting jacksquat. There’s plenty of other schools and orgs in the area.

  444. MMB*

    Rainbow! I love it. (Realized what a bizarre non sequitur this sounds like. User’s name = colors of the rainbow.)

  446. Petty*

    I was a freshman in college taking a basic entry-level class taught by a grad student that’s part of core requirements for every degree. I was homeschooled and I don’t try to hide it, and the fact I was came up at some point during the semester. Well, this one guy who I ended up being in the same group for a group project with apparently didn’t like homeschoolers. He made wisecracks about how I didn’t have a “real diploma,” (I did), and how homeschoolers were dumb.

    Doing well in school was important to me, and I wanted good grades. I’m not the most gifted in this subject, but I worked hard, took every single extra credit opportunity offered, and ended the class with an A. The instructor had said at the beginning of the semester that if you had an A on the last official day of class, you could keep that grade and skip the final. She also read off in class the list of either people who had to take it or people who didn’t. I don’t remember, but either way, our names were not on the same list, so the dumb homeschooler obviously got a better grade than he did.

    The morning of the final, this dude calls me (he had my number from the group project) asking which room the final is being held in. Now I know because I remember, and it’s listed in at least two different places – the syllabus and the master final schedule on the university website. Do I tell him? Nope. I say, “sorry, I didn’t write it down. I had an A, so I’m not taking the final. You’ll have to call someone else.”

  447. Rob aka Mediancat*

    A bit late, but the food service folks at my particular branch office of my company decided that the plastic utensils they provided were not to be used unless you’d actually bought some of their food. This is in contrast to every other office in the state.

    So what I’ve been doing is taking them at their literal word, and every time I buy a soda, I take either a fork or spoon.

    Eventually I use them.

  448. Seeking Second Childhood*

    Hydrogen peroxide will taste terrible but it won’t poison you. I had to gargle with it for a medical condition for a while…it’s ok to swallow small amounts.
    You might however want to vomit if you chug it.

  449. Georgia Librarian*

    I had a boss that would always call in sick the day after you called in sick. Without fail. So I would occasionally call in sick the day before she had an important meeting. She still called in sick! And then complain about missing the meeting. HA!

  450. M*

    I dunno if this counts as petty, but there was one particular business area that was really aggravating me and my team. Hard to describe how bad they are without going into specifics, but they loved trying to throw us under the bus for their mistakes.

    So I drew a series of Simpsons memes about how much we dislike them. Stuff like:

    “Don’t forget, ‘business area’ are here forever”
    “Always do opposite of what ‘business area’ says”
    “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”

    Well, you get the idea, but there ended up being around 30 separate note cards with these memes drawn on them that ended up being traded around the department.

    Did it accomplish anything? No but it felt good to draw them.

  451. Shax*

    My employer changed a policy so I couldn’t drive my own car direct to a customer site, couldn’t book an overnight hotel and I couldn’t take the company car home overnight. This meant I had to leave my house at 5am to drive my car to the office to park my own car and collect a company car, drive the company car to the customer site, drive back to the office and then drive my own car home. This added over 2 hours to what was already 3+ hours of driving to the customer site, and a full day of meetings.

    I drove the entire way back to the office on the motorway in second gear.

  452. RubyMoon*

    The Great Petty Crapola Crusade of 2011!
    I still have no idea what this man’s major maladjustment was. He was 48 at the time and senior to me, but I did not report to him. Our roles intersected only rarely, and I didn’t know him or his circle socially. Via the shop’s camera footage we discovered that over the course of his 6 month crusade against me he:
    Went through through my float toolbag (my permanent position was not always high volume, and I carried basic hand tools with me while I helped out in other departments) while I was in a project meeting and snapped every single blade of an entire brand new package of utility knife blades in half because my new knife was nicer than his. (1x)
    Decorated my entire silk screening workroom with clean, unused pads and tampons. (1x)
    Took the ink out of all my pens. (3x)
    Took all my pens (2x)
    Took the leads out of my mechanical pencils. (2x)
    Took all my pencils, mechanical and non. (3x)
    Used my sticky notes to spell out FAT (1x) POOP (1x) and DUM (really. 1x) on my workroom door.
    Took all the blades from my x-acto knife kit and stuck them into the walls of my workroom. (1x)
    Shuffled the projects in my action rack (inbox for prints, I used a brass file rack) (almost daily)
    Meddled with my filing system, pulling screens out of their spots and swapping them around. (at least 2x confirmed).
    No, I really have no idea why, even when questioned he said he “just hated” my “smug a**.”

  453. Petty Betty*

    I work in a large goverment organization and have access to employment data. I once posted a demographics report that listed the number of men and women at each grade level to our bulletin board. The data looked exactly as you would expect. Minimal (if any) women at senior management levels, but many at “handmaidens to the lord” level. There were no names, no specific positions, just facts. I was forced to remove it.

    1. tinybitbyte*

      You’re assuming people are female from a random user name or the use of a “she/her” pronoun doesn’t mean that the “vast majority” of story protagonists are women at all. Allison commonly uses she and her when either gender is acceptable. Many commenters follow suit.

    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I’m sure it is just a coincidence since on average women tend to read advice columns more than men do. But my dad was equally petty when throwing away colleagues’ dirty mugs, so I don’t think that men are any less petty than women, they just happen to be less represented here.

      1. ArtsNerd*

        I’m also sure it’s a coincidence that the number of people who drowned by falling into pools rose and fell with the number of films Nicholas Cage starred in over the span of decade.

        Really makes you think.

        https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

        (p.s. yes posting this to flag for AAM but also because I love spurious correlations)

  455. poo doctor*

    when i was a developer another coworker and i used to change the alignment of curly braces in our code (see below). It was all friendly though…I thought it was funny.

    //my way
    if(some logical condition)
    {
    //do some stuff…
    }

    //his way
    if(some logical condition) {
    //do some stuff…
    }

  456. Safely Retired*

    Three coworkers shared an office. Between desks, computer terminals, and bookcases it was, well, intimate.
    One of the three was a Jehova’s Witness. The other two were nothing like that, and got a bit tired of hearing about it.

    When one of found an issue of National Geographic featuring Koko, the gorilla that learned sign language and had a pet kitten, they brought it into the office. It sat, with the cover photo of Koko in view, on his desk from then on.

  457. SoCal Kate*

    The nonprofit where I work was upset that everyone was taking dishes back to their desks and then never washing the dishes. Rather than talk to the individuals or send out an email, they decided to put all the dishes in a locked cupboard. Yes, because some people weren’t washing their dishes, we now only have access to paper plates (the real plates are reserved for Board Members). This is an organization that prides itself on sustainability.

  458. cheluzal*

    I push rearview mirrors in of people who park dangerously close to me. I would never vandalize so it gives me some satisfaction to annoy them. How hard is it to park between non-moving lines?

  459. Donkey Hotey*

    Not certain if this is petty or just passive-aggressive AF.

    About a week after Halloween, My Former Employer had their semi-annual fire drill. The drill came to a screeching halt because a freshly-imported VP was not accounted for in the parking lot. We get back into the office to find he had closed his door to block the horrendous fire alarm “because he was on an important phone call.” Dude went back into his office and closed the door.
    About 15 minutes later, one of the tombstone decorations from Halloween showed up propped in front of his door. Then post-it notes of “We’ll miss you” and such. Then a (fake) bouquet of flowers and a picture of him in front of some battery-powered candles.
    Next fire drill, guess who was first out of the buildine?

  460. WannaAlp*

    The Christmas tree in the lobby of my previous workplace was annoyingly sparsely decorated, just a few lights.

    So I hung up peppermint candy canes and foil-wrapped chocolate coins on it.

  461. ArtsNerd*

    Just remembered one I’m pretty proud of:

    I used to work at a DC venue, and back in 2010 I got a rental inquiry from a Glenn Beck representative for some event related to a right-wing rally he hosted here. We were (legitimately) already booked that day, and the rep asked me if there was another space of similar capacity.

    I highly recommended Lincoln Theater, which just so happened to be in the heart of “Washington’s Black Broadway” and conveniently located on the Yellow and Green Metro lines (google “Glenn Beck Green Line” for a treat.)

  462. saxamaphone*

    I worked in a corporate office for a large retail company. They had a fantastic gym on-site, so I would often use my lunch hour to go to the gym, and eat my lunch at my desk. I always threw my trash away in the trash can under my desk, and thought I was reasonably tidy. Until I came in to work one day and found that someone had written ‘PIG’ on my desk next to my keyboard with one of my highlighters. It was someone on the cleaning crew, but nobody would fess up to the culprit. It was horribly embarrassing to have to go to my manager about it, and then they took a picture for ‘evidence’. I sometimes worked late and had to bite my tongue whenever one of the crew came in to my cubicle to empty my trashcan in the evenings. And to top it all off, my manager apparently thought it was so funny that he wrote ‘PIG’ on his own desk, and then sheepishly covered it with paperwork when I stopped by to ask a questions and looked down to see it there. Happily not working there anymore.

    1. dinoweeds*

      What?! That is terrible, and also what an awful thing for the manager to do! I’m glad you got out of there.

  463. dinoweeds*

    I cannot STAND when someone tosses their cash or card across the counter at me. I make a point of returning their change or card in the same manner they handed it to me. Throw a mess of bills and coins on the counter? I crumple up your change and put it in the same spot. Literally toss the card at me? I toss it back. Enjoying picking your shit up off the floor you turd.

  464. TodayInAnon*

    I was once let go from a position because I became a nervous wreck after getting in a pretty bad wreck. Who wasn’t let go? The employee who chatted up the Supervisor for 1 to 3 hours as soon as they came in, the two BFFs who always put the complicated work on other people because “If she can’t do it, I won’t do it”, and the employee who never did any of the heavy lifting because “that’s why we hire big, strong men like you!”

    I was the only male on staff.

  465. Elise*

    One of my coworkers didn’t like me and used to sit directly behind me in a row of cubicles. She was once sharing a snack with our team which comprised this row (of which we sat in the middle). She started at the end skipped me and then back tracked so that I would get the snack last. This was one of many things she did, but it was just sooo obvious and petty

  466. Salymander*

    I worked at a medical office when I was in high school. This was so long ago that we had all paper files, no computers at all, so I did the filing. One of the nurses saw that I liked to read the medical journals, so she started teaching me things. Then, one of the doctors noticed my interest and he got in on the fun. It was great. Dr. My-boss and the nurses would show me photos of rashes, injuries and infections and have me guess the diagnosis.

    The doctor was treating a patient for shingles. This patient was known to have a really difficult personality. He was rude, and sexually harassed all of the female staff, including 16 year old me. He was also a doctor, and deeply horrible person. He also was convinced that he was the only competent doctor out there, and that my boss didn’t know what he was doing. Not sure why he even had a doctor for himself, unless it was to provide himself with a feeling of superiority. He was convinced that his shingles rash was some kind of exotic disease. He had done research, and was convinced that he knew what was wrong. To be fair, shingles looks awful and is really painful. But this man was a huge creep, and 16 year old me didn’t care. Dr. Creepy sneered at me and ogled my body, and he was really gross.

    Dr. My-boss and Dr. Creepy were closed up in the exam room for 20 minutes, arguing at full volume. Then, Dr. My-boss called me in to the exam room. I had heard them yelling at each other, but I didn’t know what was going on. Dr. Creepy was sitting there without his shirt (I still cringe to remember it!).
    Dr. My-boss grandly proclaimed that even a kid could see what was wrong with Dr. Creepy. Then, he asked what I thought the rash was. I was blushing and freaked out, but I told him it was obviously shingles. I listed the symptoms and told him why Dr. Creepy’s rash fit the description. Then I scurried away.

    As much as I liked Dr. My-boss and detested Dr. Creepy, I have to say that was just awful. Also, really petty and probably illegal or at least incredibly unethical. Dr. My-boss seemed really pleased with his epic burn of Dr. Creepy, though. After that, Dr. My-boss did that *every time* someone came in with shingles (minus all the yelling). At least Dr. Creepy never spoke to me or even looked in my direction ever again. So, silver lining?

  467. Radiant Peach*

    Can I still add one?
    Someone I know was opening a small independent retail business that sold some products for children. She wanted a nice, colorful mural for the children’s section, and agreed to let her brother-in-law (who would be working at the store – he had worked for her at another business before she even started dating her now-husband) paint it because he’s a pretty good artist. Months passed and he didn’t have much to show her in terms of what he planned to do, and finally she gave the job to someone else, who painted a lovely mural. Unfortunately, the store closed a few years after, and as soon as it was closed the brother-in-law completely defaced the mural in the most childish ways because he was still bitter that the owner had someone else do it.

  468. Cymru*

    Our owner bought really expensive desks for our new office. She proclaimed that if anyone ate at them that they owed her $20 (illegal; and for some people working there an hours worth of work).
    One of our senior managers who was rich and making bank at our company constantly flouted this rule and didn’t pay the fine because the owner was his friend. His desk was covered in crumbs that he didn’t even bother to sweep up and with the open office space we could all see him doing it.
    I brought some Cheetos back with me one time from lunch, it was a snack bag and I had eaten half of it. I went to the supply cupboard and got a bull dog clip to seal it so that I wouldn’t be tempted to eat it at my desk, but I also didn’t put it in a drawer because I didn’t want to forget to take it home.
    Own comes round and loudly ask, “There’s no eating at the desks” trying to intimidate me.
    I reply, more loudly than usual, “That’s why I put a clip on it, so I wouldn’t be tempted, I follow the rules”.
    Didn’t make an impression on the crumby manager but it wasn’t very polite either. :P

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